What Educators Can Teach Business Leaders About Success

Earlier this year, I wrote about our culture's bizarre fascination with the idea of failure and how this misguided notion is a hindrance in both education and business. The evidence is overwhelmingly positive: Leaders should focus their efforts on articulating, pursuing, and finally celebrating their team's successes. (How odd, that this needs to be said at all.) Savannah's great songster Johnny Mercer was right. Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don't mess with Mr. In-Between.

In response to that article, several readers reached out to me personally, asking for more detail on how we apply this success-oriented thinking at SCAD. "What does this look like, in terms of actual policy and operations?" one reader asked, in an email.

I founded SCAD in 1978, when I was in my twenties. In our first academic term, we enrolled 71 students and employed 11 faculty and staff. At the time, SCAD was the smallest art and design college in the U.S. Nearly 40 years later, SCAD has become the preeminent source of knowledge in every discipline we teach, with more than 13,000 students currently enrolled in campuses on three continents and more than 22,000 alumni working in the world's great companies, firms, and galleries, leading to a 98 percent job placement rate for recent graduates — for two years in a row. Those astounding results, I believe, are the result of our laser-like focus on capital-S Success at every step of a student's matriculation.

Here's a quick snapshot of how we have created this success in every SCAD classroom.

1) Put the writing on the wall.

Remember all those course syllabi, from college? These documents do more than announce project deadlines and policies; they declare, for all students, what success looks like in each course. At SCAD, every syllabus features clearly articulated Student Learning Outcomes that, in effect, form a contract between the students and the faculty member. Everything is measured back against these outcomes, including the faculty member's own course design and how the students' assignments will be graded. Last academic year at SCAD, more than 7,300 unique syllabi were approved and distributed for nearly 138,000 individual classroom seats, each syllabus featuring three to five outcomes, articulating for all students what must be accomplished to achieve an A in each course.

For example, on the SCAD syllabus for WRIT 732 Forms of Humor: The Literary Conventions of Laughter, outcome no. 3 states, "Students will apply literary and rhetorical techniques to the writing of original works of humor that will be critiqued, revised and submitted for publication." The specificity of this language makes quite clear to every student what is expected of them in the course, including the fact that they are required to present their work for public discussion, to revise that work following critique, and to submit the work for external publication, the latter being an uncommon requirement in a workshop course — all that information from a single student learning outcome, out of three total outcomes for the course.

Following the SCAD model, business leaders should consider articulating their own team's goals in complete, content-rich sentences, providing objective and clearly defined expectations that everyone can see and refer to throughout the project cycle. When leaders state goals in complete sentences, success remains a fixed point, a True North. At the start of your next big project, write your own expected outcomes for the team. Print them out. Put them on the wall. State them in an email. Refer back to them. Keep everyone's eyes on the prize.

2) Build public and private celebration into your daily work habits.

One of the signature aspects of a SCAD education is the emphasis on continual feedback for students. Faculty members ask individual students to share their progress throughout the quarter, in open critiques where all students are invited to respond and offer encouragement. Collective challenges faced by most students are often identified in these critique sessions. Course-correction becomes a habit. Failure is not an option.

As a matter of university policy, faculty members also schedule individual midterm meetings with all students (typically during Week 5 of a 10-week term), ensuring each student is progressing through the coursework at the appropriate pace and level of accomplishment. These private midterm meetings allow faculty members to tailor their support and mentoring for each student outside of class and address more sensitive areas that might not be appropriate for a group setting. In your own work, find opportunities to praise and uplift team members both publicly and privately. Build these meaningful moments into your team's work processes, weekly, quarterly, and annually.

3) Practice the timeless art of repetition.

Recently, during my quarterly observations of SCAD courses, I sat in on ILLU 309 Illustrating Beyond the Page: The Narrative Experience, and I observed the professor engaging her students in a brilliant exercise. She had each student generate a single visual idea — a frog dancing with a bird, a child riding a gryphon, windblown dunes stretching to the horizon — and then asked each student to create a thumbnail for the visual idea (i.e., a loose, quick sketch of an idea with minimal shading that helps artists select the ideal composition). She gave them five minutes, after which, each student stood, showed their thumbnail. Most were quite proud of their quick work. "Okay," she said. "Now create a few more."

"How many?" one student asked.

"Fifty," she said.

I was intrigued and returned for the next class. The professor then asked the students to narrow down their 50 thumbnails to the three strongest, resulting in a clear favorite for each student concept. In comparing the final (i.e., best) thumbnail to the original, of which everyone had been so proud, the differences were obvious and vast.

The repetition, it turned out, had not been repetition at all, but rather a gradual evolution into greater complexity. The more the students drew, the more their bad habits fell away, until they discovered the perfect visual composition, which in almost all cases was the very last thumbnail. This, of course, doesn't mean those other 49 thumbnails were failures. Absolutely not. Those were the necessary stepping stones to the final.

And wouldn't you know it? The course syllabus announces this assignment loud and clear, as learning outcome no. 4 states, "Students will refine illustrations through research, multiple sketches, and iterations based on self-analysis and feedback."

On your own team, look for opportunities to set aside time and have contributors create multiple iterations of the same idea (for example, a hashtag for a new campaign, or a narrative outline for a client pitch). Instead of asking them to create three ideas, ask them to go the extra mile and create 20 or 30 ideas, stated in short form. The sheer quantity and repetition creates a kind of magic, allows space for the mind to work, for concepts to evolve and improve.

These three lessons from SCAD classrooms across the globe can be adapted for any business, any organization, any team. Stay tuned next week, when I'll go further, discussing three ways SCAD applies its distinct philosophy of success on three initiatives outside the conventional classroom.

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Paula Wallace is the president and founder of SCAD, the most comprehensive arts university in the world, with locations in Savannah, Atlanta, Hong Kong, and Lacoste, France. She created SCAD in 1978, after a career in gifted education in the public schools of Atlanta, Georgia — a story she tells in her recent memoir, The Bee and the Acorn.