Conversations That Matter & Unfearing Feedback
Most organisations don’t have a conversation culture that supports growth
Feedback and improvement are inseparable. Most if not all people are committed to learning - learning for themselves and supporting the learning of others. Yet the appetite for feedback (given and received) is much lower. There exists a massive opportunity cost in ignoring feedback capability and culture.
People avoid these conversations because:
“I’m not comfortable giving feedback to others, I’m reluctant.”
“I don’t know how to get my team to see value in performance appraisal.”
“I know I should be a better listener, but I don’t know how.”
“It’s just easier to not say anything. In any case, it’s up to a more senior leader than me to take responsibility for giving difficult feedback.”
“I don’t want to upset the other person, so I keep the feedback to myself.”
Saying what needs to be said can be tough. Especially if stakes are high, emotions are raised and opinions differ. To make matters worse, most people don’t fully understand the neurobiology in play, nor are they aware of the conversational skills required for success. It’s a bit like returning to a familiar city with an outdated map - your usual routes and ways of moving just don’t seem to work.
In reality, few of us have been given or taught the best ways to plot a course through the minefield that is ‘courageous conversations’. What we need is an updated ‘map’ that gives better waypoints and navigation tools than the old maps, helping us bypass unhelpful habits and ways of working.
Ask the question: what value does the appraisal leader bring to your process? Do they just guide the participant through the steps? Oftentimes, their ‘added value’ is not much better than neutral.
Many leaders don’t know how to explore possibilities in a way that enlists motivation and action towards learning and contribution.
This program gives both knowledge and experience in new ways of landing feedback and difficult conversation and is especially helpful for senior and middle leaders, or anyone facing tough talk on a regular basis.
Leading Teacher Teams
Leading Teacher Teams was a substantive flagship program run internally for Cognita Asia middle leaders. This very successful program has an alumni of outstanding educational leaders, many of whom have gone onto more senior middle leadership roles and even school executive. Some have since grown beyond their school to lead their own entrepreneurial ventures.
Increasingly, and especially given Covid-19’s impact on schools, I have seen teacher leaders in a growing squeeze.
Teachers are now faced with a series of problems, and I hear past colleagues and clients now saying:
I am being asked to do so much more amongst massive uncertainty - sometimes I’m not even sure what the school strategy is!
People in my team are hard work, and I’m not sure how to handle them, or inspire them to action.
I’m being stretched - implementing senior leader strategy/tactics that are unpopular with the troops.
Covid-19 has demanded new leadership skill sets of me, I now need to both learn and lead .
I am having to deliver wellbeing support to their team whilst I, myself don’t always get the same support.
I still need to deliver outcomes in continuing workflows (e.g. recruitment, inspections) yet struggle to deliver in a vastly different world.
This places many of the middle leaders in schools in tough place, and some find themselves being pushed down this ‘ladder’, from thriving to coping to surviving, even drowning.
Any downward movement has a negative impact on the learning and improvement of the team being led.
So you have a new middle leadership role in a school. Or maybe Covid-19 placed so many new demands on you that you feel like you are new in role again. How could you use the later weeks of your summer break to prepare?
The program will be structured into three domains:
Action - the right action to be taking, both immediate and long term. Knowing what you could, should and should not do is key.
Empathy - empathy is a complex idea with distinctive variations. Important for the middle leader is problem empathy (knowing the issues that the team members face in executing their roles) and presence empathy (just being with people).
Culture - building ways of working that support Action and express the values of Empathy.
Focused and staged learning in each of these areas will strongly support you to build empathic and action-oriented leadership.
The 2020 Leading Teacher Teams program will comprise a series of five 1 hour online conversations, some teamwork and new learning, all of which will equip you to be a resilient and impactful leader of a learning team. Some of the work together will be synchronous, using engaging and immersive learning design. Other learning activities and collaborations will be asynchronous.
In joining me on this program, you will also be joining a community of educational leaders from around the world, a network that will help you extend your learning and skills well beyond the course. Learning is social, and this program will definitely be so.