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Hello *|FNAME|*,
A leader’s most important responsibility is to develop leaders.
70-20-10, this is the golden rule for successfully developing leaders. We know from research that senior leaders are the most proven and powerful tool for empowering aspiring leaders to be accountable for 70% of their own development. Aspiring leaders realize 70% of their leadership development by accepting responsibility for challenging tasks, such as:
- Starting something from nothing,
- Fixing something broken, and
- Being responsible for influencing others without authority.
However, to ensure aspiring leaders develop from these challenges, which may include failure, senior leaders need to accept 20% of the responsibility for an aspiring leader’s development. This requires senior leaders to regularly interact with aspiring leaders to clarify roles and expectations, keep them focused on the bigger picture and help them to reflect and learn from their experiences.
10% of any leader’s development is related to structured learning activities, such as workshops, book studies, professional reading, and conferences. Structured learning activities, over a long period of time, have the least amount of influence on a leader’s development, but when introduced at critical junctures in the development journey, can be amazingly powerful for broadening perspective, providing inspiration, and introducing new ideas. Often, aspiring leaders need input from senior leaders to identify appropriate learning activities to stimulate their development journey.
Aspiring leaders, when empowered, will be the most effective tool in ensuring transformative and sustained change. Structured learning activities can introduce aspiring leaders to knowledge, tools, and strategies to foster greater interdependency among team members and develop a sustainable collaborative team culture. But it is the influence of senior leaders, as well as role modeling, that will serve as the catalyst to ensure aspiring leaders use the knowledge, tools, and strategies to build and sustain a collaborative team culture. Senior leaders, serving as Mentors, are vital for keeping aspiring leaders motivated throughout the school year and keeping them on track to achieving goals that will improve teaching and learning across the school.
Three Transformative Outcomes Achieved with Mentoring
Over the course of this school year, from August to June, I have been facilitating a Mentoring program that included five campuses from the Yew Chung Education Foundation. In February 2022, at the midway point of the program, all participants completed a survey to share their experience in the program. These were the areas of the participant experience that the survey focused on and where I believe the transformation in both the leader’s and the school’s development is rooted:
- Leadership Development Projects: What were participants working on and how had it evolved over the course of the program? What was their relative level of confidence to complete their project?
- Relationships: How has the program influenced their relationship to each other and to the school?
- Retention: To what extent had the program influenced their desire to stay at their school and their belief that they could effect change in the organization?
Data collected for Leadership Development Projects indicated that a majority of projects had changed over the course of the school year, most of them only moderately, but 9 of 22 projects had changed significantly. On a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 indicating Not Confident and 4 indicating Very Confident, 5 of 22 mentees were not confident they would successfully complete their projects at the start of the year and no one was very confident they would successfully complete their projects. By February, everyone felt they would complete their projects, with 9 of 22 participants feeling very confident they would successfully complete their projects. Mentor survey feedback mirrored mentee feedback in these regards. At this stage, we can only surmise the influence that mentors had, especially considering that all participants had to overcome pandemic-related challenges to successfully achieve their projects.
Data collected relating to Relationships was very positive. 14 of 18 mentors participating in this program indicated that this program influenced their relationship with aspiring senior leaders by ensuring they were more directly involved in developing the leadership capacity of aspiring senior leaders. Even more encouraging, considering the strain educational leaders experienced during the pandemic, was that there was a high level of trust between all mentoring pairs. On a 1-4 scale, with 4 indicating trusting their mentor/mentee completely, 30 of 40 participants rated their relationships as a 4, and 10 rated the relationships as a 3.
Lastly, regarding data collected for Retention, all participants indicated that this program had positively influenced their perception of being able to effect change in YCEF. On a 1-4 scale, 22 of 40 participants selected 3 and 9 participants selected 4. More promising was that on a 1-4 scale indicating how likely will participants stay at their school as a result of this program, 32 indicated that the program had a positive influence on their decision to stay at their school with 9 participants selecting 4, indicating it had a significant influence.
If you would like to learn more about this mentoring program and how your school can implement one, please contact me or go to visit this link, where I outline the program in more detail. There are also testimonials on this page.
Thank you for your continued interest and consideration of my monthly missives,
Michael
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