“Morning meeting time to build relationships? When they’re already asking us to teach more content than students can master? What a joke,” the middle school math teacher told me. Content and relationships do seem like competing priorities, don’t they? After…
An off-the-cuff math question, “How much do you suppose they’re making off this ridiculous spectacle?” turned an excruciatingly dull evening into a creative endeavor. Yep, a math question. The other chaperones and I were hostages to a truly ghastly theatrical performance.…
Have you noticed there’s a Women in Leadership Conference in November ? In New Orleans? Are you thinking, "Why an event just for women? Isn’t ‘cross-pollination’ between genders a better way to improve the lives of children?” If you’re a female…
Another year of growing, questioning, escaping, laughing, and learning through reading. And another blog on my top 5 books for the year. A few comments Total for the year: 145. I read just about all genres, and find that fiction…
I used to facilitate the MBTI ® Certification Program, and over the years started hundreds of consultants and counselors and OD specialists and educators—and more—on the path to effective use of psychological type theory. Note that I said started them on the…
How do your strengths get in the way of coaching and mentoring those around you? Leaders who easily see the best course of action in complex situations may “tell” rather than giving an employee enough time to reason it through…
In a previous post, I wrote about “satisficing”—putting in just the right amount of effort. Whether you’re hearing, “These employees simply need to do more with less” or “We need to teach students to have grit”, the implication is that…
Only on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise does saying, ‘Make it so,' make it so. That's one of my favorite responses to leaders who say, "My team simply has to do more with less--our vision is too important to…
“I have to hold their hands.” “They need constant supervision.” “They don’t think!” “They aren’t creative.” Have you heard leaders and managers pass these kinds of judgments on employee abilities?
Frequently, as I conduct employee focus groups or review 360 results, leaders who make these kinds of statements receive the following kinds of comments: “What a micromanager!” “Constant meetings and checklists and interference keep us from our work.” “We’re treated like children!”
“But I tried giving more autonomy and it was a disaster,” many leaders say. Frequently, they provided autonomy without clarity of goals or the benefit of 
wisdom learned from the past. There’s a happy medium of structure AND autonomy, a polarity that leads to results AND happy employees!
“Get the resisters on board–that’s why we’re bringing you in” is what I often hear from leaders when change processes aren’t
going smoothly. In most cases, though, a few simple yet profound changes in leadership attitudes and practices are what is really needed. Here are three mind shifts I’ve seen in effective leaders:
As a school leader I know stepped into a new principalship, he told the staff, “I’ll be spending this first year listening, watching and dialoguing with you to understand the strengths and needs of this particular community of learners.”
No one believed him.