Executives go back to school

By ASHLEY CAMPBELL

Ann Sherry is standing in front of 83 teenage girls making them gasp. First she tells them she's responsible for 6500 staff. There is a collective intake of breath. Then she tells them she heads a $700-million-a-year business. They are incredulous.

But the piece de resistance is when she answers the unasked question that's hanging just above every girl's head. "And yes, I do have a husband and I do have kids." You can hear the sound of horizons expanding towards infinity.

Westpac's chief executive for New Zealand and the Pacific is addressing a Year 13 assembly at McAuley High, a decile 1 Catholic girls' school in Otahuhu. She's spending the day with the staff and 600 students as part of the Principal For a Day programme run by the City of Manukau Education Trust (Comet).

Now in its second year, it is based on New York City's Principal For a Day programme which, since 1995, has been putting people as diverse as entertainer Jerry Seinfeld and Merrill Lynch chairman and chief executive David Komansky into the city's public schools. Since then, the idea has spread around the world.

The programmes aim to bring together businesses and schools to discover ways they can help each other. And they're working.

Last year 60 business leaders and schools took part in the Manukau programme. Already local IT industries and schools are working on an internship programme for students and Ernst and Young has developed a mentoring programme with Hillary College. Developing a skilled labour pool starts here.

Sherry was one of more than 50 executives who last Thursday exchanged their offices for classrooms and gained first-hand experience of life in South Auckland's schools.

Down the road at Otara, the staff and 400 pupils at Yendarra Primary School were coaxing More FM chief executive Larry Summerville out of his comfort zone in the nicest possible way.

Summerville confesses that while his radio station likes to think it's for all Auckland, most of the staff are white and middle-class. This school is something altogether different.

"That probably was the biggest thing for me - just the colour. It was a very brown Auckland," he says the next day, in the excited tone of a child who's just discovered something new and wonderful.

He was greeted with a powhiri, which he describes as "humbling and so awesome, it was spine-tingling stuff".

Then he spent time observing the school's four Samoan and two Maori immersion streams. "I could see the feeling of confidence in these kids was just amazing."

And already the ideas about how the school and radio station can help each other are flowing.

For example, he says, many of the pupils have never seen the harbour bridge, never seen the Sky Tower.

Hiring a bus for a day to show them the world outside Otara is something the station could do quite cheaply.

Likewise, he's planning to send his team to the school to experience this other Auckland for themselves.

Co-principal Glenda Kitney is imagining more ways the relationship could work.

The school's culture groups would love to perform at the radio station's work functions, she says.

And Summerville's staff would probably really enjoy the cultural concert the school holds at the end of the year.

One of the biggest buzzes Sherry gets from such days (she did the same thing last year in Melbourne's programme) comes from the chance to "connect" with young people and open their eyes to the opportunities before them.

"I want the girls to think, 'Gee, I could do that', because there aren't that many business role models for girls," she says.

And the day is also "a window into part of the world I don't interact with every day".

But on a more practical level, these girls are about to leave school and start thinking about work. In a talent-hungry employment market, Sherry wants them to think about Westpac.

"If I asked most of these kids had they thought about working in a bank, the answer would probably be no.

"But the reality is that we would be one of the biggest employers in this area."

It's something that hasn't escaped the attention of McAuley High's acting principal Collene Roche.

"It would be wonderful if the Westpac branches in this area contacted McAuley if they were looking for staff," she says.

They can both take comfort from the fact that later in the day, as some of those Year 13 students spent more time with Sherry one of them specifically asked what qualifications were needed to work in a bank.

It wasn't so much qualifications, Sherry said, as attitude, and she saw plenty of attitude here.

With building a long-term relationship one of the programme's major aims, schools and their principals for a day are carefully matched, so that their common ground will keep them interested in one another.

While the process of developing those connections in South Auckland is still in its infancy, it's had more time to develop in New York.

One such relationship has grown between Salk School of Science in Manhattan and pharmaceutical giant Merck, whose executive vice-president and chief financial officer Judy Lewent visited the school for a day in 2001.

She persuaded Merck's Institute for Science Education to form a partnership with the school and since then it's provided science materials for classes, sponsored a teacher to attend a professional development workshop, bought microscopes and computer software for the school and provided US$8000 ($13,700) worth of books for the school library.

In return the school's teachers are giving the institute feedback on how its equipment is best used in the classroom, so it can create an effective model for the rest of its educational work.

Sherry, Roche, Summerville and Kitney also speak highly of the chance to see how leadership and management work in different environments.

The business leaders have come away impressed with the leadership skills being applied in schools, and the principals now hope their staff will have a chance to spend time learning how leadership and management work in a commercial environment.

Perhaps the best test of the programme's success will be in whether it broadens students' horizons and motivates them to set career goals they may otherwise have thought out of their reach.

Certainly Comet chief executive Bernardine Vester sees it that way. She wants the connections between education and commerce to motivate more school leavers to go on to apprenticeships or tertiary study "so that labour market needs are addressed".

It's a vision that Sherry understands.

"As a major employer, you need that engagement with the next generation of your workforce, to understand what they are doing.

"I think I'll take back with me a better understanding of where that next generation is coming from. These kids represent the future."

Principals for a day

* Include business executives or proprietors, community leaders, celebrities, sportspeople, artists, philanthropists and public servants

* Are matched to schools according to common interests and goals to create lasting relationships

* Take part in a range of activities including talking to an assembly, touring the school, attending a school council meeting, sitting in on a class, talking about their business, reading to younger students, meeting parents, staff and trustees

Comet

Principal for a Day