During a recent Healthy Green Schools & Colleges conversation, Lazell Ofield II, Chief Operations Officer at Columbia Public Schools, reflected on his first two years overseeing transportation, custodial services, nutrition services, technology, and facilities and construction across a district serving more than 18,000 students and 43 schools, and shares lessons he has learned.
The first lesson is that new leaders need to understand the current system before making changes. Ofield approached his new role by gathering information from multiple levels of the organization. He surveyed staff about their experience with operations, attended principals’ meetings, spent time in buildings, and created a leadership retreat with his departmental directors.
“I came open, ready to know. I’ve got these five departments, I need to learn as much as I can, and still be that advocate and resource for them” Ofield shared.
For organizations working toward healthier and more sustainable facilities, this same principle applies whether the proposed change involves cleaning products, indoor air quality practices, preventive maintenance, purchasing standards, waste reduction, or integrating a new technology.
The next lesson is around understanding resistance to change, and for the leader to find ways to use it to build connection. The technical case for a new process may be obvious to the person designing it, but it may not feel obvious to the people being asked to change how they work. Ofield described approaching resistance by first trying to understand what sits underneath it.
“I try to understand why they are currently doing what they’re doing, whatever the process is, and then help them understand how a change will benefit and be more efficient in the long run,” he says. “Those are personal conversations, sitting with them, not forcing my agenda on them, but allowing us to have dialogue so that we both can agree on a path forward.”
These conversations are important because organizational change is rarely only about the process being changed. Employees may be wondering, does leadership understand what my job actually requires? Will this make my work easier or harder? Is this project going to fizzle out and I won’t have to do it anyway?
Addressing these questions requires lots of conversations, true dialogue, and a dedicated effort to hear what staff has to say.
Another lesson from Ofield was with regard to changing his own approach to his work. “I want things to happen yesterday,” Ofield says, laughing. “But sometimes I get ahead of things and then I have to take us back, make sure the team understands the goals, make sure their input is heard, and then we can successfully execute the plan that we come together on.”
Facilities leaders regularly operate in environments where urgency is persistent. Leaks need to be repaired. Schools need to open on time. Staffing gaps need to be filled. Projects have deadlines. That operating rhythm can make it easy to bring the same urgency to everything, forcing pressure where it doesn’t need to be there.
Strong leaders must be up to the challenge of identifying which situations require immediate action and which require greater engagement first, and staying true to the needs of the situation.
Columbia Public Schools continues to have significant work projects underway, including new school construction, long-range master planning, and preparations for future capital investments. For leaders to effectively drive these large projects, they must also be intentional about their everyday approach to leading.
This includes being strategic and attunted to how information is gathered, how expectations are established, how employees are engaged in change, how operational work is communicated, and how relationships are built across the team and larger organization.
Sustainable change happens when organizations develop the trust, consistency, communication, shared ownership, and leadership capacity necessary to keep improving long after an initial change has been made.