The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  That’s a moment of shared meaning. It instills not the pride of individual accomplishment, but the profound sense of connection that comes from subordinating ourselves to a greater mission.

  After the All-Staff Assembly in San Diego, after the shared laughter in the office, after the religious ritual in Mauritius, after the baby shower in the jade garden, people are connected tightly together as they realize that what they’re doing is important and urgent and bigger than any of them.

  * * *

  I. In 2016, what would have been the 16th consecutive All-Staff Assembly was canceled in the face of a threatened strike by the nurses’ union. In the end, the strike did not happen. Two observations: (1) A group of protesting nurses marched behind a banner reading “We Are the Sharp Experience.” One of their demands was higher wages in order to retain the senior nurses who they argued were the best at delivering the Sharp Experience. Our best assessment is that the threatened strike reflected standard negotiating tactics rather than a rethinking of what Sharp had become over the preceding 15 years.(2) Moments of meaning matter. We would have counseled the leadership team to do everything possible to continue with the All-Staff Assembly despite the possibility of the strike—to treat it as sacred turf, in the same way that countries at odds will still compete together at the Olympics. The assembly is a moment of shared purpose. The welfare of patients should trump even a major disagreement among Sharp’s players.

  11

  Deepen Ties

  1.

  Stanton Elementary School in Washington, D.C., was a bad school. “It was the worst elementary school in one of the worst districts in the country, so it may have been the worst school in the country,” said Susan Stevenson, former executive director of the education-focused Flamboyan Foundation.

  In 2010, the school had performed so poorly that the district decided to “reconstitute” it, dismissing its principal and administrative team in order to start fresh. In June, 28-year-old Carlie John Fisherow was tapped to lead the turnaround.

  She was sobered by what she saw as she walked the halls. Concrete cinder-block walls, massive heavy doors, grates on the windows, depressing stairwells, inadequate lighting, and everywhere a horrible shade of yellow paint, like dirty-teeth yellow. One teacher hired by Fisherow said, “It didn’t remind me of a school at all. It reminded me of one of those sad orphanage stories.”

  Remodeling would have to wait. The first order of business was to manage the chaos that had been left in the wake of the district’s takeover. The decision to turn over management of Stanton to Scholar Academies, which runs charter schools, had been announced very late in the school year. Many parents were furious because of the late notice and perceived lack of input. Teachers were angry and stunned because they’d had no idea that their jobs were in jeopardy.

  Fisherow understood their anger, but she had very little time to soothe frustrations, because she had to make quick staffing decisions. During the last week of school, her team interviewed all the teachers and staff who worked at Stanton. The interviews, which took place in the school library, were frequently interrupted by kids “rocking bookshelves, calling each other names, picking up chairs and threatening to throw them at other kids,” said Fisherow.

  In the end, the school’s new leadership team retained only 9 of the school’s 49 employees. Once the new staff was on board, the team overhauled the depressing school environment: scrubbing it clean, lowering the ceilings for better sound, doubling the hallway lights, hanging college pennants and inspirational banners everywhere, and adding some fresh Kelly-green paint.

  When Stanton’s students walked through the door on the first day of school in fall 2010, they walked into what was effectively a new school. It had a new principal, a new staff, a new curriculum, and a new paint job. Fisherow and her team were confident that, even in a year’s time, they could make a big difference for their students.

  But shortly after classes began, they realized just how hard the turnaround would be. In the first week of school, Fisherow was introduced to a new term, elopement, which referred to students leaving their classrooms without permission. Elopement was epidemic at Stanton. Many classrooms at the school had two swinging doors, like a western saloon, and Fisherow said, “Kids would walk out one side and back in the other. They’d circle in and out of their classrooms all day long . . . into the hallway, to the dark stairwells, down to the cafeteria, into the gym. . . .”

  The staff could not get control over the school. An astonishing 321 suspensions were enforced during that first year, with many of those going to the same subset of misbehaving students. 28% of all the students were classified as “truant,” meaning they had missed 10 or more days of school without an excuse.

  “The year was crazy. It was like being in the trenches. We felt like we were in battle,” said Fisherow. None of their plans were working. As one observer said of Stanton, during the 2010–11 school year “the school went from ‘really bad’ to ‘worse.’ ” Then, midway through the year, Fisherow fell down the stairs at school and broke her leg.

  “By the spring, we were ready to do anything,” said Fisherow. “We were desperate to do something different. When you’re down and out, you’re open to all sorts of ideas.”

  Looking for solutions, Fisherow met with a representative from the Flamboyan Foundation, a family foundation focused on improving schools. Flamboyan was known for its emphasis on “family engagement”—encouraging parents to play a more active and supportive role in their children’s education. Fisherow knew that this was a weak spot at Stanton. “You can paint and put in lighting and college pennants, and bring in a great team, but if there’s not trust with the people you’re serving, it doesn’t matter,” she said.

  There was a history of mistrust between parents and teachers in the D.C. school system. Susan Stevenson, the foundation’s executive director, convened focus groups with 150 families from across the district. “What we learned was really disheartening,” she said. The parents thought teachers were ineffective and indifferent—just there to collect a paycheck. Many of the parents had attended D.C. public schools themselves, and they were often bitter about their own educational experience.

  Teachers felt the parents didn’t seem to value education. They rarely showed up to events at school. It was tough to get them to show up for a parent-teacher conference about their own child. (Meanwhile, the parents had concluded essentially the opposite—they perceived the teachers as uninterested in their kids. So it didn’t seem worth the time to attend events or meetings.)

  Stevenson had learned of a program in Sacramento, California, that was designed to boost parental involvement. It had shown promising results in early tests, and she wanted to pilot the program in D.C. with a handful of schools. Fisherow said that “we basically begged Flamboyan to take us on as a pilot school.”

  Late in the school year, Fisherow called together the faculty to hear how the pilot program would work. She was nervous: “My staff was tired, really tired, at that point. A two-hour training on a Thursday night . . . I thought, There’s no way this is gonna go well.”

  At the meeting, the foundation’s advisors unveiled the activity that would be at the heart of their plan: a “home visit,” in which teachers would go to see parents, before the next school year started, to talk about their children.

  The concept of a “home visit” was not unfamiliar to the teachers. Many charter schools, for instance, require home visits. But often the goal of these home visits is to ask parents to sign a “contract” in which they pledge to support their kids in certain ways.

  The Flamboyan Foundation’s approach to home visits was quite different. The teachers were forbidden to bring any paper to the visits—no contracts to sign, no information to review. Their role was simply to ask questions and listen to the answers. Those questions were prescribed for them:

  “Tell me about your child’s experiences in school. Tell me about yours.”

  “Tell me your hop
es and dreams for your child’s future.”

  “What do you want your child to be someday?”

  “What do I need to do to help your child learn more effectively?”

  One teacher who was there that night, a fourth-grade math instructor named Melissa Bryant, said, “My first reaction was ‘I call bullshit.’ ” Bryant had taught in some tough neighborhoods even before she got to Stanton—South Philly, Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant—and she was skeptical that one home visit was going to accomplish anything.

  But then two parents spoke. Flamboyan had flown them out from Sacramento, where they’d received home visits as part of the program there. They talked about what the visits had meant to them: It was the first time anyone had asked them about their dreams for their kids. Usually, when the school came calling, there was a form to fill out, or a discipline problem to talk about, or a request for volunteer time. But the home visit was different. The teacher was on their couch, listening to them.

  Hearing the parents, Bryant’s attitude changed. “We say we value parents’ voices, but we never really listen to them,” she said. “It gave me goose bumps. I thought, Wow, we need to do more.”

  Flamboyan’s research suggested that home visits could have profound effects on the parents’ engagement, which in turn could boost student outcomes. “It was a like a light went off in the room,” Fisherow said. “We thought, This can have a huge impact AND we can do this.”

  About 15 teachers agreed to conduct home visits that summer. The early progress was slow—parents were skeptical at first. But then a positive buzz about the visits began to spread around the community. “Parents were wanting visits,” Bryant said. “You’d hear them saying, ‘Did you get a home visit? I got a home visit.’ ” One teacher was stopped on the street by a parent who was annoyed that she hadn’t had her home visit yet.

  On the first day of school in the fall of 2011, the vibe at Stanton was palpably different. For one thing, many of the students already knew their teachers’ faces and names—they’d seen them in their own living rooms, talking to their mothers. And that basic familiarity and trust resulted in better behavior. One day, an issue in the cafeteria resulted in about 100 students having to line up on the stairs. The previous year, there would have been pandemonium. This year, there was silence and order.

  “Our school felt like a school instantaneously,” Fisherow said. “I could not believe that it had worked so fast.”

  The true jaw-dropping moment, though, happened a month into the school year, at the annual “Back to School” night. The parents were invited to come to the school, meet their kids’ teachers, and see their classrooms. Usually, Bryant said, the parental participation was underwhelming: “Every year—not just at Stanton, but at every school I’ve ever been in—that was just a day to clean my room. Nobody shows up except for the same three parents, and you’ve already talked to them because they come to everything.”

  Only 25 parents had shown up the previous year. This year, optimistic that the family visits would make a difference, the staff set up 50 seats in the auditorium.

  Fifteen minutes before the program was supposed to begin, all 50 seats were full. So they added another 100. In 10 more minutes, to their amazement, all those seats filled up, too. The faculty had been sitting, so they vacated their seats to make room for more parents. When Fisherow finally took the stage to welcome the crowd, it was standing room only. More than 200 parents had come to the school!

  “There was a moment where all of us looked at each other,” said Bryant. “We felt like we were in The Twilight Zone.”

  The astonishing moments continued, one after another. Attendance at parent-teacher conferences spiked from 12% of parents the previous year to 73% in 2011-12. Truancy dropped from 28% to 11%. Academic performance improved, too: The number of students rated “proficient” at reading on the DC Comprehensive Assessment System (CAS) test doubled from 9% to 18%, and proficiency at math tripled from 9% to 28%. Suspensions went virtually extinct, from 321 to 24.

  Nor did the family engagement reflect a brief “honeymoon period.” It actually strengthened with time. Year over year, the successes built: More home visits. More parental participation. Better behavior. Higher test scores. By the 2013–14 school year, Stanton’s CAS proficiency scores had climbed to 28% in reading and 38% in math.

  A typical third grader in Washington, D.C., might spend 7 hours per day in school, across a calendar of 180 school days. That’s 1,260 hours of school time. The impact of a one-hour home visit should have been hopelessly diluted. Yet that one hour made a difference that rippled across the whole year. That’s a defining moment.

  How could such a small intervention have such a big effect? We are accustomed to thinking about relationships in terms of time: The longer the relationship endures, the closer it must grow. But relationships don’t proceed in steady, predictable increments. There’s no guarantee that they will deepen with time. When you and your uncle make the same small talk every Thanksgiving, it’s not a surprise that 10 years later, you don’t feel any closer. Conversely, have you ever met someone and felt instantly that you liked and trusted them?

  What we’ll see is that, if we can create the right kind of moment, relationships can change in an instant. That’s what happened at Stanton, and it can happen in other relationships at work and at home.

  What is it about certain moments that deepens our ties to others?

  2.

  The social psychologist Harry T. Reis has spent his career studying that mystery. In 2007, he published a provocative paper called “Steps Toward the Ripening of Relationship Science.” It’s a modest title for what is, in reality, an attempt to climb a kind of academic Everest.

  Reis challenges his fellow researchers to work toward a universal theory to explain relationships. Why do some relationships endure while others crumble? Why does intimacy develop between some partners and not others? What, in short, is the “circuitry” of a successful relationship?

  Reis presents his candidate for the “central organizing principle” of relationship science—a concept that could tie together the vast and scattered research literature. It can be captured in one sentence: Our relationships are stronger when we perceive that our partners are responsive to us. (The term used frequently is “perceived partner responsiveness.”)

  Responsiveness encompasses three things:

  Understanding: My partner knows how I see myself and what is important to me.

  Validation: My partner respects who I am and what I want.

  Caring: My partner takes active and supportive steps in helping me meet my needs.

  Notice how much of the recipe is about attunement. We want our partners to see us the way we see ourselves, and we want them to accept us and to help us get what we want. It’s incredibly selfish, frankly—me, me, me! It’s reciprocal selfishness, actually, since our partner expects the same.

  What does nonresponsiveness look like? You walk in the door, distraught, and your partner doesn’t even notice (anti-understanding). When you describe a new interest or passion, your partner seems uninterested or dismissive (anti-validation). In a situation where a hug or a soothing comment would go a long way, you get a blank face (anti-caring). Nonresponsiveness is corrosive. It deprives us of our individuality; we’re not seen or treated as special.I

  Studies show that responsive treatment leads infants to feel secure and children to feel supported; it makes people more satisfied with their friends; and it brings couples closer together. Responsiveness is correlated with attachment security, self-esteem, emotional well-being, and a laundry list of other positive attributes (even healthier levels of diurnal cortisol, which sounds like a Harry Potter spell but is actually a stress hormone).

  So when we ask what made the home visits at Stanton Elementary School so effective, the answer is simple: responsiveness. Take a second look at those four questions that the teachers asked the parents:

  “Tell me about your child’s experiences
in school. Tell me about yours.” (Understanding)

  “Tell me your hopes and dreams for your child’s future.” (Validation)

  “What do you want your child to be someday?” (Validation)

  “What do I need to do to help your child learn more effectively?” (Caring)

  Remember that the Flamboyan Foundation forbade the teachers to bring documents to the visits. Now it’s clear why: Generic documents are depersonalizing. Here’s the same pamphlet we’re handing to everyone. Responsiveness is not compatible with a canned agenda.

  Reis was right about the vast reach of the responsiveness concept. In the business world, the Gallup organization has developed a set of questions to assess employees’ satisfaction at work. Gallup has found that positive responses to the questions are associated with almost all the goals a typical manager would care about: the employee’s engagement, retention, productivity, and profitability—even the satisfaction of the organization’s customers. Gallup discovered that the six most revealing questions are the ones below. Notice that the final three of them might as well have been penned by Reis himself:

  1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?

  2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

  3. Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

  4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work? (Validation.)

  5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? (Caring.)

  6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development? (Understanding. Caring.)

  Remember Keith Risinger, the sales manager who coached Bob Hughes on better listening and later awarded him the Bose headphones to celebrate his progress? He’s a good example of a responsive manager. He pays attention to his team members, invests time in them, and recognizes their successes. As the Gallup research suggests, responsiveness matters as much at work as it does at home.