This morning, I took a different road to work.
No particular reason. It was simply a road I had never driven before.
As I made my way through the cornfields with the sun coming up over a part of northeast Ohio I don’t normally see, I found myself thinking about something a drill sergeant taught me nearly 30 years ago.
Fort Knox, Kentucky. 1997.
Drill Sergeant Rafael Coppin (1959 – 2003) taught us that you should never take the same route to work every day. His reasoning was considerably more military than mine is today: confuse the enemy.
At the time, Drill Sergeant Coppin (E7) struck me as perhaps a little unhinged, occasionally slightly dangerous, and absolutely convinced that the enemy was paying much more attention to our daily commute than I suspected.
But buried inside all of that was a lesson that has stayed with me for almost three decades:
Know another route.
Because the objective doesn’t change just because the road does.
If the road is blocked, find another one. If there is a crash ahead, maneuver around it. If the bridge is out, you’d better know where the next bridge is.
If the original plan no longer works, don’t sit there staring at the barricade and complaining that this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Keep moving toward the objective.
That’s battlefield thinking. And it’s also leadership.
School leadership rarely follows the route you drew on the map Monday morning. Something changes. Someone needs you. A plan falls apart. An obstacle appears that nobody anticipated. The bridge you fully expected to cross simply isn’t there anymore.
The mission, however, remains.
Our responsibility as leaders isn’t to become so attached to the route that we forget where we were trying to go in the first place. It’s to understand the terrain well enough to maneuver.
Plan A. Plan B. Plan C. Left turn. Right turn. Back road. Detour. Whatever it takes, keep moving toward the objective.
And sometimes, there is another benefit to taking a different road.
This morning, my alternate route gave me cornfields, a gorgeous sunrise, beautiful scenery, and a view of someplace I’d never been before. Maybe that’s part of the lesson, too. Sometimes the road you didn’t plan to take shows you something the original route never could.
Nearly 30 years later, Drill Sergeant Coppin’s lesson is still riding with me. Know another route. Keep moving. Accomplish the mission.
And for me, that mission remains pretty simple: keep learning, keep maneuvering, and keep working every day to be the best school leader I can possibly be.
Onward!