Leadership

Leadership, Character and Congruence

/ Dave Eberwein / 3 Comments
Being ‘Character Smart’ is Key to Leadership Success

If you are in a leadership position that hires other leaders, your primary focus should be to hire people smarter than you. As Superintendent, I am in the fortunate position of having this opportunity to hire leaders smarter than me. Some might argue that’s a pretty easy target to hit — thank you for that. Although, that might explain why I’m surrounded by some pretty amazing people.

Leadership Goal: To create a leadership team with really smart people — people who push my thinking and provide the necessary conditions for us to make decisions that further the district’s mission.

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Taking A Very Personal Risk

/ Dave Eberwein / 6 Comments

Learning something new can be exciting — it can also be intimidating. A story I am about to share with you today captures both of these realities.

Several of my blog posts have talked about taking risks — about taking that chance at a new idea or new way of doing something to be better.

It can be uncomfortable. Sometimes, it can be downright frightening.

I’ll start with an example of a fairly low-risk professional learning journey I took last year. I wanted to learn more about racism — what it looks like and how it weaves its way into our language, decisions and actions. I immersed myself in the topic, wrote a few blog entries about it and even shared my learning journey with my Board of Education and others in the school district.

I learned a lot, but I felt pretty safe while doing it. Admitting that I don’t know everything about a topic is usually easy for me, so learning more about racism, while important, wasn’t super risky.

But, there WAS something I worked on last year that was intimidating — something that actually had me doubting myself along my learning journey.

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Painting a Picture with Numbers

/ Dave Eberwein / 2 Comments

Numbers are a great place to start a conversation. While they never tell the whole story, they do offer a launching point.

Take a look at the ones above.

They represent some statistics on an important topic — a part of a story from across our province and country. And while they don’t offer a complete narrative about the topic they do help to paint a compelling picture — a picture that reaffirms for me why schools need to be an important place of understanding and acceptance.

The topic I want to talk about today is also a polarizing one in our communities. My experience has shown that few people are without a strong opinion on the topic.

Let’s begin today’s discussion by looking at the two largest numbers …

1,000,000

  • The approximate number of persons in Canada who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer or questioning (2021)

75,000

  • The approximate number of persons in Canada who identified as trans or non-binary (2018)

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