L-E-A-R-N to Become a More Effective Leader

During the NASBE Annual Conference last week in Austin, I heard one phrase repeated most: life-long learning.  Sitting in the new state board members meeting on Sunday reminded me of how when I was first elected chairman of the Tennessee State Board of Education in February 2023, I wanted to learn how to be an effective chairman. That led me to think about the word learn, and, as I result, I developed an acronym to help me in my effort: LEARN.

The first letter is L. What’s the first thing a person in a leadership position should do?  That is to “Listen.” How do you effectively listen? One can only do that if they “Engage,” so the second letter E stands for engage. Interestingly, at the NASBE meeting, engagement was also a common theme! The A is for “Act.” Effective leaders should not act until after they have first engaged and listened. The R has a special meaning: “Respect.” In your actions, respect the opinions of others even though you may not agree with them. Finally, if you listen effectively through engagement and wait to act in a respectful manner, then you can effectively navigate through the process to a more effective solution. So N is for “Navigate.”

However, shortly after developing the initial LEARN acronym, I thought of a couple other Ns that add to the effectiveness of the process. Being an engineer, I added an exponent of “3” to the letter N. Not only can you navigate more effectively, but, if you follow these simple steps, you can also negotiate more effectively, and the result is to nurture the parties involved. In fact, as state board of education leaders, the ultimate group we want to nurture are our students.

Listen, Engage, Act, Respect, Navigate, Negotiate, and Nurture, or LEARN³. I have been flattered by some very effective leaders who came up to me later and said they want to use the acronym. I hope it is as effective for you as it has been for me. To me, the acronym ties very closely to the frequently used phrase at the NASBE conference that we are all life-long LEARNers!