.
It’s the end of term! Time is short! And so is this week’s 40HP blog piece. The 40HP team have pushed the buttons quite a bit this term. We’ve tried to be provocative and we’ve tried to get people thinking about how they do their roles in a quest to leading a more balanced life.
So here goes a very quick precis of the top ten (in no order of importance) take outs and provoactions from our term of writings. Call it Forty Hour Principal Speed Dating if you will!
- “Give – giving is the thing that tends to fall away when you’re tired, stressed and swamped. There is an amazing amount of energy that one can receive from giving, in times of any struggle. And the best thing to give is time.”
- “When was the last time you paused, off site in a peaceful place, with a piece of blank paper and considered the how? The ‘how’ reflects the time you commit to a task, the energy you give and the stress that you either accept or reject. It is the difference between Principal A spending all weekend working on their Strategic Plan, and Principal B achieving the same outcome with their team during the week. Both get the same ‘what’ done, but how they do this is completely different – this is where possibility lies.”
The How matters (at least) as Much as The What
- “As principals and leaders we find ourselves doing a whole heap of stuff that simply isn’t our core business. We don’t ask often enough, WHY is this my job? WHY is this my rodeo?”
- “What would you need to see or learn to change your mind about something?”
- “Giving yourself a little time to PAUSE BREATHE SMILE before letting your next step be dominated by a feeling or emotion maybe, just maybe will save yourself the stress of dealing with extreme behaviours, especially if they’re yours!”
- “By trying to please everyone, or at least to avoid upsetting anyone, we unwittingly make ourselves ineffective because the only way to attempt this impossibility is to consign ourselves to maintaining the status quo. (And maintaining the status quo is simply not OK in a world where we need change.)”
Pleasing People is a Losing Strategy
- “Slow things down. Don’t over complicate what you’re doing or what you’re hoping to achieve. Yes, there is an end goal, but your method of getting there could well change depending on what you are doing now, so spend time on that. Take one tackle at a time.”
- “There’s a lot of scientific data that links your future personal misery to the amount of time that you spend enjoying the seductive embrace of the swivelly chair.”
The Seductive Trap of the Swivelly Chair
- “Management vs Leadership? Surely they co-exist, not only side by side, but together like osmosis, flowing into one another; at times morphing into pure management while at other times being pure leadership, but more often than not just a colourful mixture of both.”
The Management Versus Leadership Debate is Dead
10 . “Refusing to stay home (when you are sick) can also be a subtle disrespect of your team, because being unwilling to take a sick day on the grounds that you are irreplaceable, implies that your team is not quite up to the mark.”
Steve