Ep #191: Building a Resourceful Staff

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 191.

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.

Hello my empowered leaders. How are you? Happy Tuesday. Happy August. Can you believe it? You guys are probably back at it by now. We’re towards the end of August. It’s been a wonderful summer. I’m sure you are ready to roll. I hope these podcasts are getting you revved up for the school year. I’m so excited. All right. Let’s dive right in.

Today we’re talking about building a resourceful staff. So what is this? What do I mean by building up a resourceful staff? Your job as a principal is to empower your staff and create a culture of teachers who are not dependent solely on you for all of the answers and all of the solutions to every problem on your campus. Now this sounds delicious, I know. However, let’s talk about why this doesn’t happen on campus.

So what we want to do, what our goal is, is to encourage your staff to figure out solutions on their own. You want them doing the work, them problem solving. You do not want to create a codependency between teachers and yourself, support staff, anybody. You do not want them to be codependent on you where they feel they don’t have any agency over their career or their classroom or the decisions that they make. You want them to use their brain power and be resourceful in solving problems, in creating new solutions, in coming up with ideas.

Now, why do we want to create a very resourceful staff? Now first of all, it empowers them and that’s what we do as leaders. We empower others. It increases their value as a teacher. The more resourceful your teachers are, the better teachers they are. It increases their value as a teacher, which then helps you. It increases their contribution to the world and to the kids and to the field of education, which enhances your legacy as a leader. Your ability to lead.

Of course the obvious one is that it allows you to delegate. When teachers are resourceful and they can come up with solutions to problems and they can take things on themselves, you can delegate with confidence and trust the outcome of their work. You don’t have to believe that you’re the only one who can solve problems, you’re the only one who has answers. When you do this, it will not only free up your time. It will constrain your focus. You won’t have to think about so many things and solve so many problems and just spin out on all of it.

It conserves your energy. You save energy for the things that you do need to focus on, the things that do matter to you, the things you want to accomplish. You can let teachers and staff members do their thing, take full ownership of their job and their responsibilities and not micromanage them. The more resourceful they feel, the more you trust them, the more buying they have. The more you trust them, the more they trust you. They will want to follow your lead.

Your goal is to inspire people into action, but you have to be willing to let them take the action. You can’t inspire them and get them all excited then shoot down every idea they come up with. Or tell them they have to run it by you every decision. I’m not saying they’re going to be at free will and do whatever they want. You will have connections with them, and you will have conversations with them, and you’ll have parameters and protocols for how ideas and new solutions become a reality. But your goal is to inspire them into action, and they have to be allowed to take those actions.

So why are we afraid to empower teachers? Why don’t we have more resourceful teachers? Well, the system doesn’t allow for that, and I understand that. You have the capacity to allow it within your campus. So why don’t we? What are the fears? What are obstacles in the way?

I think one of the reasons, one of the top reasons that we don’t do this we don’t want to admit to ourselves. So I’m just going to admit it for you. We get our emotional highs from other people needing us. When our teachers and our staff rely on us for everything, it makes us feel needed, important, powerful. We feel resourceful, right? We feel really empowered. If we build up resourcefulness, they won’t need us anymore. Then we’re not going to get the emotional response that we’re looking for because we think we need other people to need us so that we can feel powerful, resourceful. We can be in charge, right?

So if we give that away, we won’t feel needed anymore. Then who are we? So we’re hanging our self-concept on other people needing us. I know sometimes moms do this, or maybe parents. Any kind of parent. Moms, dads, grandparents, anything. We want our children to need us. We want them to want us and need us. As they grow older and become more independent, we have to reconcile that with ourselves. We have to learn how to fulfill ourselves without our children needing us all the time.

Same is true with our teachers. I think this is running at a subconscious level. So I want to put it out there and say like where are you getting your emotional highs as a leader? What feels good to you? When do you feel empowered as a leader? Is it coming from other people needing you and feeling very important and very busy and being at all the meetings and people having to ask you a million questions. So think about that.

Another one is we are afraid to give up control. Yes, I said it. You’re afraid to give up control because one of the reasons we’re afraid to give up control is that we lack trust in other people’s ability to get the job done.

Now the reason we don’t trust in people to get the job done is because we have a set of standards. We are not satisfied unless it’s up to our standards, and we want everybody to do it A+. We want them to do it our way. So we can’t give up control because we are afraid that people won’t get the job done the way we want it to. So we keep doing all the things and we don’t empower our teachers to be resourceful because if they do the job differently, we won’t like it. Then things are going to fall apart. We’re going to have to clean up the mess. It’s going to take more time. That whole story is why we don’t give up control and why we don’t empower teachers.

The other reason we are afraid to give up control. This is the secret reason behind the reason. Is that someone else might actually do the job better than us heaven forbid, right? We don’t want to see that somebody else had a better idea. A more creative and more efficient idea. We don’t want to look like we aren’t important and not needed. What if teachers did it better than us? What would happen then? What would it mean about us?

Again, we’re hanging our self-concept on the outcomes of other people. We’re not building up our self-concept and our emotional resilience from within. When we’re afraid to empower teachers or anybody else around us to be their best, it’s because we’re not afraid that we are being our best. So I want you to take a look at that. Notice. Are you holding back from letting teachers do their thing or try new things and fail or bring ideas to you or just run with something without you having to know every single thing?

So once we clean that up in our thinking, then we get to our job. What is our job? Our job is to create sufficiency and emotional highs for ourselves. Don’t depend on other people needing you to feel sufficient, to feel empowered, to feel like you’re doing a great job.

You decide that for yourself. You give yourselves a pat on the back. You notice all of the ways in which you are smart and capable. You are achieving. You’re successful. That has to come from within you or you’ll never give away the torch to somebody else. Create sufficiency for yourself and work on building up the positive emotions for yourself with your own thoughts, not what you think other people think about you.

Number two, build your level of trust in yourself so that you can increase your capacity to trust other people. When you delegate something, it’s not going to be what you would have done. You have to allow yourself to know what you want enough to be able to tell somebody else or teach somebody else how to do it, but you always have to expect that it won’t be done exactly like you, and that’s okay.

If it comes back at 80%, that’s amazing. 80% means you did zero of the work and got 80% back. Let other people have a chance to be resourceful. Let them have a contribution that gives you time and energy and focus and space to do other things. When you try to do it all and you believe that you should be doing it all, you are not empowering your staff or growing them as teachers.

Number three, allow ourselves to release that control. That comes from working on our mindset. Believing that we are good enough, that our job is safe, that we are safe. That we have job security. We are doing our job even when we’re delegating. We’re allowing people to be resourceful. That is doing the job. You’re doing a great job when you let people do their job. We all belong. We’re all on the same team.

Somebody doing a great job doesn’t mean that you’re not doing a good job. Your teachers can be doing a great job and you can be doing a great job. We’re all resourceful. We can all contribute. That’s our work as leaders is to build up our mindset about who we are, what we’re capable of, and building our capacity to believe in how powerful and how amazing and how resourceful our teachers are.

How fun will that be if you can build this kind of school for yourself this year? If you can imagine being at the end of this school year and how it will feel to have built up the resources in your school from a sense of people feeling that they are capable and they are resourceful and they have great solutions, they have great ideas, and that they’re allowed to implement them and try them. Imagine the grounds that you will make. Imagine the gains that you can take your students to. Imagine the places you’ll go, right?

If you can let go of needing people to need you and letting them be independent and run with it, the results that your school will achieve will be 10x, 20x. It will be fabulous. So I want to hear from you. What thoughts hold you back from staying resourceful? What thoughts hold you back from allowing your teachers to do what they are set and designed and trained to do? Where is your insufficiency that is holding you back from allowing them to be more sufficient in their job? Let me know.

Join the Facebook group by the way guys. Come on in. Let’s have a conversation. When you’re ready for coaching, you know where to find me. Talk to you guys next week. Love you. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.