RABI AUWAL 9 1430 A.H.
FRIDAY MARCH 6 2009.
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Managing human resource at a school level (II)
DR. IBRAHIM BRAJI
To be successful a principal must be able to reconcile strong leadership with participatory decision-making qualities. He leads by communicating with staff thereby motivating them to be part of the decision making process. He asks more questions than giving answers. In running the school, it is therefore not that of finding the right answer to all the questions but finding the right questions to all the answers. Through this method, staff not only becomes responsible for all decisions taken but also develops faculties of reasoning, analyses, and reflections on how to tackle teaching and other responsibilities assigned to them. Participatory leadership allows staff to learn new skills, and experiences.
In fact, the essence of heading school is not in commanding staff and students but in teaching. After all, you are not in the school to be an administrator, a boss or a superb bureaucrat but a teacher of skills. Your mission is to have an institution that excels in learning and culture. In this case, you must command respect, but not demand it. To command respect, you have to sets high standard; consider what is right, honorable, helpful, likeable, and brilliant. That does not mean shying away from responsibility, difficult task or challenging issues and staff. Challenging staff must be disciplined instantly to be an example to the rest. Discipline, however, should be method of enforcing school’s rules and regulations. Disciplinary system is aspired to modify staff behavior for improved performance and not just a punitive measure alone.
Nevertheless, most principals are unable to distinguish between misconduct behavior and lack of capability of staff to perform their expected roles. While the former attracts punishment, the latter draws helping hand, counseling, support and retraining. The principal should be able to understand the difference between staffs “who cannot” and those “who will not” perform their duties. This is one of the intricacies of administering schools. Carelessness, negligence, dishonesty, harassment, rudeness, and insubordination are misconduct behaviors, while poor teaching method, unable to control the class, shyness, laziness, untidiness, disability (such as inability to communicate well, move around, poor sight etc) are within the pole of lack of capability.
Thus, to be successful a principal must have a mission as well as a vision that are inspiring and clearly worth achieving for the development of staff and students. Vision is required for every field where performance and results are needed. A vision contains missions, goals, and a target. Vision allows one to organize effectively the resources under his control. A mission seeks to answer the following questions:
* What/who are we?
* Why/How are we established?
* Where are we now?
* Where do we want to be next?
* How are we going to be there?
However, a mission must capture the essence of what the school is all about, which should be shared with the others, the staff, and students. It is this mission defines the principal, his effectiveness, and efficiency in running the school.
Principal is faced with managing teaching, staff, students, and the school. One cannot separate the four because they are interrelated. Nor can we separate decisions on each one, as the decision on one affects the other. Mismanaging any may leads to the other.
TOWARDS A SUCCESSFUL MANAGEMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCE
For years, managing staff is given low priority in many schools. It is however, a significance aspect of running schools. Managing human resources at a school level is as complicated as in any other organization. Both teaching and non-teaching staff can be difficult to manage. Dealing with this resource, principal must adopt an appropriate management style, which must be fair, sincere, honest, and frank. Principal needs to be prepared to manage staff with all the seriousness it deserves.
Each school has its peculiar nature, background, culture, pattern, and history. It has a set of beliefs and behaviors, which may be different or entirely strange to one’s background. It is therefore, important to understand the cultural history of a school before heading it. This should be taken seriously. Most principals hardly care about the cultural history of their schools. Some mistakenly think that it is as easy as the reading of alphabets. However, even the alphabets are not easy to read to non-literate. As Terrence Deal (1985) states;
“Each school has its history of origins, the people, or circumstances that launched it, and those who presided over its course, thereafter.”
Schools are shaped and reshaped into an organic collection of tradition and culture, which are hard to be tackled or changed easily. Most teachers have limited or no training in human resource management. Most principal have received no specific preparation for management roles in a school environment; an environment set by others decades ago. Behaviors considered as inappropriate or unacceptable to one may turn out to be entrenched and acceptable in the school system or the community for years. Therefore, the first management task of a principal is to understand the cultural history of the school environment. It says a lot about the behaviors of the community, staff, and the students.
It is the saying of the wise, however, that the manager does things right; a leader does the right things. While a manager follows directions, a leader sets out in search of a better option for each problem. A principal has to have the ability to combine the two features to perform effectively. As a manager, a principal follows the directives of his superiors at the Ministry. As a leader, he leads his school to success. Most schools, nevertheless, arc over managed but under led, which explains the failure of our principals in managing staff and students.
Principal in a larger school may take more of a coordinating school’s activities while the one in a small school utilize hands-on approach of management. Despite this difference, managing human resource in both schools entails a multitude of roles and responsibilities, such as reward and discipline management. Both principals use these roles to manage their staff and gain their commitment in the interests of the schools under their control.
Added to that, a principal manages staff through improving teaching and learning facilities, by reviewing, upgrading lesson plans, supervised classroom, and monitored curriculum. These measures are taken to improve staff performance.
Improved staff performance can be explained as increase in efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, or yielding of positive results in a workplace. It is increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of staff through better management of human, financial, and material resources.
TOWARDS BETTER PERFORMANCE AT A SCHOOL LEVEL
There are no broad management decisions one can take which would simultaneously increase staff performance on all fronts, however much one may try. This is so because performance pertains to both ability and commitment to duties. In fact, people hardly notice or appreciate the performance of public schools but their failures. However, through normal techniques such as job enrichment, rotation, enlargement, realistic staff plans, workload forecasts, recognition of staff achievement and daily consultation with staff the principals can dramatically increase performance. This, however, does not mean it is an easy task. Performance improvement is one of the most difficult programs one may likely attempts. The very term “performance improvement” implies the failure or criticism of the present methods. To ‘improve’ one therefore, requires all the persuasive power he can muster, and his personal commitment to see programs through. All these could be successful if one is able to assign competent staff that could carry out the required changes through improved planning, scheduling, and delivery of services.
CONCLUSION
To improve staff management at school level, public schools require people with discipline and logical minds, capable of working a problem through to its conclusion. The sector requires people with creative imagination who can ask penetrating questions and break free of the traditional ways of viewing the sector as a bastion of decadence. It also requires competent and highly motivated individuals whose considerable energy will be devoted to the development of the organization and not to his person.
I believe that the audience here will be that kind of people. However, little caution is required while trying to increase output’ you need to recognize that most organizations have difficulty designing, and implementing change while still discharging their normal duties. Added to this productivity improvements at a school level require additional resources otherwise they would fail, or not have the desired effect.
Introducing new ideas for improved performance through better management of “man” requires a great deal of effort and attention. Ideas must be evaluated carefully with proposed methods and procedures based on the already laid down regulations. Surely, all of this requires a considerable amount of time and resources. For higher performance and discipline in schools there is the need to respect laid down rules and regulations. Rules are made to be followed and respected and not to be thrown to the dogs as we have been witnessing in the public schools. Personalization of public schools and total disregard to its regulations will not argue well for efficiency, and effectiveness.
Institutions must have clearly defined goals, with precise targets and specific strategies and means to achieve the objectives. The school system must appreciate hard work, merit, and commitment. It should be a system whereby people are paid for their performance and not a social or charity scheme where people are being catered for doing nothing and get raises or promotion just for the sake of staying on, regardless of meriting it. If the public schools could be transformed in to such a system, the productivity that has been eluding it will be achieved.
