Supporting your staff sounds like an obvious part of your job as a school leader. However, I can tell you from personal experience, when you’re caught up in all of your other duties, it’s easy for “being a supportive leader” to fall by the wayside. Especially when angry parents are involved, siding with your staff becomes a tricky balancing act.
I have learned over the years that teachers want a principal who has their backs. This is a huge reflection of your leadership in their eyes. Your staff wants to know you are listening to their concerns and that you believe their story. That said, you can’t hold their hand every step of the way.
It’s getting to the time when you’re mapping out what your staff will look like come the start of the next school year. Last week was all about how to let staff go responsibly and with both parties’ best interests in mind. In this episode, I’m sharing some recruitment tips to increase the chances that you don’t have to fire anyone next year!
We’re into March, which means we’re starting a new theme on the podcast for this month. For the next few weeks, we’re going to be looking at the mindset and execution of the human resources aspect of your job as a principal.
Throughout February, we’ve been discussing self-coaching and I really hope you’ve taken some valuable information out of this month’s topic. Today, we’re rounding it off by taking everything I’ve shared this month and working on applying it to the other people in your life.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been covering the process of self-coaching in great detail for all of you. With this knowledge, it can feel a bit like I’m sending you off into the world and that the rest is up to you. Well, to be honest, that would be crazy.
Last week, we looked at the self-coaching strategy of doing a brain drain – transferring all of your present thoughts onto paper as a method of helping you identify where the drama is in your mind around a certain topic. But what happens when we don’t like the thoughts that we identify?
Do you find yourself enduring relationships with people, things, or even jobs for way longer than you should because you believe things “could be worse?” Do you tell yourself every day that it’s not so bad and you can get through it? Well, that was me not all that long ago, and it’s something we all do when we can’t see past something ending.
As a school leader, it’s impossible to get along with everyone all of the time. You have staff, parents, and students that all have opinions on everything you do, and vice versa. We know that molding people and having them behave exactly how we would like is never going to happen, but there must be something we can do, surely?