Rockstar Teachers Podcast
Rockstar Teachers Podcast
How To Build A Resilient Staff Culture
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If you took a polled your staff with the question, "Do you think next year will be easy?" . . . I would be willing to bet the resounding answer would be 'No'. The reasons would vary. From current economic status of the families, virtual learning, kids getting sick to the uncertainty of what the next week or month holds. Then if you asked the question, "Do you think we can still create a world-class teaching environment, regardless of the circumstances?". . . well, those answers may not all be the same.
The goal of a leader is to prepare, inspire and support your team to weather any storm - even COVID-19. We all realize the uncertain times we are about to embark on, but how do you create a team that is confident, excited and prepared for any adversity that comes their way? That is what we explore in today's podcast.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
#1 Kindness Speech (link)
ABOUT THINK KINDNESS
Think Kindness (link) is a non-profit organization dedicated to inspire measurable acts of kindness in schools and communities around the world. Each year, the organization hosts a national kindness school tour, where schools take on a challenge to change the world, in just 15 Days!
What is going on Rockstar teachers, principals and counselors? Heck, we've even heard parents are listening to the podcast. So welcome to everyone, every teacher, even some fortune tellers I'm sure wondering the question, what will school be like next year? Well, I don't have the answer. But I can offer just a little bit of a solution in this episode to make sure that no matter what happens next year is still amazing. My name is Brian Williams, your host of the Rockstar teachers podcast and today, we will be talking about how to build resilient teams when adversity strikes. Let's rock
Unknown Speaker :Okay, now before we jump into today's episode, I want to give a shout out to the winner of our national kindness speech contest or Ryan Jean. He's a fifth grade student from Fort Worth, Texas. Now, his teacher heard about our contest and sent out an email blast. And by the time that Orion got the email, he only had 24 hours to write, practice, record and submit his kind of speech. Now our team had narrowed it down to the top 20 and his speech glowingly made the cut. And then each one of the finalists got paired up with a youth motivational speaker to basically help elevate their speech and bring it to the next level before being made public. Orion got paired up with Dr. Lehmann Hicks. Now, he is one of the nation's most sought after youth speakers and also a good friend of mine. He helped a Ryan elevate his speech in a couple weeks later, he received the most votes amongst 19 other amazing speeches, here is just a small snippet of Orion speech.
Unknown Speaker :The thing is, practice is a virtue if we are willing to, so why not start today? Because right now, what we need more than ever Keepo to show love, and that love might be the hug, someone needs to brighten up their day. So what's stopping you? Join me in the race of kindness. The best part is, everybody wins. So start now and I'll be the first one to cheer you on.
Unknown Speaker :Yes, he is definitely wise beyond his years. I also got to ask him just a couple questions.
Unknown Speaker :Know what inspired the content of your speech when you're writing it? What were some of the big messages that you wanted people to walk away with?
Unknown Speaker :When I was writing this, I had seen the pandemic and the protests. And it really it just showed me that in a time where it seems that nothing is an order, one thing will always stay the same. And that is kindness. And that's why I wanted to share this message. I wanted to let everyone know that kindness will always be able to change someone's life for the better.
Unknown Speaker :Oh, so are you sure you're only nine years old? Are you lying to me? Are you more like the sound like an adult? That's awesome. Now, when people watch your speech, what's the biggest thing that you want them to walk away with
Unknown Speaker :afterwards?
Unknown Speaker :I want them to walk away feeling like this can really convinced me to join this race to kindness. So I'm going to go out there and I'm going to spread an act of kindness or
Unknown Speaker :I'm going to go tell somebody to join this race with me. Because, really,
Unknown Speaker :kindness is kindness and no matter Clean water that will never change and kindness can be expressed in so many ways. And you can do it today. So why not?
Unknown Speaker :Now if you would like to see all of our Ryan's speech, it's in today's show notes, you can find it think kindness.org slash podcast. But here's the deal. There is an Orion in every single classroom, in every school, waiting for the opportunity to change the world. And sometimes they just need that permission to step outside their shell. Sometimes they need that guidance, that community the support for these kids are truly our future. And if you look at the news, yes, just I can relate. You can't help but be a pessimists and have a pessimistic view of the world. But let's be honest, if you look at the kids in your class, the Orion's the kids with hearts filled with love and passion and joy. Joy and genuine happiness. You can't help but become an optimist. But I get it. Sometimes it's tough to see the sun through the clouds. And this kind of brings me to the topic of today on resiliency, and principals that teachers and counselors support staff are all about to board a ship and a couple of weeks with an unknown weather report. Basically, they don't know if their ship is going to be battling hurricanes, big swells pirates, or maybe if all goes well, maybe it's just smooth seas. We don't know what next year is going to entail. So as a principal as a VP as a counselor, or as a PTA president. How do you prepare a team to step onto a ship with positivity, excitement, and to not only embrace but actually love the journey an exploration that they are about to embark on. Because the ones who are excited, open to the challenge, no matter what the outcome, it will always be good. When we were attending the national principals convention in Boston, just a couple years ago, I actually sat down with a principal whose school was amongst many other schools that completely flooded in Nebraska, and obviously unexpected and then, like lightswitch, they couldn't go back to school. I asked him, How did he manage the situation? And he said, I manage the situation years before it ever happened. And obviously, I was just perplexed by his answer, and apparently my face gave it away. And he continued, and he said, I spent years building the staff culture to prepare for uncertainty to embrace it. And if we all stick together, no matter what happens, we have the power to turn the bad into great and his words We're so true, and they ring true today for every single school across the country and around the world. So this brings me to today. How do you build a culture that is resilient, positive and ready for adversity, and maybe even excited? Well, first, let's flip it a little bit. Let's make sure that we look at your school staff in terms of a team, which I'm sure most of you who are listening already do. You see teams are characterized by their high level of interdependence. Basically, they rely on one another to get their jobs done. They depend on the mutual accountability to depend on one another, and to also have a shared goal. Now during these uncertain times, there is one team attribute that stands above all others in order to be successful and that is resilience. Now, we Resilience can be defined as the capacity to bounce back after adversity. But there's a difference. You see, team resiliency is much different and approached differently than individual resiliency, which is often one of the first mistakes leaders focus on. They focus on how to make each team member resilient versus the team as a whole. But there are four key major takeaways. But there are four specific things that you can do as a leader, that will help your team become more resilient, especially as we're guiding our ship into this uncertain storm of COVID-19. Now, the first one, the first step is to think about is collective confidence. This is building the collective belief of a team that it can accomplish important and significant tasks. As a team, we're together, we're going to make this work. Look at all of the awesome people we have on our team. This, this, this adversity we're about to come, we can do it. Now, let's take an example of an emergency room during a major crisis. multiple patients are admitted all at once, people running around crazy frantic but they are focused. This is a situation where there's little room for wavering or any decisiveness. The team has have the collective confidence to overcome this adversity quickly and to make sure that each patient is treated in a proper manner. This is a collective belief that the team as a whole can accomplish their goals, not individual people simply believing in themselves. Yes, that needs to happen. But in order to work efficiently, they have to believe in the team as a whole. They must believe in their team, each one doing their part, the collective confidence ironically builds individual confidence. And in order to create this collective confidence in your school, you need to make sure that your team has clear goals, expectations, and outcomes. There must be an agreement about the team process for getting things done for every possible scenario that you can think of. Now, the key word there, there must be an agreement. And that means that they should have inputs and feel heard in creating those processes for every possible scenario. So this is having everyone coming together, building that team morale, and everyone's throwing every possibility on the board and thinking about how you're going to overcome those adversities. They must understand the links between their individual classroom and the school goals with those in their team. The leaders have to carry out a form of leadership called transfer leadership. Now that's a huge subject. And we could go deep into transformational leadership like over several episodes. But a simple explanation is this is where you set clear vision for the team and you challenge the team to think differently about problems. Now, lastly, in order to create this collective confidence is you need to have trial runs, even thought experiments, what's going to happen if this happens, okay, you're going to do X this person is going to do why this person has to do z. Everyone has to think through these challenges, and then also try to find the holes in your plan. So step one, is to create that collective confidence. People have confidence, when they're clear and strategic plans in place, and they know their role. And they see that together as a team, we can overcome anything. So step one, collective confidence. The second one is team understanding. Have your team model. This is a big one. Let me say that again, make sure you have team understanding of your team model. Your team must understand their role and the role of others the responsibilities, the interactions, and being familiar with one another's knowledge, one another skills, preferences, strength, and also weaknesses. They all need to be on the same page with how they work together. Now, let's go back to our hospital example. A patient is on the operating table and goes into respiratory distress. Every member of the surgical team must instantly understand his or her role. Each one is very defined and practiced. Now not a lot of people know this about me. But when I was in college, I was an orderly and then moved up to a surgical tech while in college, and when I heard Code Blue, Over the speaker, basically someone crashed, someone's heart stopped. And my role was to be the one person that ran and grabbed what we call the crash cart to and to bring that to the room as soon as possible. My role every day was to inventory the crash cart to make sure that everything was there, everything was charged, everything was working. I knew my role, and we practiced we rehearse these roles, and we would hear code blues and I'd have to sprint from or room nine, go all the way down the hall full sprint get or room one in under 30 seconds. Now your teachers and staff know their roles when it comes to fire drills, earthquake drills, and for some schools even live shooter drills. But each person must have defined rules for the new up and coming adversities that your school may go through from mental support. How to support not only their fellow teachers, but for the students and how to create an environment for them to talk things out. And also, how do you deal with all the different adversities from social distancing to what happens if someone on your team gets sick or hospitalized or maybe even if a student gets sick or hospitalized, what happens? Who does what? As a leader, you can enhance your team's understanding of your team's model by first holding leader briefing. So this is basically if you have specific leaders within your school, bring them all together, have these leader briefings in these coaching sessions, raise awareness of the constraints that might hurt your team's resilience. This is finding the holes and encourage shared leadership amongst the team members. Everyone needs to feel as though they play a positive role in your team. And you must let their voices be heard. And this part's really important without judgment, so Step one, was to create collective confidence. Step two was Make sure your team understands your team model. This way, when adversity strikes, everybody knows their role. And if one person gets pulled out due to a sickness or an illness, someone else can instantly step in into that role. And maybe it's who's going to call the parents who's going to send the emails, who's going to do the Facebook post, who's just going to be that positive person that's going to post a video on Facebook to make sure that everyone still feels loved and welcome. There has to be a role for everybody. So step one was collective confidence. Step two was to make sure your team understands your team model. And step three is to create the capacity to improvise. This can be looked as simple moments of brilliance that your staff can have, but it must be carefully thought out this entire process. Kind of structured even though we're planning on improvisation. But this welcomes creativity. Now if you don't structure this, it can quickly become chaos. You see, improvisation requires careful planning and proactively rehearsing a number of different scenarios. To help a team prepare for the fast and effective response that you want them to have. Your staff may not always have the exact tools or equipment, or even staff capacity to solve a problem that they're presented with. Thus, they have to rely on their capacity to use their existing knowledge to create a new solution to that problem. But they have to feel welcomed in order to improvise, which means that's the culture that you're creating. You need to create a culture where you welcome people that they feel comfortable in order to improvise, because they're taking a risk, but the team as a whole was also operating. With this openness and trust that they will all make the right decision in many teams across a large pool of organizations, not just schools, they report that they only share information that is already commonly known, basically, because they are worried that it's going to be rejected for being too novel or to outside the box. Basically, someone has a brilliant idea. And they don't want to share it, because they feel they're going to be ostracized for it. You want your team members to feel comfortable and feel like they have the ability to let their ideas be heard their opinions. You see, these can lead to an increased variety of different perspectives, especially when they're needed the most. Now, the biggest way to create this is have an open door policy for your team. And you want to ask for their input both early and often. And this isn't just asking for their input and a team meeting. This is sending out an individual email, hey, this is what we discussed. I'm just curious. If you Have Any other thoughts on this? Or if you feel like we're going in the right direction, do you have any other ideas that we haven't thought of, or different solutions, this creates the openness for you to let their ideas be heard. And the last step, and to be honest, I feel like this one's the most important. And usually, this is the one that gets overlooked when adversity strikes. And that's setting a clear vision or as some people say, make the main thing, the main thing. And I would assume that your school your main objective is to create an environment where students feel loved, cared for, and they have an environment to go ahead and learn and to grow as students and and human beings. Right, that might be your vision. And you see, despite whatever adversities, strike from COVID-19 to anything else you can think of your main thing must always be your main thing. If your staff are going to be stepping on to this ship that you're going to be sailing. You were going to need to have a good Guide, and that guide could be a local expert. Or it could be navigating from the stars which I have no idea how to do, or a compass or GPS, or Siri. You know, we basically need to know what direction the car ship. Your team needs a shared direction, not just a goal, but a vision and a purpose. This vision doesn't change, it never will. No matter what adversity strikes, your vision remains the same. Whether students are learning virtually, whether they're in the classroom, your vision remains the same. Now when I hear the word adversity, or the word vision, I always get brought back to a story of Captain Cortez. And it's actually quite a gruesome story, but the lessons can be extracted from it nonetheless, and I don't know if you guys have heard the story. It's short. So basically, it goes all the way back to 1519. So a long time ago, and Captain Cortez landed his ships in Veracruz to basically steal a bunch of treasure from the Aztecs. And so what he did is he took 500 soldiers, 100 sailors and 11 ships to Yucatan. And despite this massive army, he was still vastly outnumbered by a huge and powerful Aztec empire, one that has been around for over 600 years. Now, some of the men and crew members were not convinced that they would succeed. And so when they landed at night, they snuck out and they stole some ships to sail back over to where they came from. They lacked the vision and collective confidence that they would succeed. This created even more uncertainty and As army, because some people are wondering like, hey, they left maybe they see something that we don't. So he wanted to make sure that the remainder of his team, the remainder of his soldiers were committed to his mission, the mission to steal the riches. And so he did something insane. He gave the order to burn all of his ships, except for the smallest one, which was to be used to transport what's called the Royal fifth, which is the king of Spain demanding one fifth of the spoils of the riches if he's successful, so he was planning on succeeding, so he kept that ship around. So all of the ships were sunk, they are burned. So now his soldiers had a choice to either succeed or die. That's it. Now incredibly, despite all odds, they succeeded. In 600 years, no one else had been able to crawl conquer the Aztecs or even steal their riches. And they were able to do it simply because there was no choice to fail or to fall back, they were simply able to do it because there was no choice to fail. Their ships were gone. So the reason why I like this story is that if you take failure off the table, you're only left with success. Not just schools, but thousands upon thousands of businesses have been forced to look at adversity in a different light due to COVID-19. If failure is not an option, how can I succeed as a school or business in a COVID-19 world? How can I succeed with the box that I've been put in? failure in quitting is not an option. So what else is left for me to do? You can't help the situation that you guys have been put into none of us can. You can't help the situation that will be passed down from your local Governor's superintendent to take even the President of the United States but failing Your students, that's not an option. So how do you succeed? How do you embrace the uncertainty stand by each other during the ups and downs. So when this is all said and done, you can say together as a team, we did it. And at the end, you'll be stronger.
Unknown Speaker :Thank you guys so much for listening to today's episode. This one was a little different than some of our other interviews. So if you'd like more episodes like this, let me know. If you know someone on your team that would benefit from this episode. Be sure to share it with them. And always we'd love it if you'd like subscribe and feel free to leave an honest review. You can always find a link to today's show notes at think kindness.org slash podcast. Thanks so much for listening everyone. And remember, be brave be kind and together we can all change the world