Is Your Leadership Team Sharp and Aligned?

Staff in many schools suffer change fatigue. Often this is as a result of too many initiatives being undertaken at the one time. Their efforts become diluted and they become overwhelmed. I believe that we can only successfully undertake a maximum of THREE initiatives or priorities, across the school, each school year.

Inevitably there will be a number of small changes, refinements or projects undertaken by various people and teams but we should only have THREE BIG ROCKS that have been identified as priorities across the school.

According to teamwork guru Patrick Lencioni, the key to managing the complexity of schools is to identify a reasonable number of issues that will have the greatest possible impact on the success of your school, and then spend most of your time thinking about, talking about, and working on those issues.

“If everything is important, then nothing is.”
A CHALLENGE ACTIVITY for your Leadership Team

At your next leadership team meeting ask each member of the leadership team to write down what they see as the agreed TOP 3 priorities for your school THIS year.
Have each individual write down their top 3 and then individually share (quick tip: the Principal should go last!)

If your leadership team are absolutely humming then this should be an easy exercise. If you get a range of viewpoints about what the priorities are, then YOUR FIRST PRIORITY must be getting consensus about your school’s top 3.

Lencioni argues the four obsessions that extraordinary executives pursue relentlessly are:-

  • Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
  • Create organisational clarity – identity, values, mission, major goals, objectives, roles and responsibilities
  • Over-communicate organizational clarity – especially your identity and direction
  • Reinforce organisational clarity through human systems – be cohesive, be clear, over-communicate and reinforce
At this stage of the year, it is ESSENTIAL that your leadership team are aligned and crystal clear on the THREE priorities for 2018 in your school.The next step is to over-communicate (like a broken record) what those three priorities are. Staff need to hear these messages relentlessly.

“Our THREE priorities this year are…..A, B and C!!!”

If aligning your leadership team and getting everyone on the same page is a priority for you, I’d love to come and work with your leadership team.

CLICK HERE to download potential topics for development of your current or aspiring leaders.

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