With the start of summer comes an opportunity to reflect on the year that was to better help us prepare for the year that will be. When this runs in July, most readers will still be on school break, so I hope these four lessons learned in the past year are also worthwhile for your consideration. Enjoy the time to balance your work, learning and leading with others to learn and lead for yourself!
Trust your intuition
This isn’t a new lesson for me, though it needs to be “renewed” occasionally. I’ve been an educator for roughly 25 years. I’ve learned a lot. And while that experience doesn’t count for everything, it does count for a lot. I’ve gotten quite good at understanding people’s needs and wants, and reading body language and verbal cues so that I can get a pretty good sense of where things can go and how I can assist. While that doesn’t mean I can help solve every problem, it does mean that my initial thinking about a challenge is usually pretty close to being correct. For example, in recently discussing some personnel needs, I sensed that a number of moves would help address those needs. Collectively, we came to that same conclusion. And while those changes may or may not occur, I know my thinking aligns with our agency’s needs.
Change won’t happen if it isn’t led
Change is hard. No one wants to change, even if we say we do. It forces us to adjust our thinking, makes us uncomfortable, and leads to the unknown. We can never be sure how change will impact us, and while we always hope to be better than we were before, it is never guaranteed. So, we have to be willing to lead (or have someone else lead) if change is truly going to stick. This year, we embarked on a massive overhaul of one of our services to districts. It required a significant alteration to the process for districts and our staff. More often than not, people were unhappy, not with the service, but rather with the fact that this change made everything more difficult for everyone, at least initially. However, as the year went on and people became more comfortable, the value of all sides was recognized. As I write this, the entire process of using the service has become much more efficient (and effective). This process would have never happened had someone not led it. And, while this time it was me, it could have been anyone. I needed to shoulder the frustration, provide the support and give people the space to get acclimated.
Give people the work they want to do
We can’t always engage in the work we want to do. I mean, simply, sometimes we have to take on tasks that aren’t to our liking. But when we lead effectively for people, we become more capable of matching skillsets with work that needs to be done. And when we match people with the work they want to do, we become more capable of achieving great things. We recently hired a World Language lead, who had done great work building relationships with staff at our state education department. She hoped to continue that relationship and develop regional assessment in partnership with this staff member. She could go in so many directions with the work, and I sensed how important this work was to her. So, my role needed to be less about questioning the value and time of this specific initiative, and more about putting my effort into getting her what she needed to accomplish the goals she had set for herself in this area. And, with lots of good work, the initiative was a significant success.
Let it go
It’s funny that this has taken me about 25 years to learn. For years, I held on to situations probably a bit too tightly, regularly trying to shift results towards what I believed were the right solutions. Regardless of whether I would have been right or not, in plenty of cases it didn’t matter. We can’t control everything, and why would we want to? In fact, we often learn even more from acceptance and then working to make less-than-ideal situations better for all involved. Since we only know our situations, we have to be willing to believe that everyone wants what is best for learners. And if results differ from what we hoped for? Then, rather than becoming angry, we have to explore what we can change to improve. As one of our programs gets ready to move locations, there have been a number of times when I have wished that decisions could be made differently. Or that my opinions were taken into account differently. That said, my perspective is my perspective, and chances are, the results of the move will be better for more people involved in the process. Sometimes, we just have to let it go.
This was a great year for me. There were challenges, of course. And there were successes. And in the end, the true success is that I learned. And that I will be able to use these lessons (and others) to help me strengthen my leadership skills in the year to come.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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