Ep #88: The Secret to Building Your Ideal Team

Hello, Empowered Principals, welcome to episode 88.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast, a not so typical, educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy, by refining your most powerful tool: your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach, Angela Kelly Robeck.

Well hello, everybody. How are you doing? So happy to be here. Welcome to September. This, I think, is a really nice month for schools. The first day jitters are usually passed by now. Many schools are really starting in August, and if you’re not one of those schools, yay for you.  You’re still working on getting ready and welcoming those kids. But for most of you, the kids have started back to school or they’re coming back this week.

So welcome to September and to the beginning of the year. I loved September. It was a great month.  The weather is beautiful. You’re getting those first day jitters out of your body. You’re starting to get into some beginning routines, they’re settling in a little bit. The kids are figuring out how to get lunch, how to get on and off the bus, how to walk in the halls.

Your teachers are really good about prepping the kids and training them to be safe and to be able to follow all of the routines at school. And the other amazing thing about September is that this is when all of the excitement and the enthusiasm for the possibilities that could become true is really high.

So this is a great time as a school leader to tap into your teachers’ dreams and hopes and desires and goals for the year. You want to understand what they’re thinking. What do they want to accomplish and why? What drives them? What motivates them? What interests them? And understanding your team’s dreams and what they’re thinking about when their energy is really high and their focus is on what’s possible versus what isn’t possible or what isn’t happening or what’s not going well, you want to tap into that high vibe that they’re in and it’s so important.

So that energy is going to be really necessary, as the school year moves on, to keep up their stamina, keep up their motivation, even when times get more challenging. So you want to understand what makes your teachers tick right now when they’re in the height of possibility and excitement.

So to kick off this September’s theme of building teams, I am going to highlight a favorite author and trainer of mine. Her name is Elena Aguilar and she is the author of several books; The Art of Coaching, The Art of Coaching Teams, and her latest book that come out last year called Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators, which is what I am all about.

I’m super excited. I haven’t even read her book, that book, yet. I’ve read the other two. And I’m thrilled to be reading that book and finding out what her thoughts and ideas are about empowering educators, getting people more emotionally resilient for this job, that is so huge. And one of my dreams is just to work with her in person.

I did have the amazing opportunity to attend a workshop that she hosted over in Oakland back in, I think it was 2014. My friend Tyler and I went, a fellow principal of mine, and our coach – we were sharing an instructional coach. So our coach came and the two of us went and it was one of the best trainings I have ever been to as a professional development series. I love her, I try to emulate her work and expand upon it in my own coaching work, and I just think she is so amazing.

So I’m here to sing her praises today and add a spin, you know, like bringing her work to you so I can add the Empowered Principal piece with that.

So, many of you are telling me, you have so many books you want to read and you can’t get to them all, especially at the start of the year, so what I’ve done in this episode and the next episode is condensed some of her ideas on building teams and then weaved in my own take into the podcast so that you get to take away some of her tips and strategies for building teams, but with that Empowered Principal approach twist that I add to it as well.

So, let’s get going. What is a great team? What Elena recommends in terms of defining a great team is that a team is a group of people that gets something done, something done that’s valuable and that’s useful and that’s appreciated. It delivers value to other people and in the world in some way.

So when you think of teams in the generic sense, we want to create teams – they’re not just for the sake of meeting or because we work in the same building, we need to be a team. No, it needs to have a purpose. It needs to be valuable. It needs to be appreciated.

A lot of great things are going on in the world, but if we’re not seeing the value behind it or we’re not using it or we’re not appreciating it then that work sits there stagnant. So, a great team needs to have this universal understanding of what they’re creating is of high value. And you’ve heard me talk about value when you talk about leadership, like, what we give is we give value by providing a service to our school district, to our teachers, to our students, to our families, communities.

And what humans love to do more than anything is to contribute value, to contribute something meaningful that helps you in some way.  And of course, education, we’re in the business of this. but we need to understand that when we’re approaching our staff and we want to help them build team and create a great team, the idea behind that is that we are going to create something of value together.

So the team has to have a process for working together and generating up a set of collaboration skills that they want to increasingly evolve as they work together. There needs to be this openness to learning the process of collaboration and the feelings that come with having to work with other people, and especially people who have a different opinion than our own.

I think that’s why people, like, push back on wanting to work with a team or they kind of go back into their own classroom, they don’t really want to give because there are feelings associated with having to work with other people that are uncomfortable. We don’t just get to do what we want, say what we want, act how we want.

We have to open our brains and our ideas and thoughts to other people’s brains, ideas, and thoughts and the way that they approach teaching and learning and collaboration and parents and kids and work, all of that.  So really, what makes a great team is being open to learning new ideas, concepts, skills, and knowledge. And what we want to create when we make a team that’s great is to create safety.

We want to let people know that it’s safe to be who they are, to share their ideas authentically, and that it’s safe to not know all the answers or know how to do something, that supporting each other when one person knows something and another doesn’t or one person is struggling and another is succeeding, that doesn’t mean – it’s not a sum-zero game like, you win I lose or I win you lose. It’s the support and the synergy of that team that allows that struggle to be an acceptable part of the process, which then creates more value.

We don’t create value when something’s easy or simple or we know all the answers already. We create value when we struggle and when we learn and when we grow. And through that process, our team creates something of value.

So, what now is an effective team? So you can have a great team, but what makes them effective? So, an effective team is a team where all of its members are fully committed to the purpose of working together rand to supporting one another and achieving the results that they have said they wanted to achieve.

So components of an effective team are that all members contribute and support, that the members recognize one another for their contributions, so you’re acknowledged for the value you’re providing, that you’re saying, hey, great job, that’s a good idea, I hadn’t thought of that before, wow that really expanded my thought, I’ve never considered something like that.

Third, you want to be open to creativity. So members of an effective team, they’re very open-minded. They’re open to the creative process. They’re open to thinking outside the box. They want to try something that’s not what we’re already trying, even though it sounds different or willing or strange, they’re willing to say hey, let’s consider this, let’s play this out, what could happen if we gave that new idea a try?

Another thing that makes an effective team is that the team is committed to the results more than they’re committed to themselves. This one gets tricky because when we’re sharing our ideas within a team, we want to feel like we have been accepted, our ideas are valid, they belong, that we belong. There is this sense of our ideas being a part of us.

And when we share them, we want them to be accepted and valid and appreciated and we have to understand that sometimes, part of the process of effective teams are that we have to commit to that overall outcome more than we’re committed to our personal way of being in this group or what our role is, you know, that ego kicking in. we want to put the passion and the service and the value that we’re providing above our own needs, above our own ego or the way that we feel about our commitments and our contributions.

And finally, an effective team, we have to know how to self-coach when there is conflict. This is something that I added. I really believe strongly that teams are not effective if the individuals in the team cannot self-coach and manage their own thoughts and feelings about the teamwork, about the results, about the approach that they’re choosing.

There will be conflict in an effective team, that’s not what doesn’t make an effective team. If the conflict is the primary driver of that team, they’re not going to be very effective, but conflict within a team does make it effective if each of the individuals know how to manage themselves and their thoughts and feelings around being in a team and collaborating for the bigger good.

Question number three, why do we need teams. Why do we want them? What is the deal? I remember being a teacher and thinking, oh my gosh, another meeting, another team is being pulled together and I can only do so much, and even when I’m on these teams, I don’t feel very productive or very purposeful, so why are we doing this in the first place?

Well, the truth is that we cannot do it all alone. We already know this, you guys. But it’s so much easier to work alone. I have to admit, like, a lot of my work time in terms of my creation and content, I’m alone. I coach all day. I offer consults. I offer professional development. I create trainings and podcasts and, you know, I write to my email list trying to give tons of content and value, but I know that I can’t do this alone.

And as my business and company grows, I am going to be hiring people to support the business. I cannot do this alone. I cannot do this podcast alone. I have a producer who helps me with this podcast. And then he has people that he’s hired to help him with his projects.

So we know this conceptually, that we can’t do it alone. But yet we continue to try to do it alone. We, especially as school leaders, we think that we’ve got to be on top of everything, know everything, do everything, be everywhere. So we have to allow ourselves to trust other people and delegate when appropriate.

You are going to be able to accomplish so much more as a leader when you embrace the idea of team building and delegating work than when you attempt to do it all yourself. Being in control and trying to be so busy that you’re working 60, 70, 80 hours a week is not a badge of honor, nor does it make you feel good as a leader, or does it make you an effective leader of teams.

It actually impairs your ability to have an influence on your staff and to empower them to contribute and achieve. So we have to let go of wanting our hands in all of the pots, trying to be everywhere to everyone at all the times. We have to be able to build our team to let go so that we can actually have more of an influence.

We want teams because we want our students to be successful, and in return, we want them to be motivated and accomplished learners. Therefore, we want our teachers to be effective in their work and feel confident in their job so that they can continue to stay motivated and become accomplished educators.

We want our school community to work as well as possible together so that when people are on our campus, no matter if it’s teachers, parents, volunteers, whatever, that everybody on that team feels the same energy and the vigor that comes with effective team environments. You really want to focus on building those teams.

So, pretending to have teams for the sake of teams isn’t very motivating or effective, nor is having so many teams for every little thing. They don’t see the purpose or value or that it’s not, like, super important. That is not helpful.

So, how do we build teams? I believe this is the secret; you, as a leader, do not get to force building teams. So many of my clients will ask me how they make, like, a grade level work better together. How do I force this team or how do I facilitate this team to work greatly together, to be effective, to be collaborative, to achieve more than they could on an individual level?

And the secret is this; you cannot do that. You cannot force other people to work well together, especially if you’re not even on the team. But you can’t force them to work well together even to the point where you can’t get them to agree on what may seem as the basics of collaboration.

So you can set standards and guidelines and put conditions in place to inspire people into teamwork, but you cannot control the teams yourself. It’s very important to understand this as a leader ahead of time before you establish your teams because if you believe that you’re the boss and you can enforce or control how your teams are going to work together, then the way that you are approaching those teams will come from the emotions of frustration and consternation, which is not going to lead people into inspirational action.

So, number one, how do we build them? We must know ourselves as leaders. Elena refers to understanding ourselves as emotional intelligence. We’ve heard emotional intelligence before, but she refers to emotional intelligence to increase our awareness of our self.  So, self-awareness, self-management, and the social awareness and relationship management that comes with self-awareness.

So it’s one thing to understand yourself, but you also want to understand yourself in the construct of how others view you and what you make that mean and how you manage relationships and what you make those relationships mean.

I agree wholeheartedly that these components are all important for us to know and understand as instructional leaders. This is the foundation of what I teach school leaders, is that willingness to study our self and fully own everything about us, but not from this place of shame and guilt or self-loathing.

You want to understand yourself and lead from a place of self-understanding, self-awareness, and self-love. Our ability to love ourselves is in direct correlation to our ability to lead others from a place of love. And when we believe that other people are the cause of our emotions versus believing that out thoughts regarding those emotions create our emotions, like what we think about other people is what we feel, or what we think they’re thinking about us is what makes us feel the way we’re feeling, we actually limit ourselves when we think that it’s other people’s responsibility.

We limit ourselves, we limit our goals, we limit our accomplishments. We cannot, on one hand, decide that other people are, in fact, responsible for the way that we feel but then, on the other hand, want to feel better about our own work. It can’t work that way.

We have to believe that we create our emotions before we’re going to feel better. And once we believe this, then we can coach ourselves on the emotional reactions that we are having to others. And then, and only then, will we start to feel better and approach the way that we lead from love versus fear.

So, your ability to self-coach or receive coaching form others on your emotional state is one of the strongest predictors of job success and that 90% of top performers in any line of work, from anywhere in the world, they have strong self-coaching skills. So you must be able to self-coach yourself on your thoughts about any team that you’re either directly working with or in, or that you are directly leading.

So you might not be in the team. Like, you’re not in the kindergarten team, but you lead them, so you need to come from a place of love and abundance and though in how they interact, how they engage, how their collaboration is going and how you want to inspire them into collaborating at even a higher level.

Our brains have the capacity to grow this skill of self-coaching, just as children have the ability to grow their skills and knowledge. And it seems like, as adults, we’re less likely to choose the discomfort that comes with learning and change. That’s really what’s happening. Like, kids are just exposed to it all day long. That’s just the expectation. And they’re young and resilient and they don’t have a lot of past baggage to hold them back, the fears that hold us back from learning and change.

When you’ve been doing it for 40, 50 years, you’re like, I know what the deal is here, right? I don’t want to have to go through the process of taking on an idea that’s uncomfortable for me. So we basically avoid it and we sidestep around it.

So I invite you to practice asking who you are and who you want to be. And then I want you to share this with your teams in a regular basis. Trusting you is the very foundation of them learning to trust themselves and one another.

So that leads us to how do we create that culture of trust? I absolutely love this. Elena has a section in her book that’s subtitled Why Human Bingo Doesn’t Build Trust. I laugh at this only because, as teachers, we learn these games and strategies that allow our students to get to know one another. And oftentimes, in adult meetings, we bring these same tools and we use them with the adults in the room, and with good intention.

We want to teach people, like, here’s a new strategy for your classroom. But also, we do it with the intention of trying to build trust and connection with the adults on campus. And as you and I both know, trust doesn’t come from these one and done relationship building activities. It doesn’t come from our words. It comes from our actions and not just one action; from a series of actions that we take as leaders.

So every day, we are faced with tons of decisions. And big goals are accomplished by a series of small decisions. And when you show up every single day and you give your teachers an opportunity to build trust with you by showing them, through your actions, what your intentions are, that over time, is how you build a culture of trust.

Let’s take it out of the classroom. So, for example, let’s say you have the goal to lose 20 pounds. You don’t lose 20 pounds by deciding one day, this Tuesday I’m going to lose 20 pounds. I’m going to go on a diet and lose 20 pounds. You don’t lose it that day. You don’t lose it by going to the gym one day a week. You don’t lose the weight by sometimes showing up and sometimes not showing up for yourself.

You lose the 20 pounds by making tiny small decisions all throughout the day every single day. You wake up, you choose to drink water over a latte. You choose to take a walk at recess versus sitting in your office. You choose to go home at five o’clock versus six o’clock so that you can do a workout tape or join a friend for another walk or get to the gym, whatever. You make this little decision to have vegetables with your dinner versus driving through McDonald’s or something.

So all these little teeny, tiny decisions is how we get to the end goal. So the same is true at school. When you have an end goal of building highly effective teams, the little teeny tiny decisions that you make and that you model for your teachers and your teams is how they will get to the point of being an effective team.

Leadership and trust building is the same. It’s committing to those small decisions, like we just talked about and the actions that build up the trust with your team on a regular basis. So, choose to stay in integrity on a daily level, and to the best of your ability, honor your commitments, do the things you said you would do, and these little actions will establish trust over time.

Start with listening to your teachers. Understand what’s in their brain.  Know what their thoughts are. Understand why they have those thoughts. What is their line in the sand? Where do they draw that line in the sand where they want to achieve this goal no matter what, they’re super committed, this is why, this is what drives them. Know those things about your teachers.

When you listen to them, you know what is going on for them, and you really deeply understand what motivates them, what drives them, and why they’re acting the way they are, that is how, over time, you can do the next step, which is lovingly hold other people to their commitments to the team.

So, one of the things that makes a team effective is everybody’s contributing. And sometimes, you probably experienced this before, not everybody contributes on an equal basis. Well, we don’t need to strive for equal basis, that everybody’s doing exactly 25% of the pie. What you do need to address is that everybody’s contributing in the way that works for the team. And when somebody doesn’t do that, we don’t make it mean they’re a terrible person and they’re not responsible.

We just lovingly bring them back in, just like you would with one of your students. You would bring them back in, get them back on track, and hold them accountable to those commitments. We want to be transparent about our actions, why we chose them. We want to have no hidden agendas so that when we hold people accountable, they understand it has no other purpose than to help them accomplish what they want.

We don’t want to break trust through trying to manipulate, trying to have a hidden agenda. Like, I want to support you, but really, what I’m saying is I want you to support what I want, and that breaks trust super-fast, so don’t do that. But you want to ask for feedback as a team leader or as a leader who is managing teams. You want to ask them for feedback.

So you have to do anything that you are asking of your teachers. Be willing to do what you ask of them. I can’t say that enough times. And let them know that you are considering what’s going on, you’re listening to them. And that part of teamwork is getting feedback, adjusting your approach, and trying again.

Another thing to consider is to truly apologize when it’s appropriate, when something has happened within a team that maybe breaks down trust or causes people to stop and pause when there’s something within your control that could have happened or didn’t happen that should have happened or you committed to something and failed, and that happens, it’s okay. Just acknowledge it through an apology. People really respect that and that will continue to keep the trust going on the team.

You also want to continue to reflect on the team’s progress; what’s working, what’s not, what can we do differently, asking this on a regular basis to tweak those adjustments and to help people see, like, this month didn’t feel so well for me and that’s because I forgot to do this or failed to do that or I didn’t really show up in a good energy or something else was distracting me.

Acknowledging that other people’s contributions and strengths are equally important to yours, there’s no – if one person’s really good at writing and they love to do the writing but you’re really good at, let’s say, creating content like posters or visuals for kids, maybe you’re an artist, that person’s not. Everybody’s contribution is equally valuable even though it’s different.

And then this is one thing I think we forget to do. We’re so driven by the next goal, the next goal, the next goal, we don’t stop to take time to genuinely celebrate all that’s going on with our team and the progress that we’re making.

Teams sometimes have a start and a finish, and they should have a start and a finish.  But we want to celebrate all of the successes along the way to keep people focused on the goal and motivated and so that their personal needs don’t get interfered with the team’s needs. When somebody doesn’t feel validated, they’re immediately going to focus on why they didn’t get validated and what that means about them and they’re not going to be focusing on contributing to the team and the team’s goals.

Number three, we want to establish norms and hold people accountable. Now, I mentioned this a little bit prior, but this is one of the areas where we tend to slide. It feels uncomfortable. We don’t like it. We’ve had people roll their eyes at norm-building and that’s because they go through it every year.

But in most cases, to be honest with ourselves, we don’t usually use them on the regular. We don’t refer to them in a real meaningful way. And when we don’t do that and we kind of discard the norm process or the norms that we’ve created and agreed upon, even if there was some high energy around that norm-building in the beginning, when we put them aside and we don’t use them on a regular basis, then our structures start to fall apart. We don’t have structures in place to hold ourselves accountable, to hold other people accountable.

And if you pull them out and be like, hey you’re not following this, they’re going to be like, hey you weren’t following this two months ago, for months we haven’t been doing this, what’s the deal? You’re going to have to go back to square one. It happens, it’s okay, but the goal is to use them on such a regular basis that it’s just how business is done; having that system and having structures in place that are agreed upon and followed are what makes teams highly effective, efficient, and productive.

You want to start by modeling how to hold yourself accountable. Your ultimate goal is for teachers to be able to hold themselves accountable and you want to show them how you do this with yourself. And that goes back to the self-coaching I was referring to earlier.

And finally, what you want to do is model this every single day. Model how you lovingly hold others accountable, how you are gentle with them and consistent with them, but that in the end, you’re letting them see areas where they’re being very productive and very efficient and very accountable, and some areas where they might not be. It’s possible to do both.

You can be gentle and consistent. You can be accountable and loving. Honesty doesn’t mean being cruel or rude. It means loving your students and loving your teachers so much that you are willing to set limits and boundaries and hold them to the expectations that have been followed.

It’s just like having your own kids or how you would treat your students. You want to love them enough to hold them accountable to the family norms.

So, if you can establish your trust as a leader, then you are well, well on your way to building strong relationships and building strong teams. Building a team, it’s not about getting a group of people to show up and do what you want them to do. It’s about inspiring them and helping them see the value that each of them provides, and how, by working together, everyone rises.

And with that, we have the first part of Foundations of Team Building from Elena Aguilar’s book The Art of Coaching Teams.  Next week, we will continue talking about the art of building those teams, how to make them effective, and what to do when challenges arise. I look forward to sharing that with you next week. Have an amazing empowered week. I will talk to you next week. Take care, bye-bye.

If you are enjoying the podcast and want to learn how to apply these concepts at a deeper level in real time, then you have to check out what Principal Empowerment can do for you. It’s my personalized coaching and professional development program where we take concepts from the podcasts and we apply them to your specific situation.

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