(Note:  I spoke to the members of the Salesmanship Club of Dallas today.  What they have done with their many years of commitment to childen is — (this is not hyperbole) – awe-inspiring.  This blog post is adapted from part of what I shared)…

——————-

“I want to get out of the business of trying to save failing students before their lives are destroyed,” Canada said. “I’ve been in that business, and it’s a tough business and a good business, and I’m glad some people are in it—but I really think it’s the wrong place to focus.”
Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, quoted by Paul Tough, in Whatever It Takes:  Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America

——————–

If you wait to do an intervention, it may be too late.

The chorus is loud and clear – companies and organizations suffer when they have the wrong people on staff.

And who are the wrong people?  The wrong people are people who do not have the skills (the specific skills; the hard skills; the soft skills), or the work ethic, or an inability to be a team player, or…

Some of the “wrong person” problem can be tracked back to inadequate education. And, some of it can be tracked back to inadequate training within the company — either no training, or the wrong training, or maybe not enough training.

And some of it is that we may have too many folks who have not developed “performance character” (Paul tough’s subtitle hints at this in his excellent book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character).  When there is a lack of “performance character,” such as zest, optimism, social intelligence, curiosity, effort, diligence, perseverance, then a company has to either endure an inadequate worker, or start the hiring process again, or… try some sort of intervention. 

And, successful intervention is hard work.  Very hard work.

In other words, the slippage in education, and character, and discipline, and work ethic, which is seen in so many places across our society, requires us all to take more seriously the “conveyor belt approach” to helping children succeed.  The “conveyor belt” is the imagery used by Geoffrey Canada.  Again, from Whatever It Takes:

What the conveyor-belt idea represented to Canada was the hope of a new alternative. “The question is, can you build a system where kids in middle school won’t need these kinds of interventions in order to be successful?” he said. “And my bet—I could be wrong, but this is my bet—is if we start with kids very early, and we provide them with the kind of intense and continuous academic rigor and support that they need, then when they get to the middle school and high school level, we’re not going to need those superhuman strategies at all.

If we don’t tackle this more effectively as a society, at every level of society, at practically every level of education and work, and, really, all of the arenas of a human life, we are in for some increasingly difficult years.

Now, what should we do?  I suggest two steps:  In your community, get involved in the education needs – with that conveyor belt approach  — from the moment of birth, all the way through high school, with attention to the students and the parents.

And, at work, help reestablish an understanding of the value of training — with some coaching, and mentoring woven in.

How do children succeed?  The same way that adults succeed.  With a lot of self-motivated work, and, plenty of the “it takes a village, an army” help to go around.