The Interim

Last summer, my boss gave me some news: he would be retiring as assistant superintendent of innovation and instructional support. He invited me to serve in the interim position during the search for his replacement. The superintendent approved the plan. I would be the interim.

Since the summer, I began taking over 90% or more of his duties, while he worked from home in a modified schedule, and as of October 1, I stepped, fully and formally into his shoes running the department. I spent all day everyday in conversations with our network specialists, computer repair techs, librarians, TOSAs, listening and learning more and more about everyone’s jobs, worries, deadlines, projects, and fears, so that I could give meaningful input and guidance when called on. There were crisis mode meetings. And “do you have a minute” type of meetings. Most meetings I intentionally scheduled so that I could spend time with my department in one on one conversations to learn what they were facing in their jobs. The people around us are books, stories, and histories of passion and struggle. We are surrounded by an immense library of human experience.

Every conversation pried open my awareness and understanding to the burdens we individually and collectively carry. My success as a leader has come from being flexible, being creative, and from not needing to be right to find the right answers. And in this position, like a lot of my successes in the past, I found that success was in listening. In awareness. In eye contact. In affirming. And, in the right moment, which was often a long pause, in a silence, between someone unveiling their worries and sharing their heart, success was a simple, affirming question.

“What do you need?”

Until that moment, until a moment when someone has shared their burdens, their heart, their concerns, their worries with you, just work alongside them. Spend time with them. Invest in relationships through conversations. But when they share their struggle, ask “What do you need?”

Until that moment, you wait, in the interim.