I believe that most urban school board members want to be empowered to do their best work on behalf of kids. The big secret for the superintendent is finding a way to empower board members along with you so that the organization views all of you as a united team. In Long Beach, we used quarterly workshops as a proactive mechanism to keep the Board and superintendent united for a decade.

When I was first appointed back in 1992, I was reading a book by Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca about the importance of the senior management team staying together. At one point he said: “It’s important for the Board to get together every 90 days for a mini-evaluation of the CEO and to discuss the direction of the organization so that the annual evaluation doesn’t become so high stakes.” As a newly appointed, first time superintendent that seemed like a very reasonable suggestion. So I proposed that approach to the Board and they agreed.

When we first started, these workshops were held four times a year usually over a two and a half day period. The agenda was generated by both senior staff and members of the Board, and items that could be characterized as future policy initiatives were given priority. In addition, the workshop included a half-day, closed session evaluation of the superintendent. Over time these workshops became the glue that held us together as we sponsored unanimous initiatives in the areas of school uniforms, ending social promotion, single gender education and partnerships with higher education. All of these initiatives grew out of impassioned discussion and debate in which Board members were able to air their differences in a setting that was quite different from the usual circumstances of a regular Board of Education meeting.

What resulted from this development was an informal understanding among Board members that regular Board meetings would be business-like, trustee type meetings that last on average 45 minutes so that the superintendent and his staff knew that, except for 10 days a year, they were free to actually supervise and monitor student improvement initiatives without having to worry about preparing each week for a lengthy meeting, sitting at the meeting for five to six hours, and then having to debrief and follow-up for days after the meeting. This led to an executive staff that was genuinely empowered to do the work advancing the student achievement mission of the school district.

A second focus of significant learning took place in the area of labor relations. One day, I was having a pretty heated exchange with the president of the Teachers’ Association about what they were hearing from teachers versus what we were hearing from them. So he suggested that we visit schools together to listen to teachers in order to resolve the discrepancy. This was one of those times that you agree to something in order to save face, but your gut is telling you that you’re being set up and that you’ve allowed your emotions to get you into a situation that will end up being even more negative. But I went anyway.

I’m glad I went because it turned out to become a transformative experience that influenced the course of labor relations throughout my tenure. The truth is I had no idea how difficult a job it was being president of an urban teachers’ union. I presumed that teachers and the leadership of their association were fairly monolithic in their views, and they would never share their disagreements in front of a superintendent. I was wrong. We showed up to listen to the concerns of a large high school faculty starting at 7:40 a.m. The teachers were meeting with us on their conference periods. By snack time at 9:30 a.m., I was feeling sorry for the union president because the faculty was beating up on him because they didn’t like the politicians that the statewide association had backed in the recent elections. Also, they felt that the association had not done enough to support retirement incentive programs “so that we can get the hell out of here.”

I went back to the office and told our Chief Business and Financial Officer to come up with a retirement incentive program that would capture all of the teachers at that high school who wanted to go. We sat down and negotiated this new benefit with the Association in a one-hour negotiating session, and the practice of visiting school with the Association president became a regular feature of my tenure. It served to dramatically improve labor relations by suggesting to the larger organization that listening to teachers in a collaborative manner was an important value I held.

And we never had a teachers’ strike, and negotiations never lasted more than two days.