Four Diamonds

You pull up to the TABS hotel and you’re not too impressed. Walk into the lobby and still not impressed. The wait to check-in? Not impressive. (Although the desk clerk who checked me in was most impressive! Give credit where credit is due.) But while you wait to check-in you see a AAA Four Diamond plaque on the wall. “Okay,” you think to yourself, “things must be much better up in my room if this place has four diamonds. This is, after all, just the lobby.” Well, your thinking would be wrong.

And this got me to wondering about what AAA was thinking and what little it must take to get four diamonds these days. But then that got me thinking about our schools. When we say we have great (aka "four diamond") teachers, what does that mean? What are our proof points? How do we define great? More importantly, when we say we have great teachers, how do our prospective families define great and what expectations have we established for them? We better be on or get on the same hymn sheet as our prospective families, maybe even after getting them to realign their definition of great with ours.

After all, if you get to define great for them in a way that is uniquely your school, then you have set a near impossible standard for other schools they are considering to meet. Game over.

So it seems to me that if you want to be successful, you need to differentiate yourself as well as establish some high, seemingly four diamond-esque, standards you think are uniquely yours and can be claimed by no other. And then get families to buy into that. Did you get all that?

And, oh yeah, unlike the TABS hotel, you have to be able to deliver on it.


Personal Indulgence (since it is my blog!): two pieces of exciting news this week. First, congratulations to Joe Hanrahan for being named the next head at Marianapolis. I had the incredible pleasure of working with his wife and to know them and their lovely family. They will rock that school and it will be much better for their arrival. Good luck!

And congratulations to Lynne Hay, retiring after 25 years in the Admissions Office at the Episcopal Academy (PA). She is returning to the classroom and by doing so has robbed our profession of one of its most senior, thoughtful, ethical members. Lynne is the kind of colleague I wrote about on Thanksgiving. It’s our tremendous loss not to see her again at the likes of SSATB, TABS, Essex, etc.