Author: David Armstrong

Protecting Your Own Borders

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Barbara Zandoval 

Protecting Your Own Borders

No judgements from me on the recent American politics because I simply don’t know enough to make an intelligent contribution to any debates. But what I do know is there’s been a lot of talk about ‘protecting our borders’ which implies that there’s some sort of threat involved in not doing that.

As we pass the halfway mark of this final Term, we are certainly facing some threats – there are plenty of things that if not protected will lead to problems for you, your family, and by association, your kura.

Things like –

Space to think

Time to prioritise

Sleep

Exercise

Food

Being available to your team

Completing people based work

Your entire calendar for the next 4 weeks is yours to organise as you see fit. I suggest that spending 20 minutes this weekend identifying your non-negotiable borders and building some metaphorical fences is time very well spent.

Proactive is sustainable – reactive is not.

Dave

 

Batching Season

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Andreas Klassen 

As Week 3, Term 4 comes to a close, pretty much everything on your ‘to do’ list becomes time limited. Hiring people, spending budgets/creating new ones, strategic planning, appraisals, – there’s a whole plethora of ‘stuff’ that is rolling towards the annual deadline.

There’s only so much that you can fit in your day (40 hours or not) so being able to prioritise is certainly an essential skill (my rule of thumb is that anything to do with people rises to the top of the pile). But you also have to get the work done – a priority order is the first step, then actually doing the work is the next, and this is where the art of ‘batching’ comes into play.

.   .   .

We’ve written about batching before and the term is borrowed from Tim Ferriss, a well-known entrepreneur and thinker.

It’s actually a very simple tactic – block out periods of time where you remove distractions and focus solely on a particular task. This sounds easy, but to work, you need to use some strategy.

The first part is to sort that priority list. I’m talking about the key tasks you simply have to achieve before you wave your learners goodbye in 35 more school days (or much less if you’re in a secondary environment).

The next step is to identify periods of opportunity in your day/week where you have the least likelihood of being interrupted and the most likelihood of being able to shut your office door and focus. Experience has taught me that after 9:30am and before midday is going to be my best opportunity. Up to 9:30am most days is a critical connection time with students, teachers, parents and admin staff. Shutting your door then will cause downstream problems.

The other winning reason for choosing an earlier rather than later time is simply that you are fresher. You haven’t yet missed lunch or drunk 4 cups of coffee so the likelihood of being productive is higher than later in the day.

Step 3 is to gain the support of the key gatekeepers in your school. It is critical that the people who can prevent interruptions know why you are going off grid. My experience is that if you share the reason why you are not available well before time (e.g. it’s in people’s diaries), they will willingly support you. My rule is that unless it is a genuine emergency, I’m out of contact while batching and when I initially started using this tactic, I specified what constituted an emergency from my perspective – and needing an icepack, or someone with a “I’ve got a quick question”, do not qualify. Your personal definitions may vary.

I suggest an hour of batching is the minimum reasonable time block. Two hours is also about the upper limit. Any more than this and you might as well open your door back up as focused productivity will be fading by then. It’s all about holding focus and avoiding distraction.

If the interruptions can’t be easily controlled, you should take your batching off-site. Just like when you are unwell, or your youngest child is getting married, school will continue for the 2 hours you are absent. If it doesn’t, then you are either a sole charge principal with no relievers, or you need to urgently empower others in your team.

And if you’d like to  can read a fuller post on this topic that we wrote earlier, that teases out some of the key details, just click here.

Dave

Touch Pause Engage

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Olga Guryanova

In the sport of rugby union, there’s a thing called a ‘scrum’ where the opposing teams’ forwards push against each other while trying to win the ball. By design, scrums mean large forces are put on the players shoulders, necks and backs and to limit possible injury, these contests used to start with a sequence called touch, pause, engage.

The opposing players reach out and touch their opposition (which ensures they are close together), they then pause to allow everyone to be ready, and only then do they engage with their opposition.

.   .   .

I recently listened to an experienced school leader explaining how they had learnt to slow down when faced with difficult situations. Hard won experience had taught them that to react quickly was often to react ineffectively. As they were talking, I couldn’t help but notice that they were describing a touch, pause, engage strategy.

When debriefing scenarios that have gone badly between adults,  missing any one of these steps is usually the reason why.

For example, if an issue arises, it is tempting to jump straight to ‘engage’ and to try and sort the situation out immediately. The problem with this is the emotions are likely to be very strong and this usually makes it impossible to resolve anything.

Likewise, if an issue arises and you decide to wait to let people ‘cool down’, but don’t at least acknowledge the issue exists, you create a vacuum that will inevitably be filled by people’s imagination. Not good.

And if you do acknowledge the issue, and give some wait time to let emotions cool off, but don’t then work to actually resolve the situation . . .

.   .   .

My suggestion when the next curly situation arises is to:

Touch – despite any time/workload impediments, reach out via email/phone/message and let the person know you are aware there is a problem and that you are committed to resolving it. This can be very brief but fills the void of ‘nothingness’ that could exist. Give them an estimate on when you’ll get back to them.

Pause – don’t do anything more for a while. Over night is a good pause period. You can gather a little intel if appropriate but without any pressure to come up with a solution.

Engage – organise a meeting/phone call and start working through the situation. If it is still heated (emotional), add another pause. Rinse and repeat as needed.

It took me a while to understand that the touch phase often makes or breaks the eventual outcome. Practice makes perfect here, but a couple of things I’ve learnt are; phone calls trump emails, if you have to email, the only purpose is to tell them you’re on it – keep it very brief, set your pause period and stick to it.

Happy Friday.

Dave

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Where Are All the Teachers?

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Annika Gordon 

The good news –

One week to go, and if you live in South Canterbury New Zealand like I do, Monday is a public holiday – the term break is almost close enough to reach out and touch.

The potentially stressful news –

We need to hire some teachers and it seems many of you need to as well.

It is hard to understand how teacher supply can be such a roller coaster of a situation for successive Governments. All the factors for a bit of pre-emptive planning are right there – number of school age children (including immigrants), staffing formulas, number of teachers leaving, number of people enrolling in/graduating from training organisations. Surely a smart group of people with an Excel sheet or two could nail this down? . . . yet here we are again, with an imbalance between demand and supply.

Or maybe the ‘system’ did know what was coming, just that no one close to our political leaders could convince them that unless the job was made more attractive, people wouldn’t choose it.

But waaaay down the chain of command where I operate, parents tend to notice very quickly if their child either doesn’t have a consistent teacher, or has one that is not great. The distance between reality and pain is very short indeed.

We are now being asked for ‘innovative local solutions’ which effectively boils down to how best to recruit overseas trained teachers. (Although I heard it suggested in media this week, that we can also entice retired teachers back into the classroom, and that potentially, we can get approval for untrained/semi-trained people to lead classes.)

The obvious problem with these solutions is that none of them support a high quality, pedagogically sound, or culturally responsive education system. In fact, they are the opposite.

So, like many of you, I’m going to cross every appendage I possess, hold my breath and hope that the people we are looking for can be found. I can already feel the hurt the probable compromises I’m going to make will cause me.

And because I know this is a stressful state to be in, I’m going to double down on my own proven strategies for sustainability – moving, eating ok, having some fun. You might want to prioritise something similar.

Dave

PS: I wrote this post just before the APPA/NZPF Trans-Tasman Conference. I bet I heard some gold plated, inspiring thinking there which will give a positive kick towards the Term break. I’m looking forward to it greatly!!

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Hell Yes or Hell No

Posted on by David Armstrong

 

When you can’t do everything, you need to prioritise, and this is where the world’s simplest sorting tool shines –

Hell yes! or Hell no!

Example:

“Can you add me to your reliever pool?”                       Hell yes!

Should I start work on the 2025 budget?                       Hell yes!

Have I got the time to chat to that upset teacher?      Hell yes!

“Will you be a rep on the beach clean-up team?”         Hell no!

“Would you like to lead next year’s pet day?”                Hell no!

“Can you sit in on the I.E.P. sign-off meetings?”            Hell no!

That instinctive, ‘gut’ reaction is where the magic happens.

Of course, some of the ‘nos’ may morph into, ‘if time allows’, which is only reasonable, but by putting the ‘yeses’ first in line, you’ll be sorting efficiently.

And as a wee tip that has never let me down, anything to do with people is usually a ‘hell yes’.

Good sorting.

Dave

Credit to Derek Sivers

Who’s in Front of the Class?

Posted on by David Armstrong

 Creative Commons Attribution

I’ve seen a lot of comments recently about the dilemma of not having enough teachers to cover classes. The situation is clearly dire in many schools/areas and does not seem to be resolving anytime soon. And the smaller the school, the closer to this pain point becomes the principal.

Maybe I’m biased because I’m inside the education game, but there does seem to be a unique situation involved in the way our schools are organised i.e.  25 students + 1 teacher.

Subtract the teacher and the 25 children are still coming. Every one of them is a partially formed little human and they do not fit into an in-tray which means they can’t be temporarily stored, paused, or ignored.

I’m struggling to think of a comparable workplace.

When a doctor is unwell, their appointments are cancelled. When an engineer is absent, their work is paused or diverted. When an Auditor is short of staff, the audits are delayed.

But your 25 eager, energetic young people are still going to walk through the school gate at 8:30am and they’re not leaving until 3pm. Regardless of whether their teacher is present or not, they still carry their usual ‘baggage’ – anxiety, autism, social quirks, dysregulation . . . and your staffing issue is not going to change any of that. It’s not their problem.

Which is where a choice has to be made, and the options are finite:

Find a reliever

SLT teach them

Split the class

You teach them

Finding relievers – in our region this is difficult if there’s lots of lead time (think weeks) and impossible at short notice. The increase in CRT and lack of local, trained teachers means that on some days there are simply no relievers available. Not a single one.

SLT teaching – if your school is big enough, there may be people released to do other work. Once every so often this is a reasonable ask, but not regularly and not if you’re in a small school where everyone is already teaching a class.

Splitting the class – this is definitely a last choice solution. Dropping extra children into someone else’s class crowds the students in it, takes teaching time away from the teacher, and is essentially just child minding for the day. The anxious or disruptive children don’t leave that behind either. (In secondary schools it often goes the other way – they combine several classes with one adult supervising, again, simply child minding.)

You do it – we’ve written about this before (To Teach or Not to Teach) but in a nutshell, this solution is at the very end of the list. By choosing to teach when you should be acting in a leadership role, you are also choosing to stop work on all other aspects of your job. This has real downstream effects not the least of which is the stress it adds to yourself as you fall further and further behind in your actual job.

And perhaps the real problem is that the general public have no idea that this issue is system wide, every day. Your compromises shelter them from reality.

Perhaps it is time that we let them know.

Dave

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Will Power is Overrated

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez

“Willpower is overrated. If you want to eat healthier, don’t work hard to avoid stopping at the cookie jar when you walk into the kitchen. Get rid of the cookie jar.”   Seth Godin

Let’s apply this thinking –

If staff are distracted in meetings,

Start with screens closed.

If you don’t want mountains of clothing in the ‘lost and found’ cupboard,

Remove the cupboard.

If your grounds are covered in food wrappers,

Ensure wrappers are removed before heading into the playground.

If a group of kids keep playing after the bell,

Introduce a schoolwide ‘rule’ that any points scored after the bell don’t count.

If the area around the Otto bins is covered in rubbish,

Move the bins to a more public space.

The secret is to change the fundamentals so you don’t enter a loop of nagging people to show more will power or self-control.

Change the rules – change the game.

Dave

PS The examples above are real. I dare you to act on example 2 regarding ‘lost’ property. The trick is to completely remove any central ‘dumping’ area and insist that found items are returned to the area in the school where people of that size work. It’s magic in action.

PSS A fortnight ago I asked people to share whether or not they were meeting the WHO guidelines for basic weekly exercise. The results are below (61 people responded). Where do you fit?

 

WHO has some Advice

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Bruno Nascimento

Just over halfway through the year . . . how did that happen?

No doubt you have a few important things to do next week. If you shared your calendar, I’m pretty sure we’d see meetings, school events, PLD, class visits, strategic reviews, duty commitments, reports due, etc, etc.

But would we see important sustainability things?

Would we see scheduled exercise, blocked out time for reflection, lunch with a friend, a coffee catch-up with a colleague, time to prepare healthy food, a late start after a late finish?

If the answer is ‘no’, it’s very likely that some/all of those things won’t happen. You will be gambling that you can somehow just fit them in. The result is that next week will be a net drain on your personal well-being and capacity to do your job sustainably. If subsequent weeks are the same, in 9 weeks’ time you will probably be a bit ‘crispy’. Sustainability is a cumulative game, what you do/don’t do today adds or subtracts over time. 

If your answer is ‘yes’, then you win. You win more energy, more sustainability, and more capacity to lead with excellence.

This “Is it on your calendar?” question is something we’ve written about before. All the really important things are in your calendar/diary system. Why do you always remember a Board meeting? It’s on the calendar. What’s the last day to submit your Strategic Plan? Just check the calendar. What are you doing today? That’s right, have a quick look at the calendar.

And we’re talking about important things.

Any one of limited exercise, poor diet, lack of sleep, or social isolation has a tangible and deeply serious impact on your health over time. If you combine them . . .

So, today you can improve this situation in 5 minutes. Here’s the minimum amount of exercise to add to your calendar for next week –

Exercise:

From the World Health Organisations’ minimum guidelines for adults aged 18–64 years.

  • Should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity throughout the week, or do at least 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both.
  • For additional health benefits, adults should increase their moderate-intensity physical activity to 300 minutes per week, or equivalent.
  • Muscle-strengthening activities should be done involving major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week.

That’s 2.5 to 5 hours moderate activity for the week, and two muscle strengthening sessions. You’re got 7 days to play with and I know you can work this out!

Just for fun, click here and share your current reality.

You can do this.

Dave

 

What Do You Stand For?

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Anthony Tori 

What do you stand for?

I was at a convention last week where one of the speakers shared an epiphany moment they had a few years ago.

They were at a cross-road in their career and were forced to take time off from a busy job. It slowly hit them that they were ‘lost’ in who they were, and where life was going. It was in this involuntary moment of wondering that they realised they knew what they didn’t like, value or respect – the things that they were against.

But on the flip side, they didn’t really know what they were for.

Our speaker took the time, and put in the effort to change this, and from that point, their life changed too.

In a complex role such as school leadership, we are often challenged to explain our decisions and actions. Clarity on what we deeply believe in, just might be a crucial way to avoid doubt and approach decisions with confidence.

What do you stand for?

Dave

 

Sickness

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Kelly Sikkema

Can you remember when you were sick for a few days 5 years ago? What about a year ago? Me either. I can remember the times I broke a bone or had some sort of medical intervention, but not the times a seasonal bug flattened me for a few days. I know it happened but it’s not important.

So, what does that prove?

Firstly, we can safely assume that everything turned out OK. That urgent work was either not as urgent as we thought, or someone else dealt with it.

Secondly, the worry involved in deciding whether to stay home was a tragic waste of life energy.

Unless you are one of the tiny minority of people with bullet-proof immunity, or luck, you will sometimes become unwell. We work in very close proximity to a lot of children, and they are essentially little human Petrie dishes in the winter months.

But here you are this morning, beating yourself up about needing to stay home even though you feel like rubbish.

Perhaps you’ve got an ERO review happening (who’s feeling déjà vu at the latest version of the model?). Perhaps there’s a Board meeting tonight. Perhaps an angry parent has a twice delayed meeting scheduled . . . Pick your pain.

As leaders we operate from a position of supporting people, trusting them and setting a good example, but here we are seriously considering doing exactly the opposite, by:

  • Working at 50% capacity
  • Spreading germs to others in our schools
  • Not trusting our teams and systems to deal with our absence
  • Modelling the wrong thing to do when sick
  • Sending a message that we think we are indispensable

Don’t do it.

Message your leadership team, crank up the heater, and head back to bed. The only person standing in the way of this sensible, professional response is you.

Dave

Audit Time and The Power of the MVP

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Kelly Sikkema

It’s audit time in New Zealand schools. A state appointed auditor has a close look at the financial performance of your school (with a few random ‘add-on’ questions included).

This can be a process akin to dental surgery or it can go quietly in a low-key type of way. What I’ve learnt over time is that the amount of stress involved is directly proportional to your understanding of the MVP – minimum viable product. And, if you like acronyms, you are the other MVP in this process (most valuable player).

MVP in the sense we’re using it here is straight from the land of product marketing. It describes the least developed product/thing/widget that can be put into the market for consumers to consider – in effect, you get your biggest amount of bang for the least amount of bucks.

As your personal stash of ‘bucks’ is both important and finite, it makes sense not to over use them on tricky audit questions. Recognising this happy balance improves with experience, but there is a simple hack that anyone can use which will get you 90% of the way to a sign-off – it’s leveraging the infallible power of “yes” or “no”.

“Do you have a policy for disposal of assets under the value of $50?”

Yes or no.

“Do your cash handling policies, procedures, and practices ensure the risk of fraud is properly managed?”

Yes or no.

Sure, sometimes an explanation is required, and in these cases the concept of MVP is again the best way forward. This bit could be called the MVWs (minimum viable words). Less is always more for these queries and any degree of overthinking should be squashed at inception.

I always find it helpful to remember that some hard-working junior auditor is responsible for getting all the required answers and in most cases, they simply want to get the job done. It’s a kindness to make it easy.

It obviously goes without saying that every answer should be completely honest and factual, and occasionally that will mean you must admit a deficiency. Again, this is not a problem to worry about, even if it leads to a “note” on the final accounts. Unless a note involves fraud or serious mismanagement, neither your mum nor Presiding Member should care.

I once received a note for getting 2 FlyBy points on my personal credit card related to a school purchase. I still remember it because it annoyed me greatly. The school had ordered a piece of computer equipment from a well-known national retailer. No one had time to collect it during the week, so on a Saturday morning I hopped in my car and drove down to the shop. As I waited at the checkout for the helpful person to process the order, they said, “FlyBys card?” Without thinking I handed them my own one.

So, on a Saturday morning, in my personal time, using my own car and with no malicious intent, I earned our school a “note” . . .

I rest my case.

It’s possible that by the time you read this post your audit will be complete – congratulations, you can go back to leading learning. But if you’re still in the process, keep it simple, keep it brief and this too will pass.

Dave

4am

Posted on by David Armstrong

An eon ago you woke up, and try as you might, you just can’t get back to sleep. Random thoughts, ideas and worries flick through your mind in a messy cascade of wakefulness. You don’t really know how long this has been going on, but it feels almost endless. And you know this is bad – there’s work tomorrow.

Eventually, you roll over and check the time. Surely, it’s nearly time to get up, but those glowing wee neon lights make your heart sink. 4am.

How will you possibly get through the day? And yesterday the same thing happened .  .  .

.   .   .

Sleep – the best of things and the worst of things. And many, many school leaders slide to the wrong side of the equation on a nightly basis. When Steve and I talk to principal groups we often ask how their sleep is going, and on average, 75 percent of all principals we’ve asked report significant problems with their sleep.

If you’re one of the three quarters of these sleep deprived school leaders, it’s time you stopped worrying about the science of reading and started considering the science of sleeping because there’s a growing amount of it, and the current buzz phrase – “sleep hygiene”, might actually change your 4am experience.

So why do you wake up or stay awake?

It’s almost certainly a combination of things, but three that drive a lot of people’s wakefulness are:

  • A high level of cortisol
  • Misuse of caffeine
  • Bad habits around screen use

Cortisol

Question – do you regularly feel stressed at work?

People operating with elevated levels of stress produce more of the hormone cortisol. It’s our bodies way to get through difficult situations and in the right amount, for a short time, is good. Too much, for too long is bad.

As part of our human circadian rhythm, everyone’s cortisol naturally peaks around 2 – 3am daily, which is fine, unless your base level is already too high. If it’s too high, the 2am boost pushes you into consciousness (even if you are tired).

There are many ways to deliberately reduce stress (meditation, exercise, diet, etc) and I believe our job choice requires us to make an effort to do so.

Caffeine

Question – do you know how much caffeine you take each day?

(cup of instant coffee 60mg, double shot café coffee 200mg, can of Coke 30mg, cup of tea 50mg)

We love caffeine. It’s addictive, it’s fun and it’s certain to wreck your sleep if used thoughtlessly.

The problem with caffeine is that it binds to exactly the same receptors in your brain as does the natural sleep-inducing chemical adenosine. One function of adenosine is that it builds up over the day and at a certain level makes you feel sleepy. If you take caffeine, it blocks the adenosine from working.

With a half life of 5 – 6 hours, that 2pm coffee you had after lunch is still 50% active at 8pm and 25% active at 2am . . .

Based on this long effect, it’s generally well-known that taking caffeine after midday is not a winning move. However, drinking coffee first thing in the morning can also negatively impact sleep.

Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and researcher at Stanford University, has studied what happens when caffeine is taken in the first hour of waking. If you do this (and I always used to!), you’ll get the usual ‘lift’ as it blocks your adenosine, but at the cost of stopping your naturally rising cortisol from waking you up.

There are two downstream effects – firstly, that adenosine doesn’t disappear. It stays circulating waiting for a receptor to bind to and unless you keep adding more caffeine, will eventually succeed and cause the dreaded afternoon energy slump. But the bigger effect is that by stopping your body using cortisol to maintain a natural rhythm across the day/night you impact on your sleep too. A double whammy. Mr Huberman suggests waiting at least an hour, ideally two after waking, before feeding your caffeine habit.

Screen Use

Question – do you have a screen device in your bedroom?

Are you looking at a screen in the hour before going to bed, or worse, scrolling on your phone while in bed? Most people I know do one or both of these things . . . and they wreck sleep.

We’ve all probably heard that blue light emitted by screens effects sleep. It does this by supressing the hormone melatonin which regulates the good old circadian rhythm. What happens when you mess up your circadian rhythm? You also mess up your sleep cycle.

Any light when you should be asleep is bad, but the blue wavelength has the strongest suppressing effect on melatonin. It’s not rocket science to know what to do about this, but it can be incredibly hard to make change because addiction and habits are involved.

One simple step to take is to keep your phone out of the bedroom.

.   .   .

I’m no sleep scientist but have had my own struggles with sleep over the years, which is why I try to keep up with the thinking. I strongly recommend that you do your own homework in this area and happily, there are plenty of experts publishing practical guides that can help.

Two books to read are:

              “Why We Sleep”, Matthew Walker

              “Sleep Book: How to Sleep Well Every Night”, Guy Meadows

Two podcasts to listen to are:

              Sleep Toolkit: Tools for Optimising Sleep and Sleep-Wake Timing, Andrew Huberman

              The 6 Sleep hacks You Need – Matthew Walker

Sleep well!

Dave

An earlier post Steve wrote on this topic.

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Eclipse Predicted

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Garrett Jackson

One quarter through this new year and you’re probably already behind on some of those aspirational goals that you set with the energy and optimism that the Christmas holidays brought. This is business as usual for most of us mortals and nothing to worry about, but over the last week we have also been treated to a list of the new Government’s own ‘to do’ priorities, and as faithful public servants, we are paying attention and starting to wonder what the nitty gritty details will mean . . . specifically what we will be required to do.

It’s a bit like the recent solar eclipse across North America – through the wonders of modern science pretty much everyone knew it was coming and understood what was happening, so it was merely interesting. 500 years ago, the same event would probably have caused terror.

Knowing something is coming and understanding what it will look like are two critical steps in avoiding worry. On the flip side, if the sun suddenly disappears and you have to make up your own explanation . . .

.   .   .

The great news is that we remain ‘self-managing’ schools here in New Zealand. We have the ability to create the ‘how’ of what happens each day. The ‘what’ is largely mandated, and this is no different with the latest set of Government priorities and aspirations.

A degree of autonomy is a degree of insurance in a time of change. Insurance against what? I suggest against any possible unhelpful and/or unreasonable policies with the word ‘possible’ being critical. It’s easy to see change as threatening and to lose objectivity even before that change arrives. At least we have half of the picture – we know our next wee eclipse moment is coming.

The bottomline is that significant change requires significant energy, and so the annoying gap between knowing change is coming and understanding what it will look like, is an opportunity to shore up our personal reserves.

Luckily, a Term break is right in front of us and with that freedom comes the opportunity to do things that mean we will be ready to deal with whatever is coming down the pipeline of new governance. I intend to get moving, get connected, and to do some more learning about how to sleep like the proverbial baby. What’s your plan?

Dave

How open are you to change?

Posted on by David Armstrong

Photo by Nubelson Fernandes 

How open are you to change?

The answer will vary based on a number of factors – not the least being how busy you are when the possibility arises.

As we are currently in a 5 day mini-break, and with the April school holidays only a fortnight away (in NZ anyway), it’s just possible that now is a time when things could happen.

What habit do you need to stop?

What habit do you need to change?

What habit do you need to create?

Easter well.

Dave

Clarity of Purpose

Posted on by David Armstrong

 

Last weekend our school held one of those uniquely NZ events – a working bee. There are things happening on our site this year and we needed to remove/prune a large number of trees and shrubs. So out went the word to the community – help needed.

When I got onsite just before 8am (the advertised start was 8:30am), there were already people in action, cutting, shifting, loading trailers. And from there it just got busier.

By 9:30am there was a small army of people doing what needed to be done. By 12pm we were finished.

.   .   .

On Monday we held student conferences. This was an important event at our school too, but this time, we had to work much harder to get people involved. The same dads who willingly gave up a precious half Saturday had to be cajoled and reminded to get them there for 15 minutes.

Why?

There will be lots of different factors in play, but I suspect at least one of them was clarity of the purpose.

On Saturday, the reason for being there was obvious, and recognising the success outcome was easy. There was no ambiguity, and so the goal was super clear with all working side by side. Result? A massive task was achieved without much stress.

Contrast that with the conferences – each family experienced the event separately and in isolation with their teacher, worked through the allocated time. No one could look up across the school and say “job done” in a collective sense. There was a tangible feeling of uncertainty with many as they arrived and waited for their turn. Combined, these factors meant enthusiasm and commitment to the event was harder to build.

Which raises the question – can we do better?  Can we simplify the goal of each conference down to one thing. No ambiguity, no ‘open’ agenda, but focus on the one overarching outcome that would equal success? All other things achieved being unexpected bonuses.

For example, if the common, over-riding goal of every conference was building a working relationship with their child’s teacher, and all parties knew what that looked like, just maybe the usual reminders wouldn’t be needed.

Clarity of purpose + Common goal = Commitment. I think we can do better.

Dave

 

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