Page 11 - Leadership Basics 5

Tell and Sell

In this strategy school leaders select a limited number of messages to ‘sell’ to their community.

These messages are usually the messages that the school leaders wants their unit or community to
hear about. They may be ‘marketing’ schemes to promote some activity or aspect of the school. For
example, to promote the school’s shift to a PYP philosophy over the next 12 months.
This might also be a strategy to ‘cover’ up some problematic issue, to divert community attention
away from potentially damaging concerns, or it may simply be to promote an event, policy or
programme.

In this strategy school leaders may come across as enthusiastic and engaging but only on the
messages and issues they have chosen to sell to their target audience.

Sometimes the message that the school leader wishes to ‘sell’ students may be different to the
message they want to clearly send to teachers and staff. In this strategy, ‘confidential’ or
‘in‐confidence’ memos and information may be created.

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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