The RALLYING CRY: One of my favorite ways to start a new year with a team
It’s mid-July, and while in some ways it seems the summer may last forever, a new school year is right around the corner. Some of my clients are schools with a first day on August 1, while others don’t go back to school until September 7. While the start time of the school year may vary, leaders throughout the education space are currently thinking about how to start a new year. Even if you aren’t working directly in or with schools (not all of my clients do!), the beginning of the new school year may feel like a fresh start with fall approaching.
Given how much I’ve been talking to leaders about planning for the start of the school year, I wanted to share with you one of my favorite tips for leading a team and starting the year off strong:
Choose a rallying cry.
The dictionary definition of rallying cry is
“a word or phrase, an event, or a belief which encourages people to unite and to act in support of a particular group or idea.”
We see examples of this all over the world–like “Remember the Alamo” or Nike’s “Just Do It.” Rallying cries can be a shorthand way to touch on a deeper shared experience and meaning.
As leaders, our jobs are to lead complex and ever-changing groups of people in often thorny situations to a shared goal. There can be a million distractions, and the challenge is making sure people focus on what’s important. There are a myriad of ways to do that, but picking a rallying cry for the year can serve as a cultural touchstone for people to draw on throughout the year ahead.
Your rallying cry can be a theme, a phrase, a quote. Over the years I’ve used everything from Robert Kennedy’s ripple of hope quote to a Bruce Springsteen team theme. I’ve included a few ideas below and I’d love to hear in the comments what rallying cries for teams inspire you!
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.’” This Frederick Douglass quote (and the broader paragraph and speech it is derived from) is an amazing literary masterpiece, and can open up a conversation at the beginning of the year of the inevitable struggles in the work, the way it yields progress, and times in the past where this has been true. By framing it this way at the beginning of the year, when people have a lot of gas in the tank and are hopeful, it can help gird the team for the challenges that lay ahead.
Use a team, band, orchestra or theatre production to study how successful teams work and derive the lessons to use within your own team. I am a huge Springsteen fan and I literally am considering writing a book on how everything we need to know about leadership we can learn from Bruce Springsteen: I always started the year with a professional development system where we observed the team in action, distilled the essential components and related it to our work. This could work with a clip of a sports team, watching a clip from a Broadway musical or seeing an orchestra perform–they are all teams in action that work exceedingly well towards their goals and there are lessons in how we do this that we can apply to our work. The key is to pick something that you as a leader are genuinely passionate about–it shines through. (This PD was such a hit, I offer it as part of my work to teams now–book a call if you want to learn more!)
When I led a training institute that trained teachers, the work of many of the staff was distant–they created the university village that operationally allowed teachers to thrive, or they trained the coaches who trained the teachers. I used the imagery and words from Bobby Kennedy’s “ripple of hope” quote, and had it printed on the backs of super comfortable staff shirts they could wear. We talked about how the work we did affected students all over the country–because the better trained their teachers were, both for today’s lessons and in the mindsets they brought to their careers ahead, and we were, through our work, sending forth a ripple of hope.
The Boss himself — a huge source of inspriation!
What rallying cries or themes have you used or been inspired by? Share in the comments so we can all learn from you!