” …you really have to appreciate teachers and students simultaneously and link them together if you are going to get results.”
Dr. Michael Fullan, acclaimed international authority on educational reform and change, discusses his bestselling book, The Six Secrets for Change: What the Best Leaders Do To Help Their Organizations Survive and Thrive, in this interview. Fullan explains his six secrets for strong and effective school leadership and shares the means to transform schools into positive, well-led organizations that stay strong in the future. The following is an abridged version of our interview with Dr. Fullan.
Q: What inspired you to write The Six Secrets of Change?
Michael Fullan: We’ve been doing a lot of work on large-scale change of partnerships with systems and getting results and using ideas. There were certain insights that I ended up calling “The Six Secrets” and I wanted to test those against the research literature. It was really a combination of being stimulated by what other people were writing and realizing there are some insights here that should be shared more widely.
Q: Why don’t we just start with the First Secret?
Michael Fullan: Let me first say that these are not necessarily all that much of a secret if you just look at the surface word. I consider them to be secrets in two senses; one, there is a deep meaning for each one, and the second is to make sure you put them together — that all six are necessary. If you start working on a couple of them without the others you’d get into trouble.
Secret one is love your employees as well as your customers, so to speak, using business language. The secrets actually are in pairs, so the first two are about people. We can start with: love your employees. Especially in education where people are talking about students first.
We noticed that a lot of people were not appreciating teachers as much and therefore the means of getting at students was weak. So you really have to appreciate teachers and students simultaneously and link them together if you are going to get results. And I found that to be the case in all the business organizations: those that value their employees as well as their customers really got the impact that the organization was striving for.