Being Edupreneurial
About five years ago, I was golfing with a friend on a beautiful spring day. We started early. Conditions were wonderful. As we neared the turn, we were engaged in some pretty solid golfing conversations. Those of you who golf know will know these conversations, the ones that meander from shot to shot and often carry over from hole to hole, the ones that are a sort of conversational ‘skins game.’
That day, a lot of what we were talking about was our work and how our passions drive us in our work. On the 8th hole, right after my friend tapped in for bogey, he said, “You know Nathan, I think you are more of an entrepreneur than a principal.” And as many golf conversations go, we left the comment behind us as we moved to the 9th hole and didn’t come back to it.
But those words stuck with me in a significant way. Was I really more entrepreneur than principal? Am I doing the wrong thing? Am I in the wrong profession? The answer to these questions are no, no and no! But what if I could be both entrepreneurial and educational? What does it mean to blend my entrepreneurial spirit and my passion for learning? It means time for a new word, Edupreneur!
Being an Edupreneur simply means being an educator and an entrepreneur at the same time. It can play out in many ways, but it is essentially a call to be creative inside and outside of the structures of learning and education. But we never lead ‘alone’; Being Edupreneurial means working as a team to respectfully break, flex and or shape the overall systematization of learning. It means approaching change with a playful spirit wholly knowing that we don’t know it all. And as a team, it is important to understand the impact this might have on the culture in the school. This can be both exhilarating and daunting. Being an Eduprenuerial team plays with these tactics:
- Ask what if – Having a what if attitude about everything is a way to look at problems and solutions with beginner’s eyes. It’s a spirit or mindset with which we can approach programs, policies, and structures.
- Fail fast and iterate – Try something new, roll out an idea, test it for desired results, and iterate if it doesn’t compute. Keep iterating till the idea is flourishing.
- Make newness the norm – Roll out something new every quarter. A new staff program, a capital improvement, a student program or community initiative that is different that the usual.
- Be respectfully disruptive – A respectful desire to disrupt the assumptions of the ‘educational institution’ as we know it is a way to improve learning results.
For some of you, this list might sound like a bit of a ‘double bogey’ kind of idea. But five years ago after that tap in, I had only just thought about mixing educational leadership principles with business leadership principles, I hadn’t considered how they might play out. These two arenas are often seen as contrary worlds, but it is our experience they have many similarities. Putting the educational world and the business worlds together has been a powerful tool for us to frame, and to approach leading a Christian school.
Nathan Siebenga
Principal, Hamilton District Christian High