Live Well, Lead Strong: Lessons Learned This School Year
You’ve all had special “leaving times” over the last few weeks; the May and June days are always full of final celebrations, good-bye gatherings, retirement celebrations…whew! When you have a moment to catch your breath after all that, I wonder if you might consider these questions: What lessons did you learn over the last year that will help you lead with insight as you plan for the future? How can those lessons help you show up with more and more skill and strength ( and even joy!) in the fall?
In his book The Four Pivots, Shawn A Ginwright unpacks what that term “insight” may mean for leaders: “Insight is the elixir of deep hindsight and powerful foresight mixed together with just the right balance of each, just when we need it.” (emphasis mine). In other words, if we take time in these summer weeks to look back with curiosity on what we’ve learned this year, that knowledge can be a rich source of information to inform how we move forward with more strength and skill.
What might that actually look like? Well, maybe this year you saw a teacher flourish when given her first chance to lead a team. You saw initiative, competence, and the power of teachers working at a high level of productivity. What might that mean to your plans for careful supervision and support for that promising leader?
Maybe you learned that when you plan and hold a sticky, uncomfortable conversation, you need to think more carefully about how the teacher will receive your feedback and how they might respond during those types of interactions. That’s a powerful cue for you to become even more well prepared—to realize the other person may become defensive, angry, or try to distract you—so you can school yourself to remain steady during times that may be tense. I promise you’ll feel so much better!
Like my principal friend Ryan, maybe you decided to try a voluntary book study. Ryan chose From Behaving To Belonging to help his people try to learn more strategies for problematic student behavior. Although the group started small, Ryan kept at it and simply offered the opportunity for people who wanted to engage. Guess what happened? Ryan learned very quickly that good ideas grow organically, and he saw more and more people learning from their teacher teams as interest really snowballed in this valuable resource. “I just trusted that my teachers would know a good thing when they saw it, and the ideas would spread on their own”, Ryan said to me. That, my friends, is a powerful insight to reflect on at the end of the year.
We’re all leaders of these learning organizations called schools, dear friends…and our own powerful learning can be right at our fingertips if we plan forward based on deep insights from our past experience. That’s my wish for all of you: a slow pace to just have time to think, and to return in the fall feeling confident, competent, and strong for another year. I’ll look forward to seeing many of you at Summer Leadership Institute!
Until then, may your courage continue to shine,
Debbie McFalone, Ph.D.