The Remarkable Vision Formula: How to Create the Campus of Your Dreams [Part 2 of 3]

Chapter 2. Dream Up Your Remarkable Life

There’s a book I love called The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly (2015), a business parable that tells the story of a fictional company called Admiral Janitorial Services. At Admiral, custodians work for a number of different companies cleaning offices, workspaces, bathrooms, and so on. The job literally stinks.

Well, Admiral finds it hard to get workers to show up. And instead of trying to understand the reasons why, what does the leadership team at Admiral do? They blame the workers; they assume that the people they’ve hired lack a work ethic and don’t care about doing a good job. (Have you heard this anywhere else before?)

Eventually, after the problem continues, the leaders start to get curious about it. They start investigating and discover pretty quickly that it’s not that their workers are lazy or careless. The problem is actually that most of them live far from the job sites and they don’t have access to public transportation.

Once the leaders identify the actual problem, they finally start coming up with real solutions. First, Admiral invests in a fleet of vans and buses and goes to the workers’ communities to drive them to work every day. For a while, that solves the problem—but it introduces a new, unexpected problem. The workers are finding new work at other companies.

At first, the leadership team at Admiral assumes once again that they are lazy or that the work is too hard. Finally, one of the leadership team introduces a radical idea: Because everybody wakes up each morning with some kind of dream inside themselves, what would happen if we knew the dreams and desires, the hopes and aspirations of all of our workers? Better yet, what would happen if we helped make those dreams come true? What if we invested radically in improving their lives?

With that idea, they create a new position at the company called the Dream Manager. The Dream Manager’s sole job is to sit down with the workers at Admiral, come up with a list of their dreams and aspirations, and figure out what it would take for those dreams to come true.

One woman the Dream Manager talks to wants to buy her first home, so he helps her create a plan to save the money for a down payment and increase her credit score. When she buys her house, she shares her joy and gratitude for the Dream Manager’s help with her coworkers and friends.

Interest in the company grows as more and more employees’ dreams come true thanks to the help of the leadership team. They are happy and engaged at work, and they deliver a superior customer experience than their competitors. Other janitorial companies find their workers leaving to go join Admiral, and Admiral suddenly finds it has more contracts for work than it knows what to do with.

In education today, there’s a similar retention problem—and it’s not just because of the money. It’s also because of the stress. The expectations and burdens you carry are probably not what you thought you were signing up for when you decided to become a teacher. In other words, your dreams aren’t being fulfilled.

The good news is that you have the power and agency to change your situation. You can be your own Dream Manager. And while you should care about your team’s dreams as well—that’s the whole point of the book—the first person you have to worry about is yourself.

In Chapter 1 of my book Build Leadership Momentum: How to Create the Perfect Principal Entry Plan, we wrote about bringing your best self to school and taking care of your physical and mental needs. Ruckus Makers know that you can’t pour from an empty cup, and you have to put on your oxygen mask first before you can help others.