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Without trust, employees won’t level with you—at best, you’ll learn either non-truths or part truths.

The best way to start building trust to take the time and meet as many individual contributors as you can as soon as you can.

Many leaders see their role as directing and giving information, rather than gathering.  There is pressure to “come up with the answer” quickly or risk looking weak.  Too many new leaders believe they’re expected to know the answer without input or guidance. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Doing this correctly takes time—but less than you might think.

Later on my first day at Intralinks, I began arranging meetings with individual contributors. That’s where my learning really began. Over the next few weeks I met with over 60 individual contributors. Not only did I learn a lot, but I convinced them that I cared what they thought and could be trusted with the truth.

Instead of just laying this out in an all-hands meeting, I began laying out the plan in one-on-one meetings in which I talked about how each individual’s feedback had helped guide my thinking.

None of this could have happened without building the trust of the team. New leaders must remember that many of the best insights on how to fix a company lie with employees further down the org chart. Creating a trusting, honest dialogue with these key personnel should be every new leader’s top priority.

Title 1 funding that traditionally would have paid for an additional literacy specialist was allocated for the data strategist position.

The possibilities are endless when an individual's interests and skills are considered within the context of a school's needs. Such roles might also include community liaisons responsible for connecting families with various social services while plugging students into local job, volunteering, or community service opportunities. A keen interest in 21st-century skills might develop into a role that guides students to collaborate with others, synthesize information, and create something unique and useful for their peers.

The most prevalent barrier to hybrid teaching roles is the district-mandated staffing plan that leaves buildings with little opportunity to determine how personnel are allocated.

an area with cushy couches and tables called the Fishbowl, where students gather to chat between classes or to work on group projects.

put on headphones or twist iPod ear buds into their ears, because the online programs are interactive and multimodal—comprised of audio, video vignettes, Flash animation, quizzes, and games. Paraprofessionals called “assistant coaches” walk through the center to make sure kids are doing their work, fix computer glitches, help with academic questions

The online curriculum for each course is adaptive, meaning it can gauge from the students’ answers when they have mastered something and are ready to move ahead and when they may need extra practice before moving on. A bar on the upper right corner of the screen tracks students’ progress in every course and becomes part of a report automatically e-mailed to parents at the end of every week.

Using this “daily achievement data” from the students’ online work, teachers at Carpe Diem meet with students individually or in small groups, called workshops, either to give extra remedial help or to facilitate enrichment projects. Grouped roughly by age, students rotate in and out of the Learning Center, workshops, gym, or science labs every 55 minutes until the end of the day.

combine the best of traditional, face-to-face instruction with the best of the cutting-edge online curriculum available to virtual schools. The result is something education experts are calling a hybrid school.