Leading from the Middle: The Honeymoon is Over
Do you sense a palpable difference in the way your team interacts, compared to the start of the year?
Are you noticing colleagues or team members exhibiting signs of distress or withdrawal?
Do you have a team goal?
Hopefully, the answer to the last question is no. If you are only 45-days into your school year, then you should only now start discussing a goal. Up to this point, a middle leader’s job should have been to help team members adjust to the demands of the new school year and establish trusting relationships with each other.
Before I delve deeper into goal setting, I want to address the first two questions. It is incredibly difficult to maintain high levels of positivity and collaboration over the course of a couple months, let alone a whole school year. Yet, I would argue, this is a middle leaders’ most important job. This is more important than common planning and moderation, because, if the team is positively collaborating, the common planning and moderation is being done by the team, not the middle leader.
So, how do we address the first two questions, so that we can begin making progress with the third?
Accept that your role as a middle leader is to help team members enhance commitment, focus their activity and reduce negative emotions. Your job isn’t to manage tasks…they are adults, that is their job. If you are doing your job, you are creating a supportive environment where no one feels alone. You are creating life preservers, so that no one drowns. If this message is resonating with you, then checkout the online course my wife and I developed, Positive Behaviour and Relationship Management in International Schools. Additionally, here are some free resources on Promoting Positivity.
Now, to the question of goal setting. First, I wasn’t surprised when I read that only 14% of organizations have a good understanding of their strategy and direction (Performance Management: Putting Research into Action).
“It’s a bit like soup”
School development plans can be a lot like making soup, in that leadership keep throwing things in the pot to enrich the flavour. This comment was made during a Senior Leadership team meeting when I asked them to identify the major development objectives they expected teams to align with and support. Everyone in that meeting had different priorities for their divisions and departments. At the start of the school year, everything seems possible and everything is a priority.
This is precisely why you are beginning to see team members withdraw or become frustrated. At the team level, everyone is trying to do everything that is being asked of them, so they are rightly beginning to feel burned out. Be honest, have you booked your Christmas holiday? Odds are, if you are beginning to withdraw your mind is retreating to other places, and not places where your team collaborates.
So, if you want to inject some much needed sense of purpose back into your team, put these 3 questions on your next meeting agenda:
What are we doing well as a team?
What could we be doing more of to support each other?
What can we as a team achieve in the next few months? (For higher functioning teams, set your sights on the rest of the year.)
Question 3 will require some frontloading, in particular, you may need to call in a Senior Leader to clarify what the top priorities teams should be aligning with.
To help you with Question 3, I have prepared a self-paced online course for you, my Goal Setting Master Class. In this course, free to my subscribers, I include 2 chapters from my book as well as some goal setting exercises. The purpose of this course is to ensure you are able to align the needs of your school with that of your team, as well as ensure that a good dose of purpose is infused in your goal.
