Education Leadership

Sadly, most meetings are never as fruitful as they could be. After all, if you are a leader, you usually get to work with people that you like, which can be a distraction. If you are an especially comical bunch, the meeting could be a series of jokes, laughs, and digressions into topics that have nothing to do with the theme of the meeting. In the end, everyone’s time has been wasted. Effective leadership is about making meetings as useful as possible.

Preparation is key

Begin by having an agenda, and make sure you distribute it all of the people who will attend at least 48 hours before the meeting begins. On the day of the meeting, make sure the temperature in the meeting room is comfortable, and the room has been properly cleaned.

Make sure you start the meeting on time and end on time, which is one way to respect everyone’s time. During the meeting, provide a brief overview of the agenda, and then start with item one. Encourage everyone to contribute and to take notes. As the leader of the meeting, you’re responsible for the flow of the meeting, so take care not to spend too much time on one item. You can even establish a time limit for the discussion of each item. If distractions occur, seek to minimize them and then get the meeting back on track.

When it is time to end the meeting, ask if there are any final questions, and establish a time and date for the next meeting. That’s it, having a productive meeting that stays on topic and does not run over its time is not that hard; it just takes focus.

Concluding thoughts

Do a good job of effectively leading meetings, and you will see your organization’s productivity skyrocket. People will be excited to attend meetings as it will help them to become better employees and make their assignments and projects less cumbersome. Yes, wonderful things can happen when everyone is one the same page and marching to the beat of the same drum.

Whenyou show respect to your leadership team and the educators in your employ, it is much easier to build meaningful relationships. It conveys that you care about them as a person, and you want the best for them. It makes it easier for them to give their all to project or initiative, as the respect that they receive from their coworkers reinforces their passion and purpose.

Think about it, how do we feel when we are not respected? We react according to our personalities and level of self-confidence. Some people will be sad, some will be motivated, some will be mad, and some might be indifferent. One thing is for sure, it does not inspire everyone to be great.

So how can I show the educators in my charge that I respect them? It would help if you follow through on your promises, respect their time, believe in other people’s ideas, stand up for them, and sincerely care about their well-being. If you do these things, people will feel respected and in turn, respect you back. It is not rocket science; it is as simple as the golden rule; Do unto others, as you would have them to do unto you.

A little experiment

Let’s do a little experiment. Over the next 3 months, go out of your way to show your fellow educators and leaders that you respect them. I am not saying that you need to go overboard, but you need to make a conscious effort to respect everyone around you.

After 3 months, how has the work environment changed? If you followed my instructions, then you are starting to see your environment blossom into a culture of trust and respect, as everyone is following your lead. You will also notice that people are going out of their way to show you how much they respect you. That’s the power of respect.

It is one thing to identify your star teachers and administrators, but you also need to cultivate their success and help them grow within your school district. To effectively lead a growing number of people, you need to empower your top performers and allow them to help you realize your vision. I define a leader by the number of people they turn into leaders. They find potential leaders within their organization and help them become leaders in their own right.

Finding potential mentees

How can you mentor potential leaders? First, observe members of your leadership team or within the teaching ranks that show emerging leadership skills and the potential to be great leaders. Schedule a day and time to take them to lunch and discuss their career goals. Let them know that they have leadership potential, and if they are willing, you can help them through the process.

Set up a weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly meeting to discuss their progress. You can help them along the way by sending them articles, books, or videos that will help them boost their leadership skills. Assign them tasks that will help build their leadership character, and as time goes on, assign them duties that get progressively more nuanced and challenging.

Your job as a mentor never ends, although there may come a time when you meet or talk less frequently. Your mentee will eventually receive a new position, either within or outside of your district. You will need to find a new mentee and start the process all over. If you did your job right, your mentees will take on mentors of their own, and your leadership influence will continue to grow.

Without even trying, you will find that you have created a leadership pipeline that will ensure that your district is never short on leaders, as they have been all homegrown, waiting for an opportunity to serve.

People do not like to be surprised; that is why it is essential to layout and agree on a set of expectations, so everyone is on the same page from day one. If you do not, everyone in the organization will be frustrated, because rules and expectations will change all of the time. This makes it hard for employees to be effective in their roles, and as a result, the organization will not operate in an optimal manner.

When you set the standard, something amazing happens

As an education leader, you can change this by setting the standard. Once this is done, educators will know what is expected of them, and as a result, they will work hard to reach the bar that has been set. To make sure expectations are clear, begin by providing a work environment and structure that is conducive to success. Next, set short term and long term goals. Then add benchmarks that will define success or failure. During the process of attaining these goals, continuously give and ask for feedback.

If you feel as though you have done a poor job of setting the standard in your organization, all is not lost. You can begin the process right now, and all it takes is a little work. Over the next 3 months, work on setting the standard for your organization. The first step is to acknowledge that you have done a poor job of conveying your expectations to your teachers and staff.

Then get started on creating and disseminating your expectations, setting goals and benchmarks, etc. What do you notice after 3 months? You should notice that with your expectations at goals defined, everyone knows what is required of them. This should take your staff’s productivity and efficiency to new heights.

The scientific research is unbelievably clear – leaders who set big goals get more significant results.  If you want to be a more successful education leader, this is the first place you should start. To begin, set one or two big goals, not 10, to ensure you’re successful. After you achieve those goals, you can set the next one or two.

As the old saying goes, “Go big or go home!” We were not put on this earth to do small things, we were put on this earth to shine brightly. So go ahead and start one or two significant goals, and put your energies and resources behind them. It’s a better plan than spreading your attention and resources across 15 different things.

What do I mean by big goals? 1. Raising 10 million dollars for a new state of the art gymnasium; 2. Starting a scholarship fund for high school graduates; 3. Building a new state of the art middle school; 4. Creating a new initiative aimed at closing the achievement gaps in your district; 5. Using donations from private businesses to increase teacher salaries. These are just a few goals that I would consider significant. You must decide what a big goal looks like for you.

Ask yourself, do we have the capacity to accomplish our goals?

One point of order. To go after big goals, you have to make sure that you and your leadership team has the resources, capacity, and skills to accomplish them. If not, you might not be successful, no matter how long or how hard you work towards the finish line. How will you know? Don’t worry, to find out if your organization has what it takes, first, think deeply about what you want to accomplish. What resources, skills, and expertise will you need to leverage to see your goals through?

Now take out a piece of paper and create a T-chart, with the first column labeled “resources, skills, and expertise,” and the second column labeled “current capacity.” In the first column, you should list the things that need to be in place in place to realize your goals. In the second column, list whether or not you have these things already in place. This will let you know if you currently have the capacity to realize your goals.

Next, you can begin to decide if the goal is viable. Just because you currently don’t have the pieces that you need to get the job done, does not mean that the task is not worthwhile. You can always hire people with the skills and expertise that you need, and the district has various ways that it can commandeer the resources that you need.

As long as you have a commitment from your school board to provide the necessary personnel and resources, you are ready to go full steam ahead.

This can be hard, but your trust in your leadership team largely depends on the people you hire, your capacity to train them, and the work you delegate to them. If you believe in their ability to do those things, you need to trust your team to get the results you want and not micro-manage every project.

The micro-manager, the most feared leadership type

This can be hard for more education leaders because even though they trust their employees, they also know that they will ultimately be held responsible for the outcome. That’s why many education leaders delegate authority and tasks, but they also look over their employee’s shoulder, attempting to positively influence the results. This is almost always counter-productive, as it can cause your employees to become frustrated and lose confidence.

The reason why you delegate authority is to lessen your workload and to help the other person grow professionally. When you micromanage, your employees do not grow, they regress, and you end up doing the work anyway, taking you away from more pressing duties.

Do self a favor, and hire people with the skills and aptitude to do the work, train them properly, and then take the training wheels off. Delegate projects to them and let them carry out their duties. You can certainly monitor the project, just don’t be so hands-on. Ask for weekly updates and reports on their progress, so you can spot any potential issues. Don’t micromanage, just assist. Everyone needs an extra pair of eyes and ears, but you don’t have to constantly look over their shoulder. You can make sure a project stays on track without micromanaging.

A little homework

Over the next month, make a point not to micromanage your employees. Don’t just try, do it. After one month, what are you starting to notice? If you truly have stopped micromanaging, you will notice that most of your employees have risen to the occasion and performed above and beyond your standards without you looking over their shoulders. Productivity will increase because your employees are working autonomously, and you are freed up to work on more important tasks.

Let’s face it; it is tough to love every part of your work no matter what you do. There are going to be parts of your job that you downright abhor. For instance, teachers love helping students grow academically, but they hate meddling parents, student misbehavior, and overbearing leaders. Also, they hate the fact that they are woefully underpaid.

A guide to inspiring others

However, great education leaders can inspire their team and make sure they know what they are doing has a more significant impact than they realize. They can paint teaching as a noble profession that has way more rewards than it does drawbacks. They can keep educators’ eyes on the big prize, which is helping students grow up to be model citizens and successful in life.

As educators, we set the foundation that makes all of this possible. We have to be able to inspire our teachers and fellow leaders to see this, even when it seems that the field of education is being attacked on all fronts. For instance, we get accused of being glorified babysitters who don’t rise to the level of being professionals. They use this as justification for keeping our salaries and benefits low. But with the inspiration of teacher leaders, school and district leaders, and educators are pushing back in a big way. We have seen educators in several states protest and eventually receive raises, and I expect to see more of this in the coming years.

A little homework

So over the next three months, make it your duty to inspire as many people in your school community as you can. Whether it’s praising a student or teacher for a job well done or giving a pep talk to the school baseball team, inspire everyone you can. After a month, what do you notice? You should notice that people light up when you enter the room because you have motivated them to become a better version of themselves. You will also notice that student and teacher productivity are now through the roof. You have created a school culture where everyone motivates and supports each other. All with three month’s worth of work.

When delegating tasks, education leaders know their team and their strengths. They use that information to decide who gets delegated which project so that everything is completed the right way. It is not a difficult thing to do, it just means that you must understand the capacity that each member of your leadership team has. That way, you can be sure that you have the right person for the job without fail.

Place your players in the right positions

Also, make sure that you don’t overestimate a person’s ability to complete a task. You don’t want to keep assigning them tasks that are way beneath their ability level, as they will become bored and disengaged. You want to assign people tasks that are just outside of their ability level.

That way, they won’t become overwhelmed or overly frustrated, but they will have to work hard to meet the mark, and in the process, grow their skills. This is the biggest win-win as the tasks get completed, and a member of your team gets an opportunity to grow. This will bode well in the future as before you know it, you will have a seasoned leadership team with skills and gifts that rival even your own.

Another byproduct of this is that you will create a leadership pipeline for your organization. As people leave, someone will be ready to take their place, and you will not have to experience a leadership vacuum in your school or district. This creates a strong, sustainable organization that will be blessed with strong leadership for years to come.

Concluding thoughts

People only grow when they are delegated tasks that they are uniquely suited for. That’s why we tend to struggle when we are given assignments that we don’t have the aptitude or skill set to complete. Good educational leaders remember this and make sure that employees get a chance to work within their areas of strength, not their areas of weakness.

There are people all over the world who think they have great ideas. Unfortunately, as great as those ideas might be, they will never go anywhere if no one else knows about it. Education leaders are lucky as they get to share their vision and ask people to buy into their ideas. Not only can education leaders share their vision, but they also can break that vision down into steps so that they can be understood by others and executed over time.

A step by step process

Let’s look at the process from the viewpoint of a new superintendent, developing a vision for his new district. The first step is taking the time to create a grand vision that is attainable. Make sure that you develop a strategic plan that lays out how the vision will be attained. The second step is to share the plan with a couple of your most trusted advisors. Ask them to read it in-depth and provide notes. Plan a meeting to discuss their concerns and also suggestions.

The third step would be to share the plan with your full leadership team and ask them to vet it, using the same process as you did with your closest advisors. By the full leadership team, I am talking about your deputy and assistant superintendents, along with other central office staff and of course, the full school board. The fourth step would be to share it with each school’s principal and assistant principals and solicit their feedback. The fifth step would be to present it to your harshest critics, the teachers.

The sixth step would be to present it to the school board, and report that you have a majority buy-in from the rest of the district. They have seen the document in its earlier form, but they haven’t seen the revisions that were made as a result of the feedback that you received from educators and other education leaders. As long as you didn’t make any substantial edits, odds are the school district won’t have any major objections.

Once the school board has approved it, the district can hold a public forum to solicit feedback from parents and the rest of the community. This feedback can be used to shape the final version of your strategic plan/vision. One last tip. You need to appreciate the process as much as the outcome and stay committed to your vision come what may.

As an education leader, you will be continuously learning new skills, but many of them will not end up being your strong suits. Instead of trying to be a master of many things, try to focus most of your attention on the skills that you are exceptionally good at. These things are your strengths, and as a result, they are the gifts that will bring you the most success and happiness.

The truth about focusing on your weaknesses

It’s ok to continue to cultivate things that you may not be good at, but keep in mind that no matter how you try, you will never master them. This is because you are operating outside of your strengths instead of inside of them. When it comes to tasks outside of your wheelhouse, accept your shortcomings, and delegate these tasks to people who are gifted in those areas. As a result of operating in your strengths, you will see your school or school district go to new heights.

On the flip side, make sure that all of your leaders, teachers, and staff are working within their areas of strength. If not, your organization is operating only at a fraction of its potential because your employee’s jobs and tasks are a mismatch to their actual gifts. Sometimes these gifts are discovered during the hiring process, but other times they are discovered on the job. Changing the way you match employees to their job duties can be a game-changer for any organization.

A little homework

Over the next month, spend 75% of your professional development time focusing on sharpening your strengths and 25% of your time focusing on areas of weakness. After a month, what do you notice? If I am correct, your skills in your areas of weakness will stay stagnant. However, you will find that the skills with your areas of strength grow exponentially. As a matter of fact, it will be the most growth that you have ever experienced within one month.