Page 15 - Mini-Module 4

Spray and Pray

This occurs when a school leader’s communication strategy is to keep
everyone ‘fully informed’ (this is the method used in Leading
Upstream). It is about ‘spraying’ out as much information as possible
and ‘praying’ that the right information gets to the right people.

Some school leaders put out a newsletter that is filled with
information, some important some not. They might also churn out
copious staff bulletins and memos overflowing with information. The
key to this strategy is that no one can say later that they ‘weren’t told’.
The school leader can point to the relevant newsletter or memo and
‘prove’ that the person was given the information – if they didn’t read
it, it was simply their fault.

Emails have become the ‘foot-soldier’ of this approach, with many
school leaders ‘spraying’ out multitudes of group send emails to all
staff. The result of which, predictably, is that the teacher who finds
many emails each day on their computer, simply stops reading them.

The other media-space ‘spray and pray’ strategy is to put everything on
the website. Layers upon layers of websites containing everything that
anyone needs to know. Again the strategy is that if a parent or staff
member say “I wasn’t told” then the school leader can point out that
the information was always freely available on the website, and all
they had to do was take responsibility for opening the site.

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