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Author: janine

Janine Stratford, is a Leadership Coach and Career Strategist, working with teachers and leaders in schools across Australia and New Zealand. A former teacher and school leader, she is passionate about developing great leaders as role models for their schools and their students. You can find out more about Janine at https://coachingfocus.com.au.

Are you really delegating or merely off-loading tasks?

Written by janine on . Posted in Confidence, Leadership Development, School Leadership.

It’s the end of Term 1. I hear a sigh of relief. Bring on the chocolate. How do you feel? Has the term gone smoothly? 

I want to discuss delegation. Are you cringing already?. If you are a leader this is something you must do and get comfortable with doing.

It is too easy to think that the only person to get something done and done well is to do it yourself. Sure the task will get done but at the expense of what? If you are travelling a lone journey towards your team’s vision, it is not your team’s vision at all. It is just yours.  You cannot share the success with anyone. You have not united your team and built strong collegiate relationships. Nor have you developed and empowered your team members to take on new challenges and learn new skills. Oh and what’s more there has definitely been no delegation! But there has been lots of control. So that’s a good thing, right? Wrong! Time to re-group.

Delegating tasks is distributing the challenges across the team. Look around at your team members. What are they good at? What are their strengths? What areas could be best developed further? What are their aspirations and how can you help their learning? Delegating is not merely off-loading tasks. If you know what your team members are wanting, and you know what you want for them, delegating becomes a matching process. You match the skills in the task to the strengths evident or to the development needs of your team members.  The important thing after that is that you STEP AWAY and let them get on with it. You can hover, but please not too close or frequently. Allow your staff to come back to you at either an agreed date/time or have a check-in open-door type relationship. Importantly, allow them to come to you.  If things get left too long for your level of comfort and you want to have an update, let them know and set a time to meet. No-one likes the leader that rolls up and demands the update on the spot.

Through delegating tasks, you develop skills and leadership in others. Through sharing your vision and helping your team to see the benefits of the direction you are taking, they will be more likely and be more willing to join you on the journey. Giving them tasks to get involved and through encouraging them to come up with suggestions and ideas to help achieve the vision, and allowing them to carry out these actions, empowers them to be a part of the direction and to take ownership of the results. Now there is excitement across the group and together you can share in the challenges, difficulties and successes that you make together. Sure you have less direct control but in the long term, you are developing a stronger, more capable team that is moving forward together. The time you gain through delegating to others you can use to encourage your team, recognize their successes, even meet with your colleagues in other areas of the organization to learn what they are doing and to plan the next steps towards achieving your vision.  You are not an island! Remember to bring your team along with you on the journey and enjoy it together.

Written by Janine Stratford, Executive Coach and Founder of Coaching Focus.

Building Your Team. Step 1- Developing Trust

Written by janine on . Posted in Leadership.

In any organisation, the most important asset is its staff. For you as a leader, your asset therefore is your team. They need you to nurture, empower, support, recognize and acknowledge them. Patrick Lencioni’s model for effective teams is shown below in a pyramid. He explains that the foundation for an effective team is trust.

Effective teams are:
• More effective and efficient
• Make better, faster decisions
• Tap into the skills and opinions of all members
• Avoid wasting time and energy on politics, confusion and destructive conflict
• Work together with greater levels of respect
• Create a competitive advantage
• Have more fun while being more productive

How as a new leader do you build a high-trust team?

This trust needs to be not only in your leadership but also between each team member. If you role model how to build trust in your relationship with each team member, it will ripple out across the team.

Below are five key ways you can start to develop the trust of your team in your leadership.

1. Involve the team in decision-making – if you seek out their opinions and involve them in decisions, they will have greater ownership of the decision and direction. The team will work better together with a stronger sense of unity.

2. Allow people to do their job. Give your staff the autonomy to carry out their job well. It is important to delegate to them to build their skill level and make sure you do not micro-manage.

3. If you make a mistake, admit it. If your staff make a mistake, thank them for their honesty in sharing the error with you and together explore the learning from the experience. Exploring new things and being innovative are going to come with some mistakes. This is how we learn and grow.

4. When one of your team come to you for advice, allow them to explore the problem with you before giving any advice. Use the coaching style of questioning to help them explore the options available to them. You will be building their resilience, keeping them accountable for the solution and building their capacity at the same time.

5. Know your team members – learn about your team members. Are they quiet, or talkers? Are they deep-thinkers or designers? Knowing their styles will help you to manage your team when they are all together and assist you to know how you need to be with each one. Be interested in your team members in terms of their challenges, their strengths, their passions and their ideal futures. Get to know their stories and their home settings.

Trust is fundamental to an effective team. It takes time to develop and a consistent approach. As the pyramid model shows all other aspects rely on trust being present. If trust disappears the pyramid collapses. (Model reference: Patrick Lencioni, Five Dysfunctions of a Team.)

Written by Janine Stratford, Leadership Coach, Coach-Trainer, Career Strategist and Founder of Coaching Focus.

The Elevating Leadership Program – Module 1: Define your Leadership Style, explores behavioural preferences in depth. Apart from finding out your own behavioural style, you will start to understand the characteristics of the other behavioural preferences and how they can show up in conversation, through the structure of their email, even by observing a colleague’s desk or office or how they dress. It’s fascinating! Once you know what to look for, you can then identify a person’s style quite quickly and the process of getting to know them and developing a working relationship is so much easier.
You can learn more about the Elevating Leadership Program ,specifically Module 1 HERE.

We can do it with our students. Why not with our colleagues?

Written by janine on . Posted in Leadership.

We can do it with our students, so why can’t we do it with our colleagues? I’m referring to being able to lead with confidence. We can take charge in our classrooms, even exert our authority. We can create great rapport with our students because we make a point of getting to know them, their needs, their challenges, so we can teach them better. In our classrooms, we feel confident, in control and we know where we are taking our students; we have a clear vision and a plan, but more importantly, we’ve developed solid relationships with our students. We’ve worked hard to create a safe place for them and for us, so we can be ourselves and so can they.

Somehow the picture is a little different when we are charged with leading colleagues. Why is it that we are not as confident in the way we communicate? Our vision is less clear and our plans are a little foggy, or at least, they come out that way when we are trying to explain them to others with whom we feel less comfortable. Aren’t our colleagues just upsized students? Don’t we all, as educators, have the same ultimate goal; to help our students achieve their best? So why are we less confident with our colleagues? This plays out in many ways. We are less willing to have colleagues visit our classrooms or observe part of our classes. We are reluctant to lead a professional learning workshop, even if it is only to lead a small 10-minute group discussion. We are hesitant to ‘tweet’ about insights from our teaching or successes in our classrooms and definitely less comfortable to tackle a challenging conversation or deal with conflict. Why is this? It’s because the relationship focus is different. With the students, the focus is on ‘them’ and their progress. As teachers we lose ourselves in meeting ‘their’ needs. With our colleagues, the focus shifts to ‘us’. How are ‘we’ together. How am I being perceived by you? Do I provide value to you? Can you see what I bring to my work and to this team?  Do you know what I want and need? Have we got a healthy working relationship where we can work things out together?

So what’s missing here?

We haven’t worked enough at the relationship and creating that safe place, so we can be all be ourselves.

Fundamentally, we haven’t made enough of a point of getting to know each other, our respective needs and challenges, and we haven’t worked out how we need to behave with each other and communicate to each other, to work better together.

Did you know? 45% of people don’t like dealing with conflict. 8% of people would prefer not to deal with other people at all. 29% of people need to know that you like them and need to be given some indication of this in every interaction and 18% of people have no regard for how you are going to get something done, only that you have got it done or will have done it by the set deadline.

These figures are based on research into behavioural styles, how people behave and communicate. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know who falls into what category? This insight would be helpful, for example, if you know there is a challenging conversation ahead with a colleague who is in the group that doesn’t like conflict. Your conversation would be slower, more sensitively worded, and taking into consideration the feelings about conflict of each person. Compare this to the challenging conversation with the colleague that just wants to get the job done. First the conversation will need to be much shorter, but in this conversation, there is not as much need to focus on letting the person know they are valued and ‘liked’ because, in fact, they won’t be caring as much about that as getting the job or the issue of the conversation completed. But what if you are the type that fundamentally needs to know you are ‘liked and valued’ and you are working with a colleague, or several, who don’t feel the same need. They don’t give feedback often, or compliment or acknowledge the work you do. They think you already know that they feel you are doing a good job. They told you last year, remember. Whose wrong and whose right? Doesn’t everyone want to be told they are liked, valued and doing a good job often. Actually, No!

Getting to know your colleagues from this perspective is fundamental to understanding how they think, how they behave, what are their priorities and how you need to behave and communicate with them. I challenge you to spend some time observing your colleagues. Are they task-focused or people-focused? How do they spend their time? Are they quiet or more talkative? Do they communicate mainly in person or through email? Do they comfortably make eye-contact with you and exchange a greeting when you pass in the corridor?

The program, Leveraging Your Leadership Style, running on Wednesday 14 March, explores behavioural preferences in depth. Apart from finding out your own behavioural style, you will start to understand the characteristics of the other behavioural preferences and how they can show up in conversation, through the structure of their email, even by observing a colleague’s desk or office or how they dress. It’s fascinating! Once you know what to look for, you can then identify a person’s style quite quickly and the process of getting to know them and developing a working relationship is so much easier.

You need to know your colleagues if you are going to have a healthy working relationship. Once you know each other better, you can more easily be yourself. Then watch your confidence soar.

Written by Janine Stratford, Executive Coach, former Deputy Principal, Founder of Coaching Focus.

To learn more about the program, Leveraging Your Leadership Style, the brochure can be found here.

The first thing to do when a challenging conversation strikes.

Written by janine on . Posted in Leadership.

We have all experienced being caught by a challenging conversation. We didn’t see it coming. We are unprepared and our thoughts are somewhere else. Effectively we’ve been blindsided without warning.

Our bodies respond to these situations with the flight/fight response. We are designed with great systems to keep us safe. Today in our corporate world, even a conversation can look like danger if we are not expecting it. Adrenaline starts coursing through your body and your heart rate spikes, oxygen is directed away from your limbs to keep your vital organs functioning. That’s why you might feel ‘weak at the knees’, shaky or your mind might feel ‘foggy’. Our emotions are triggered quickly and any hope of rational thought has ‘left the building’.
You now can’t think rationally, even if you tried. You need to get rid of the influx of adrenaline in your bloodstream and that only happens with time. We are chemical beings with our bodies responding through chemical reactions, and breaking down adrenaline takes time.

So the first thing to do when a challenging conversation strikes is to buy yourself some time.
Time allows the necessary chemical reactions to take place, the heart rate to return to normal, for blood to reach the brain. Only then will you logically engage in the conversation for a worthwhile and productive outcome. There is no point having a challenging conversation when you are in a heightened emotional state, because you will not be thinking rationally, and you could say or do something you later regret.

Buying yourself some time allows you to get your frame of reference correct, manage your own emotions, collect the data or items you need, get the back-story, bring yourself into the present moment, manage your own emotions and get some rational thinking happening. So how do you buy yourself some time?

Here are three strategies:
• Genuinely tell them that now is not a good time for you to give your full concentration to their concern and you would really like to give this your full attention. Ask to reschedule, perhaps even later that day.
• Walk with them to a different location. It is never good to have a discussion in a public space, even a corridor. The act of walking to a different location will buy you some time.
• Before the discussion gets under way, ask them if they would like a coffee, tea or water. The time it takes to make the drink or to go and ask someone to make it for you, buys you time.

Next time you are caught with a difficult conversation without warning, remember, buy yourself some time.
If you have some more good strategies, please share them with me via email janine@coachingfocus.com.au

Remember to bring the team with you

Written by janine on . Posted in Uncategorized.

The end of week 5 of the school year has just ended. You are half way through the first term in your new role. How do you feel? Is it going smoothly? 90 days into any new job, the hope is that you have hit the break-even point where you are consuming the same amount of resources and energy as you are giving back to the organisation.  Right now, you are just over a third of the way along that journey, however, you should be seeing some successes and feeling as if your work is making a positive difference on the organization and the people around you. If not, it is time to secure some early wins. If you can’t see them happening, then it is timely to return to the notes you made from your early meetings with your line manager where you discussed your role and the aspects that are to be your key areas of focus.  Look over that list and identify one, or maybe two, that can be covered off more quickly and identify some steps towards achieving them that can be secured in the next few weeks and get going on them, remembering of course not to drop the bigger things you have been consistently working on over the last 5 weeks.

This week the focus of my article is on something I see many teachers do far too often and it’s not wise and more importantly it’s not healthy. It can also set up poor habits and a mindset that is difficult to shift once these habits become ingrained.  I want to remind you that in your work, whether it is in a school or any organization, you don’t work alone nor do you have to nor is it expected. Just because you teach inside a classroom does not mean that all your work, your thinking and your planning, has to be done on your own. The old proverb holds true ‘no man is an island’ and I’m going to add to this proverb that no woman is an island either.  In your leadership role, there are times when you will need to make the decision, but his doesn’t mean that the decision needs to be made without consultation or the gathering of advice or the opinion and attitude of your team members. And just because you seek the advice and input of others does not mean that you don’t necessarily know how to make the decision or know how to address a problem. Nor does it mean you are a poor leader. So please remove these negative mindsets from your thinking right now before they creep into permanent thought.

When you started this role you formulated goals and a vision for your year ahead and what you wanted to do in your work.. A good leader shares that vision with their team and excites them about the journey ahead. The leader inspires the team to see the benefits of achieving the goals and of living the vision and ideally keeps reinforcing this message with the necessary enthusiasm and support and with some regularity so as to keep the group moving forward and enjoying the ride along the way. In effect, keeping the vision buoyant on the sea even when the weather changes or the wind direction shifts. It is worth checking in with yourself, are you doing this? Is your team still aware of the direction they are heading and do they feel supported along the journey? Have you been recognising their efforts to move in this new direction and in that recognition having you been acknowledging them, their attitude and celebrating the small steps forward individually and as a team? If not, add this to your ‘To Do’ this for this week.

It is too easy to think that the only person to get something done and done well is to do it yourself. Sure the task will get done but at the expense of what? If you are travelling a lone journey towards your team’s vision, it is not your team’s vision at all. It is just yours.  You cannot share the success with anyone. You have not united your team and built strong collegiate relationships. Nor have you developed and empowered your team members to take on new challenges and learn new skills. Oh and what’s more there has definitely been no delegation! But there has been lots of control. So that’s a good thing, right? Wrong! Time to regroup.

Through delegating tasks you develop skills and leadership in others. Through sharing your vision and helping your team to see the benefits of the direction you are taking, they will be more likely and be more willing to join you on the journey. Giving them tasks to get involved and through encouraging them to come up with suggestions and ideas to help achieve the vision and allowing them to carry out these actions empowers them to be a part of the direction and to take ownership of the results. Now there is excitement across the group and together you can share in the challenges, difficulties and successes that you make together. Sure you have less direct control but in the long term you are developing a stronger more capable team that are move forward together. The time you gain through delegating to others you can use to encourage your team, recognize their successes, even meet with your colleagues in other areas of the organization to learn what they are doing and to plan the next steps towards achieving your vision.  You are not an island! Remember to bring your team along with you on the journey and enjoy it together.

 

Let The Learning Begin!

Written by janine on . Posted in Uncategorized.

Playing it Safe Won’t Get You Ahead.

Written by janine on . Posted in Uncategorized.

This is the third article in my series written for the teacher stepping into a new role.  My hope is that this series of articles will help you smoothly transition into your new role and start kicking goals quickly. Leadership is still leadership, so if you are not a teacher, what I have written here will equally apply to you.

In my first article, I wrote about getting clarity around your new role and setting you up for a meeting with your manager to make sure you are both on the same page. How did that meeting go? Last week I wrote about developing collegiate relationships with those around you, in your team, with your manager and most importantly with the people who are at the same level of the organisation. I am hoping you have started to make connections, had a few coffees and a few comfortable exchanges as you passed through offices. This week, the focus is on stepping up and out of your comfort zone, the safe space of tasks and areas that you know well. These articles are based on ideas expressed by Michael Watkins in his book, The First 90 Days. I encourage you to buy it, in hard copy, and read it from cover to cover and make yourself notes all over it.

In your application for your new role, you will have written about and talked to the projects you have managed, or the initiatives you have taken or how you have met the various interpersonal challenges when dealing with colleagues, parents and students. All of that got you the job. These are your strengths and usually the things that you like to do, because you know them and have practiced the necessary skills. You will know that in all the work that you do there are some aspects you really enjoy and get lost in, sometimes for hours, and then there are those aspects that you know need to be done, and you put them off for as long as you can. In your new role there will more tasks that are new and different, that you haven’t done before and may not know how to do and they push and test your skills and knowledge. Just as well, you have started to build those relationships with others in the same level as you in your organization as these people will be able to help you to get a handle on those tasks where some assistance is needed.

You got the job because of your strengths but relying too much on what made you successful in the past can be fatal, according to Michael Watkins in The First 90 Days. He has a good way of assessing your problem preferences, the kinds of problems toward which you naturally gravitate.  Your preferences have influenced you to move towards jobs where you can do more of what you like. And as result, those skills have been perfected and you feel most competent in those areas.  He uses the analogy that it is like exercising the right arm and ignoring the left. The strong arm gets stronger and the other atrophies. The risk is that an imbalance occurs and then you move into a role where you need to use both arms together.

Look at the table below, which I have modified from Watkins’ book to suit a teacher’s world, and use it to assess your intrinsic interest in solving problems in each of the areas on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 means very little interest and 10 means a great deal of interest.

Design of appraisal and reward systems Employee morale Equity/fairness
Management of financial risk Setting budgets Cost-consciousness
Positioning and promoting your department/area Relationships with colleagues Focussing on high quality service delivery
Ensuring high quality of learning outcomes Relationships with students Looking for continuous improvements
Managing projects Relationships with parents and other stakeholders Working together with other departments and school administration

Now transfer your rankings from the table above to the table below into the corresponding cells. Then add the three columns and five rows.

The column totals represent your preferences among technical, political and cultural problems. Technical problems include strategies, marketing and processes. Political problems are about power, influence and alliances in the organization. Cultural problems are about the culture and climate in your organization which is influenced by values, norms, guiding assumptions and ‘the way things are done’ in your workplace.

If one column total is noticeably lower than the others, it represents a potential ‘blind spot’ for you. This means that you will steer clear of this area or worse, won’t see the need to take action. If you score high on technical aspects and low on culture and politics, you might not be seeing the people issues that need to be addressed.

The row totals represent your preferences for the various business functions. A low score in any row suggests that you prefer not to deal with problems in that functional area – more potential ‘blind spots’.

Technical Political Cultural Total
Human Resources

 
Finance

 
Marketing

 
Operations

 
Research and Development

 
Total

 

This exercise will help you to identify where you most like solving problems and where you are less eager to sit with problems. It will highlight potential weak spots in the way you work and therefore areas where you may not be seeing the issues clearly or acting quick enough.  To overcome or compensate for these vulnerabilities you can do some basic things:

  1. Be stronger with your own self-discipline and push yourself outside your comfort zone to tackle some of the areas that you find less enjoyable,
  2. Work on some of your less favourite activities with others in a team approach,
  3. Get some help from others who have more experience in the areas that are less familiar. Look around your organization for people who you can see are strong in the areas where you would like to develop and set up a mentor arrangement. You can also reach out to people in your network that may be in similar roles to you in other schools and seek their support. I am sure there will be times where you can share your strengths with them in return.
  4. Get yourself a coach and meet with them once a month so they gently push you out of your comfort zone and get you tackling those ‘blind spots’ with greater confidence.

So that leads me to tell you about The Leadership Exchange. This is a meeting group for educators in Melbourne, a network by any other name. We like to call it an ‘exchange’ because during the meeting two or three speakers share their knowledge about various topics pertinent to education and leadership and we also hear some good advice from a leadership coach; that would be me. The Exchange occurs once per term with the meeting starting at 6.00pm, ending at 8.30pm, with a break to eat and drink and connect with other educators. Too many educators in schools are not connecting enough. The internet is only one way to connect, but to know people because you have made a connection in person is worth so much more. I encourage you to attend and I also suggest that you pay the registration fee yourself. Don’t ask your school to pay it. This event is designed around building your own professional reputation. This is where you need to invest in yourself. The next Leadership Exchange is on Wednesday 8 March. Here is the link to book and get more information.

Please let me know how this problem preference exercise was for you. Remember, I am happy to assist you as your coach, meeting once a month, and helping to move you out of your comfort zone. Being a past school leader I know the world of a teacher very well.

About the author: Janine Stratford is an Executive Coach working with school leaders. She provides leadership coaching developing greater clarity, consistency and confidence in leadership, direction and workplace relationships. Janine’s company is Coaching Focus. www.coachingfocus.com.au

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