Monday Motivation – the one thing that will make an impact

Welcome to Monday Motivation. We are at, or nearing, the end of the term. Every term in education is a big one. I often describe my working life in education as 4 ten-week-sprints and in between we rest. There is quite a bit of discussion at the moment around teacher wellbeing and I want to examine this from a leadership perspective about how we work. In business, they talk about two ways of working. One is working IN the business, the day-to-day busy work, delivering the product or service. The other is working ON the business, examining how the business is functioning, its systems, its focus, the array of products and services and value and impact for the customer.  I want to take this analogy and switch it to your work, your role in your school and the end of a term is the perfect time to bring this into your focus.

In your role as an educational leader, managing your team and the daily management to ensure classes run smoothly, students are engaged and learning, and curriculum targets are being met is what I am referring to as ‘working IN your work’. It’s the daily, head-down stuff, busy, and task-focused work. This is important work and of course must be done.

‘Working ON your work’ in your role in schools is where you take a big step away from the daily work and examine things like: the direction your team is taking, the systems you use for communication, planning, the sharing and visibility of resources, assessments, their frequency and the learning value each provides to your students, as well as the quality of data each assessment provides. These are big questions. They require a distancing between you and the item you are examining and an emotional disconnection to something that you, or a colleague, may have dedicated considerable time in its creation. But this is important work too and sadly this is the work that gets left off the To Do List because the busy work (‘working IN your work’) gets in the way. Consider this – if you gave more time to working ON your work, to improve assessments, to ensure they are truly providing the learning value and the data needed, and your systems were improved or your communication was more streamlined, how would these things improve your daily work and reduce the time and effort wastage that results in you being so tired at the end of the term? This is even more important work than the busy daily work because it ensures that you are providing value, making an impact and your team is working together towards achieving common goals.

So where am I going here? It’s the end of the term. The first important thing for you is that when the term holidays arrive, you rest, you switch off for a time. Do not think about work. This switching off starts to create the distance you need between the ‘thing’ that you or a colleague may be so invested in, so you can examine it from afar. Then think about one thing that you know is causing a roadblock, or its clunky, or you really don’t know if it is having the impact you want and spend time thinking about just that. Just one thing not many. Do the thinking while walking or go to a café and think about it there. Do something different, go somewhere different, to help you think differently. But stay focused on the one thing. Work on that. Find some options and when the next term starts, take your options back to the team and together find a new way to work in that thing, so it is providing more value, better data, better learning outcomes. Then throughout the next term, set aside time each week for you to refine that one thing, test it, refine it further, then implement it more broadly. This is strategic thinking. It is about thinking ‘big picture’ so that when we are doing the work, the work has purpose, direction and it is achieving what we want it to.

If you found this useful, you will enjoy the Leadership Blueprint program. You can find out about that HERE.

This is my last Monday Motivation for 2 weeks as I too take a break for the end of term and work on my one thing in my business.

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