3 Gifts for You, Them and Us
Every term break, I have the same message for teacher leaders: Don’t bring unwanted baggage on your break. The proverbial baggage is unresolved conflict with team members and leadership concerns about team performance. So, in this monthly missive, I am giving you and your team 3 gifts to ensure you are truly able to rest this break.
Why We Can't Ignore Unresolved Matters
If conflict and leadership concerns go unresolved, they start to form part of a self-narrative each person involved develops to justify not resolving the conflict or concerns. The cost for resolution starts to accrue and anyone involved will reinforce their narrative to ensure deferment of paying the cost for resolution. This is a form of Self Deception that the Arbinger Group wrote about in a fantastic story about organizational leadership and family.
When the cost of resolution starts to increase there is a myriad of consequences (in order of the cost, from lowest to highest):
Delayed/missed deadlines
Communication lapses
Leadership distraction
Complaints
Rumours and innuendos
Lack of focus on improved teaching and learning
Loss of confidence in supervisor and/or upper management
Loss of senior management support
A toxic culture takes root
Overall cynicism and distrust
Even worse than these costs, is the cost to our own well-being. Just because we go on holiday, it doesn’t mean we escape these costs. Debt collectors are ever-present. The collection notice comes in the way of emails sent during the break, task lists that grow during our absence, a dread of returning to work, and in the worst cases, an underlying anxiousness that disrupts sleep throughout the break.
Seeking immediate gratification only adds to the debt
In the run-up to this term break, I know that several leaders are trying to clear their desks as best they can. They do this by attending to the easy transactional matters, those that don’t require a lot of interdependencies. The self-deception is that leaders seek immediate gratification from checking boxes with the belief that if everyone on a team has gotten their work done, including themselves, then the work of the team is done.
In the wake of this approach to supervising peers in what I consider a working group, not a team, a teacher leader accrues a lot of baggage. Work gets done, but it comes at a significant cost. The big items that require genuine and authentic collaboration become harder to achieve and ultimately will shift more burden and responsibility on the leader to get them done when everyone returns to work.
Don’t become prey to this self-deception. Transactional work doesn’t improve teaching and learning. Transactional working environments discourage collaboration. Transactional cultures have higher levels of conflict and lead to higher turnover.
3 Gifts for You, Them and Us
Fortunately, I have a great repayment plan for you. It can start before this upcoming break and be paid for throughout the rest of the school year. Best of all, it comes with 3 gifts, one for you, one for the team (team), and one for you and the team (us). In order to receive the gift, you must be willing to ask these questions:
The gift for You
What are we doing well as a team and need to continue doing after the holiday?
This is an easy gift to ask your team to give you. Even if there is conflict between one or a few team members, there will also be pockets of positive collegiality that when exposed to everyone, you may be able to build on.
In the case where you feel no one has anything positive to say, which not surprisingly, many teacher leaders dread, you can individually speak with each team member and summarize what was reported to you. Individual meetings become an opportunity to surface positive relationships and practices that can be documented and shared in a meeting. When enough positive instances are captured, they start to reshape people’s narratives of the team, causing them to question their own negative perspectives.
The gift for Them
As a team, what would you like us to be doing more of?
This question might seem like a large leap of faith, but if the emphasis is placed on the team and what the team needs to be doing more of, then this is an opportunity for team members to have a voice in influencing meetings and collaborative work.
Again, if you fear that this will devolve into finger-pointing and a focus on why the team isn’t doing more of what is desired, then you should engage with each team member separately to shape how the conversation should be had as a team and why you want to avoid finger pointing and surfacing reasons for why the team isn’t able to do what people want.
The point of this question is for the team to write the proverbial wish list for Santa Claus. Over your winter break, instead of focusing on being haunted by the ghosts of Christmas past and present, you can start to envision a much more positive future and how you can shape it.
The gift for Us
When we return from the break, what should be our focus as a team for the next term?
The gift for everyone, in this case, is building consensus on the thing everyone wants most from the list drafted from the second question. Once everyone starts to focus on a shared purpose, everyone will be able to enter the break having turned the page on one chapter and looking forward to starting the next.
As all schools prepare to break, both Northern and Southern hemisphere schools, I wish you peace and joy. I hope you all start the new year envisioning what is possible, as that is the source of energy you will need for the next term.
