Meanwhile…a different commissioner

Meanwhile is a shorter, wide-lens piece that runs between the main essays.

Three leaders in five months is an outlier by any measure. Yet that’s exactly the situation that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is facing. Karla Eslinger retired in May of this year, and Stacey Preis was named interim Commissioner of Education. After only four months on the job, and amid speculation that she was about to be fired, Preis resigned on October 20, saying “the board’s agenda is better served by a different commissioner.” The next day, Deputy Commissioner Lisa Sireno was named interim commissioner. (Read more)

Now, a statewide education department is an organization much larger than I normally work with or think about. But the pattern here is the same as a congregation that has three pastors in five years, or a nonprofit with trouble keeping an executive director. Whenever a system that expects (and needs) stability in its leadership finds that there is a lot of turnover at the top, that churn is a signal. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s anything wrong with the leaders themselves, or with those doing the hiring. It’s often the result of a lack of clarity about what the system is asking of those who occupy the big chair.

Preis’ statement is telling. It’s a striking example of what Friedman would call self-differentiation. She acknowledges the board’s authority to set the agenda, and her own power to support it or to step away. And having made her choice to step away, she doesn’t vilify the board for the agenda they set, or for putting her in a position to make the choice she did. She left without adding to the noise. Just clarity and an exit.

This is the perpetual challenge of anyone in an interim role, or who is leading in a time of change. It’s a high-wire act, and when the wind shifts, you can adjust your balance or step off. Given her conclusion that she was not the right leader to execute the board’s agenda, every day she stayed she’d have had to hold anxiety that was not hers. The choice to leave gives the anxiety back to the board, where it belongs, and gives them another data point about the system they’re leading and what it needs. She chose clarity over endurance.

Sireno, then, has inherited the role, and the authority that comes with it. At the same time, she has inherited the pattern, and the responsibility that comes with it. It isn’t even a question of her competence as a leader. The open question is whether she and the system can decide what the role needs to be, and what is expected from the person in it. Finding where the role’s demands end and the person begins, and knowing which side you’re on, is the task of the leader. Always.

Think about what the system insists that the leader carry, and what will happen if that weight shifts suddenly.

What’s it like where you are?