How to use this simple trick to supercharge your staff culture
A few years ago, I had an "a-ha" moment where I realized a trick to leadership that became essential in my arsenal of strategies and tools: take advantage of the calendar. What do I mean by that? Look at the calendar—the months, seasons, days off, holidays, professional days, time of year and what's going on—and use that to your advantage in planning, particularly when it comes to staff and student culture.
For many years, I had applied this in my own way teaching: there was always a new seating chart after a break, with a chance for students to start fresh near new teammates, to get to know some different people and to literally change their perspective on the classroom. I realized that if something was happening in the world (the Olympics, an election, Valentine's Day) the students were interested in it, and if I was smart about aligning my lesson plans to what was happening in the world, they were already engaged in the material, which is at least half the battle. My passion for rigor and strong student gains means I was never the kind of teacher who set aside Valentine's Day for crafts all day, but it gradually meant that we started to do close readings of famous love letters that week in 7th grade, or carved out some time to read Time for Kids about the election and did some research on issues in our community.
When I moved into leadership, I realized that there was an invisible calendar that also existed: for example, the months when people were really excited about a fresh start and you can use that to build trust and teams (coming back from the summer and winter breaks) or the times when people were fatigued, tired and got easily discouraged (October and February). I started doing staff culture planning using the calendar: really being thoughtful about scheduling some professional development that maximized people's urges to start fresh, build team and step back and see the big picture coming back from summer vacation, or scheduling some surprise time off in October as a relief for people who were fatigued.
If you're not in a school based role, or if you work year-round, this advice still pertains. Your industry or role may have different rhythms—for example, when I led the Institute at Teach For America, August was about nothing except vacation and maybe a little post-Institute reflection—-September was when we were off to the races with team-building for our full-time team, and February is when we got rolling with our summer staff work. Even when I talk to friends in wildly different fields (like law or hedge funds) there is still something in September or the start of the school year that makes it feel like a fresh start—probably because we all grew up thinking of it as back to school time, which became ingrained.
This time of year, in talking to leaders, it's clear that people are thinking about post-break PD and how to build teams thoughtfully, especially after a few unusual years where people may have been working together for months without knowing how tall the other person is—because they've just been a face on a Zoom! Coming back from summer break was always my favorite time to do a few key pieces of work, listed in no particular order below.
Vision/Mission work: It's critical to start with vision and mission and spending some time on this is so important in rooting your work. What this looks like may vary depending on your team, organization and what you do, but some simple ways to do this include having everyone memorize your mission statement (and having a competition with prizes to make it fun), or doing a Vision Walk where small groups or individuals draw what they think your community will look like when the vision is achieved. What are people saying? thinking about? doing? surrounded by?
What's your Why? New folks often come onto a team, but even in a team where everyone's returning it's important to step back occasionally and remind ourselves why we do this work individually and collectively. I tend to like exercises that produce artifacts—like a sheet of construction paper that can be hung in your office or workspace to remind you of what your why is. Sharing these motivations are also a way to build trust and vulnerability.
A team builder that increases knowledge of self and team. This is my all-time favorite—I'm definitely one of those people who loves self-knowledge quizzes (I'm a Northeast in Compass Points, an ENFJ on Myers Briggs, a Peacock on the bird test much to my chagrin...— I could go on and on!) I LOVE these types of exercises and not just because I enjoy clicking boxes online randomly. First of all, they give you and teams common ways to define characteristics that regularly come up in the course of working together. (As one example, I have been doing Compass Points for over 20 years (!) with iterations of literally hundreds of teams—and in every single case it never fails to give folks a way to understand that the more detail-oriented "West" folks aren't opposed to the big picture "East" folks—they just literally work in exact opposite ways. My favorite example of this was my second year at a school when we did this exercise and two fellow grade-level teachers of mine, who had been at each others throats the entire year before hugged it out because they realized Keith was an East and Michele was a West—-they were not arch-enemies after all!) Other benefits are people like having ways to describe themselves and having the objective perspective of the language of the personality test neutralizes it—it's neither bad nor good, it just is, and once you recognize that you can move forward. One of my favorite reasons to do these at this time of year is that it gives people a reference point to use for the rest of the year! With now over 2 decades of using team builders like this to get people together, my favorite assessment and team builder to use by far is Clifton Strengths from Gallup—for reasons I'll get into in a future blog (although a sneak peek is here).
Talking to a few school leaders this week, it sounds familiar: the time of year when hiring is down to the wire... leadership retreats are happening... August, just 10 calendar days away, is around the corner with school starting in many parts of the country. Deliberating planning for team strengths and staff culture is critically important—not just at the start of year, but throughout. That said, taking advantage of the fresh start coming after summer break is an easy way to get the year off right.
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What do you do to get staff culture thriving? Share your thoughts below in a comment!