This is a short summary of a longer article soon to appear in our July 2009 'Cultural Intelligence' newsletter...
In Queensland, Australia, it has recently been announced that the number of school suspensions and expulsions will be made public - down to a school level, for the first time.
This got me wondering about what circumstances conspire to result in the final act of a school expelling a student. In a sense, in making the decision, a school is saying there are no other options open to them - they've done their best.
I know that schools don't take the act of expelling students lightly. It's a serious decision. At the end of the day, I'd guess senior people in schools would think to themselves that they'd done their best to accommodate the student in question. I'd also guess that blame for the inappropriate behaviours of the expelled student would lay with the student and/or his/her parents.
A long time ago, I was a school teacher. Hearing this latest news made me reflect on the fact that in my four or five years of teaching I came across quite a few really bad teachers. I wouldn't have liked my children to be in the classrooms of those teachers. This makes me wonder whether school expulsions occur on occasions, not so much because of the student's innate poor behaviours, but because of poor teachers who fail to engage students.
The issue of employee engagement has been highly prominent over the last few years. In all the research I've read into this complex issue, I've not come across anything that seriously questions whether a key reason for employees not being engaged is because of poor managers.
Maybe, just maybe, some bosses need to be expelled....
