There will be public board meetings, in-camera meetings, committee meetings, one-on-one meetings with constituents. You might even find time to meet with the staffs of some of the schools for which you are now at least partly responsible — politically if nothing else. And that’s just the first month. Four years to go.
At many of those meetings, especially the board meetings, there will be people who, strangely enough, simply do not think about things the way you do. Sure, you ran as part of a slate of candidates, but half of them did not get enough votes to choke a good-sized shopping bag.
And now, while your tendency is to review all the evidence in excruciating detail before forming an opinion, that person sitting across the table, who ran on the “Education Freedom” slate with you, just skates into the discussion apparently on the basis of intuition, always beginning statements with “I feel.” How irritating.
But probably, in the long run, a good thing, as long as you and your newly elected colleagues see diversity of thinking style as a strength, not a weakness for the group. Diversity of thinking styles in any group avoids what one organizational theorist described as non-productive “affirmational chirping.” So what to do?
Now might be a good time to take your first big political risk by suggesting a full-day meeting with the rest of the board and a trained facilitator so you can all take a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality inventory and talk about what the results mean for how the board will operate. That will sound pretty challenging to some of your colleagues but the purpose of the Myers-Briggs, a list of simple multiple-choice questions, is to help identify thinking styles.
MB will not reveal your deepest, darkest secrets, but it will demonstrate, for example, that some newly elected trustees are, to use the technical MB term, “rational” when it comes to making judgments. They range between being “thinking” people and “feeling” people. Others are “irrational” and perceive things through sensation and intuition.
Making diversity in a group understandable and useful steers people away from emotional reaction when somebody doesn’t see things the same way you do. That keeps things workable.
The essence of the MB theory is that what seems to be random variation in people’s behaviour is, in fact, orderly and consistent due to basic differences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment. Perception involves all the ways people become aware of things, other people, happenings or ideas. Judgment involves all the ways of coming to conclusions about what has been perceived.
Group inability to understand and accept individual ways of doing business and reaching conclusions is the reason some meetings will wander on until midnight. It is reasonable to expect people in a group setting to differ in their interests, reactions, values, motivations and skills. The Myers Briggs demonstrates that.
There are other programs that accomplish much the same thing, and some B.C. education boards already use them. One such example is the 4D-i Thinking Preference Tool. With a 15-minute questionnaire, this tool can provide an understanding of the specific thinking strategies that people prefer to use and rely on every day. Those understandings provide ways for individuals and subsequently groups to expand skills in collaboration, problem-solving and communication. It’s time well spent for a group like a newly elected education board that faces four years of difficult and contentious decisions.
Again, 4D-i is not an assessment of cognitive competence, proficiency or personality. The purpose of the instrument is simply to provide insights into the particular thinking and emotional strategies people like to use.
Finding happiness in your role as a school trustee might be beyond the grasp of any sane person, but gaining some initial, even superficial understandings about the diversity within the board will at least render the job ahead less painful at a personal level.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools (who has attended way too many school-board meetings).
