Building Capacity by Giving Away Responsibility

As a leader, do you build capacity by giving things away?

Entrusting the responsibility for a project to someone else can be tough. But if you don't rely on others, you'll always end up doing everything yourself...and you don't build capacity within your school/organization.  Essentially, you'll shortchange those who could learn by taking on new tasks. Once you delegate something, don't be tempted to micromanage the process. Agree on the expected outcomes and just let go. If you've asked a team member to take care of an important presentation, don't spend endless time on edits and corrections. Be clear on the parameters and remove yourself so she can do it her way, not yours. This is much more efficient than taking over, and the end product will likely be better.

Remember.....great leaders are always trying to do themselves out of a job.



Adapted from "Be More Productive by Making Better Daily Choices" by Ana Dutra.

Serving as a Mentor

As a leader, do you offer to mentor new or inexperienced leaders?

An important role for any leader is the mentoring of new or inexperienced leaders.  It provides a great service to someone who is in the exact same spot you were at one time.....but it also helps you.

Mentoring a new leader is simply the right thing to do.  Somewhere along the line, someone believed in you and supported your move into leadership.  One form of paying back this kindness is to mentor another.  New leaders need individuals whom they can trust so they can share their uncertainties in difficult times and gain some solid knowledge from someone like you who simply has more experience in the role.

More than being the right thing to do, mentoring a new leader can help you too.  Your mentee gives you insight into how people are feeling and thinking in the workplace.  You may have forgotten what it's like to be new in a role and a bit unsure of yourself.  Providing a safe and confidential forum for discussion helps you build your understanding of others.  Further, mentoring helps you learn how to build capacity in others.  A key role for a leader is building capacity in your staff.  Mentoring gives you a chance to practise and hone your skills. 

Enough Complaining! Number 1

As a leader, how do you reduce the complaining among staff members?

In the workplace, we hope that everyone behaves in an adult manner.  Right? Then why do individual staff members - or even teams - still whine sometimes?  It's part of the human condition to complain, but it doesn't have to derail your group. When people on your team get frustrated and need a sympathetic ear, do the following:

• Insist on personal accountability. Don't allow people to present a problem without attempting to bring forward a solution or two. Advise them to do what they think is necessary to achieve results.
• Encourage positivity. If the whining is about fellow members of staff, encourage the group to work with each other to better understand the nature of the problem, and then create a joint solution. Remind them that most people aren't intentionally difficult.
• Support them in solving the issue.  Some members of staff may need help in how to approach a colleague with whom they have difficulty.  Support your staff member in building the skills to approach the troublesome colleague in a productive manner. 

Adapted from "The No Whining Rule for Managers" by Ron Ashkenas.

Need to Teach? Try Show & Tell

As a leader, how do you build capacity among your staff members?

How many times have you trained a colleague in a task, only to have that person come knocking on your door every five minutes with a question?   Building the capacity of your staff members is a key leadership role.  People learn and build their capacity by watching and engaging with others, so instead of telling people how to solve a problem, show them and tell them. Take them through each step, explaining your thinking and the reasons behind each. Then allow them to ask as many questions as needed. This will not only give them the foundation they need to do the task, but will prompt you to master the task more deeply as you provide a justification for each step.  And keep the office door open.  If there are further questions, you want to be there to lend a hand. 


Adapted from "The Best Approach to Training" by Richard Catrambone.

Admit what you don't know

As a leader, are you able to reveal your weaknesses in order to build a stronger workplace?

Leaders who insist on making all the decisions often find themselves with disengaged employees. If people aren't taking charge in your organization, your leadership style might be the problem. If you have an overly directive approach, take a step back. Acknowledge your failings (whether they be your knowledge base or a particular skill set) with your team. Share your personal and organizational goals. Then, admit that you don't have all the answers and you need your team's help in reaching those goals. This will give your people room to actively participate in the organization's success. This act of humility is often seen as courageous and inspires others to follow suit.

You can extend this idea to actually inviting some individuals to take on certain roles.  For example, if you're bad at remembering the social aspects of the workplace, ask for a couple of volunteers to take on this responsibility.  Another example might be asking for a volunteer or two to help identify what's missing from conversations at meetings.  Certain individuals could be asked to help the group identify perspectives that may be missed when your team gets together to work.  By engaging more staff with important workplace roles, you're sharing the responsibility of leading the school/organization.  You're building capacity, and you're ensuring the workplace is a healthy environment in which to work because responsibility is shared.


Adapted from "Fire, Snowball, Mask, Movie: How Leaders Spark and Sustain Change" by Peter Fuda and Richard Badham.

Drop Your Mask and Be Authentic

As a leader, are you authentic with your staff?

Are you hiding from your staff? Too many leaders try to conceal their flaws and present a polished façade - the 'bluff exterior'. Or they try to behave like they think "great" leaders do. When you try to be someone else, it erodes trust and effectiveness and causes people to question your true identity.  Your staff can see through this behaviour.  So drop the mask and be who you really are. This can enhance your relationships, foster trust, and create better outcomes at work. Be honest about your imperfections and ask others to help you determine how to bring more of your authentic self to work.  By not being 'perfect', you're able to build capacity in your organization/school by cultivating the knowledge and skills of your colleagues. 

Adapted from "Fire, Snowball, Mask, Movie: How Leaders Spark and Sustain Change" by Peter Fuda and Richard Badham.

Delegating Tasks to Build Staff Capacity

As a leader, do you delegate tasks to staff in the hope to build their capacity?

In a desire to share / distribute leadership, have you ever delegated a task to a staff member,....and somehow it ended up back on your plate?  Beware of this "reverse delegation."  Staff members who are unsure how to do something may enlist you in doing it for them.  Don't automatically solve problems or make decisions for hesitant colleagues.  Focus on generating alternative solutions together, making sure your colleague maintains responsibility for carrying through with the task.  Don't fall for it when others make statements like, "You'll do a better job with this."  While flattering, and possibly even true, they are often a way to get you involved when you needn't be....and how do you build capacity among your staff...if people feel they can - or should - default to you?

Support your staff members with tasks that 'stretch' them.  Many will discover that they have much more capacity than they realized.  They'll discover that their talents are greater than they realized.  But just in case.....don't be too far away.  They may need some coaching or mentoring along the way.  They'll feel reassured and more willing to take on challenges in the future if they know that you believe they can do it AND you're close by 'just in case'. 

Adaped from: Guide to Project Management (Harvard Business Review)

Too Much Listening or Too Much Talking?

As a leader, have you found the balance between listening and speaking up?

Listening is a critical, often underutilized skill.  Sometimes for leaders there is a temptation to do a lot of the talking.  In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of how important it is for leaders to be effective listeners.   But if listening is already your forte, you may need to do more talking. Speaking up is a good way to demonstrate your expertise and gain the confidence of those around you.  As a leader, too much listening can come across as a lack of confidence or knowledge.  Staff need to hear from you - in measured amounts.  If you're hesitant as a speaker, find a safe place to try it out first. Talk shop with your friends or colleagues to test your ideas. Then, refine them to share in a meeting or with your colleagues. Try to say something early on in a meeting, even if it's something small, to establish yourself as part of the conversation. The challenge here is to support your staff by speaking up enough to set the stage for the conversation without creating an environment where your staff will feel they need to echo your ideas.  It's a fine balancing act.  Listening is important, but so is speaking. Success depends on doing both.  Finding the right balance - to ensure you bring out the best in your staff - is the place you are aiming for.  It will take some time but the rewards of building the capacity of your staff are worth the effort.


Adapted from "Keep Listening, but Start Talking" by Whitney Johnson.

Being Optimistic

As a leader, do you demonstrate optimism?

Within the literature on leadership, there are many references to the significance of leaders demonstrating optimism.  As leaders, this is sometimes really difficult to do.  We face challenging situations.  We see results that simply are not good enough.  We see work practices that are not effective.  We see many things that can annoy, frustrate, or even anger us.  There are ways for us to deal with these situations......and publicly is not one of them. 

Demonstrating optimism is a way that you communicate that you believe the work you are doing is important.  You believe the work your staff is doing is important.  You believe everyone has or can develop the skills to do a great job.  You believe great results are achievable.  In other words, you have great faith in those whom you lead.

How do you demonstrate optimism?  You can't fake it.  If you don't believe in the importance of the work you are doing and you don't believe in your staff, you can't pretend.  They'll see through it easily.  You may need to shift some of your own thinking to a more positive perspective.  When you are in the workplace, are you seeing what's not there (the 'witch hunt' perspective) or do you see what's there and potentially there (the 'treasure hunt' perspective).  Draw on your observations from the 'treasure hunt' to build your own sense of optimism about your workplace.  Remember, no one ever does a great job when they feel that their leader doesn't believe in them. 

Performance Appraisals

As a leader, how do you handle performance appraisals?

One of the important tasks any supervising leader must assume is engaging in performance appraisals with members of your staff.  Performance appraisals can be seen as an annoying task that needs to be completed to get it out of the way until the next appraisal cycle comes round......or......it can be an opportunity to celebrate the good work of your staff, to support their professional growth, and to build capacity for ever-better results.  The difference is huge - a mundane task or a celebratory process focused on growth.  What makes the difference?  It's the leader - and how the leader engages in performance appraisal processes. 

If you'd like to lead a work culture that doesn't fear but embraces performance appraisals, it's up to you as the leader, to change your processes.  A few things to consider when doing performance appraisals:

• Who does the talking?  Is it you, the leader/appraiser, or do your staff members have more of the 'air time'?  This is a chance for your staff to present themselves and their work to you.
• Do staff members have a chance:
• to articulate their work,
• to explain why they work in the way that they do,
• to talk about what they believe their greatest strengths and accomplishments are,
• to describe from their own perspective where they believe they need to grow?
• Do you use coaching questions in the conversations?  True coaching questions mediate thinking and are non-threatening.  They open up honest conversation.
• Do your staff members have an opportunity to provide evidence of their work that demonstrates their strengths and accomplishments? 
• Who decides what the next steps - or growth goals- are?  As the leader/appraiser do you tell your staff member or do they have the opportunity first to explain to you what their growth needs to be.  You might be very surprised that they likely know even better than you what they need to learn next in order to grow professionally.
• Once the performance appraisal process finishes, is that it?  Done?  Or do you take the opportunity to check in with your staff to see how they're doing with the growth goals that were set?  Friendly, on-going monitoring - if done well - can be encouraging and motivating without seeming like you're checking up on them.

Performance appraisals can be a time-consuming, routine task or it can be a growth-oriented celebration of each staff members' work.  It's up to you as the leader, to create the culture by your actions.

Now that you have the position

You now have the leadership position.  But do you have the skills?

As a leader, you have a formal leadership role.  But formal leadership roles demand a set of skills that you may not necessarily have.  People frequently are promoted because they were exemplary in their position.  However, this doesn't automatically translate into having the skills required in a leadership role.  As a leader, can you identify the necessary skill sets for your position?  When that's done, can you then identify which of these skill sets you have, which skill sets you don't have, and which ones you are developing?  Once this 'gap analysis' has been done, you have some important thinking to do about how you will build the skills that you need in your role.  In other words, what do you need to learn and how will you learn it?  Every great leader is also a great learner.  Leadership demands learning and continual refinement of the skills of leadership.  What is your plan to be a great leader? 

Here is a list of just some of the skill sets that great leaders have:

• setting direction for the work of your staff
• building purposeful, authentic relationships...and then sustaining them
• knowing how to motivate people
• knowing how to handle difficult conversations while maintaining the integrity of staff members
• problem-solving
• supporting each member of your staff in building their capacity to do the work
• coaching and mentoring.....and knowing the difference
• planning for succession and ensuring that there are always others who can carry on the work
• being accountable
• taking responsibility
• identifying the focus of the work and supporting staff in keeping the focus
• dealing with distracters so that they don't impact on your staff
• distributing / sharing leadership with others
• ...and the list goes on....

Process, Process, Process

As a leader, how do you use 'process'?

Leaders are called upon to do and be anything and everything in today's schools/organizations.  With multiple demands from multiple sources, it can sometimes feel easier and more straightforward simply to provide people with information or answers.  This may be expedient but it doesn't serve your school or organization well.  What happens when you're not there?  Where will people get information or find their answers?  In the interest of building capacity in your staff so that everyone feels capable and self-directed, it is essential to create a culture where processes are used on a regular basis.  Whether the issue is the provision of information, problem-solving, information gathering, planning,.....or whatever,.....there are always processes that can help.  As a leader, the key piece of information for you is to learn appropriate processes that you can use, to use them often, and to create a culture where your staff, students, parents, and others understand the value of processes for bringing the best thinking to an issue. 

One of my favourites is Facilitating with Ease! by Ingrid Bens.  It's full of great processes for anything you need to do. 

Readers, do you have other sources for processes?  If so, please post them in the Comments section.

 

Encourage Pushback

As a leader, do you encourage ‘pushback’ from your staff?  Deference to authority is deeply engrained in most of us. As a leader you need to resist this tendency in your staff. If people automatically defer to your judgment, you may miss out on valuable thinking and critical feedback. Try to make it easy for people to speak up, and remember to actively ask for their opinions. When talking about current or future work, give some initial thoughts, but then ask for help fleshing out ideas. Recognize people who speak up and thank those who challenge your thinking. Most importantly, try not to react immediately if you start to feel threatened, or you risk shutting down the discussion.  This takes courage and confidence but if you want great results and you want to build capacity in your staff, this becomes an essential part of your leadership toolkit. Adapted from "The Dangers of Deference" by Ron Ashkenas.

The Six Secrets of Change

As a leader, do you know the six secrets of change and do you know how to use them?

The Six Secrets of Change


1. Love your employees - The key is in enabling employees to learn continuously and to find meaning in their work and in their relationship to coworkers and to the company as a whole.

2. Connect peers with purpose - ...foster continuous and purposeful peer interaction. ... The job of leaders is to provide good direction while pursuing its implementation through purposeful peer interaction and learning in relation to results. 

3. Capacity building prevails - Capacity building entails leaders investing in the development of individual and collaborative efficacy...

4. Learning is the work - ...there is far too much going to workshops, taking short courses, and the like, and far too little learning while doing the work.  Learning external to the job can represent a useful input, but if it is not in balance and in concert with learning in the setting in which you work, the learning will end up being superficial. 

5. Transparency rules - By transparency I mean clear and continuous displays of results, and clear and continuous access to practice (what is being done to get the results).

6. Systems learn - Systems learn on a continuous basis.  The synergistic result of the previous five secrets is tantamount to a system that learns from itself. 


From:  The Six Secrets of Change by Michael Fullan
Published by: Jossey-Bass

Building Sustainable Capacity

As a leader, how do you build sustainable capacity in your staff?

It was probably Peter Senge who first introduced capacity building into the organizational and management literature.  In attempting in 1990 to demonstrate a logical link between the concepts of knowledge society and organizational development, Senge asserted that two conditions must be met in the work of 21st century organizations: first, the notion that the professional learning community must become accepted as integral to organizational development and, second, professional learning communities, once in operation, must accept that their core purpose involves the creation and sustainability of significant "new knowledge". 

It was out of these dual premises that the concept of educational capacity building was born.  For, according to Senge, when the professional community of an organization such as a school creates significant "new knowledge", and sets in place processes to ensure the ongoing refinement and dissemination of that knowledge, the organization's "capacity" to achieve and sustain success is greatly enhanced.

In the two decades since Senge's pioneering thinking, capacity building and its two key subordinate concepts - knowledge creation and professional learning community - have become fundamental organizational constructs. 


From:  From School Improvement to Sustained Capacity by Frank Crowther
Published by: Corwin Press

Capacity Building

As a leader, how do you build the necessary capacity in your staff to meet the demands of the work that needs to be done?

Two key principles should permeate your capacity-building work:

1. Minimize blame and focus on improvement.  If people fear blame, there will be less transparency and less insight into the root causes of problems, which will inhibit capacity-building.  Instead, build a culture in which struggles or challenges are viewed as opportunities to learn and further improve delivery.  It is important to communicate that people are being judged in order to strengthen performance and not for the sake of laying blame.  In practice, a culture of no blame needs to exist alongside a culture of taking responsibility, so plain speaking and honesty will be crucial.  As Michael Fullan (2008) explains in his book The Six Secrets of Change, "This doesn't mean that you avoid identifying things as effective or ineffective.  Rather it means that you do not do so pejoratively."

2. Create a culture of continuous learning.  To truly sustain the capacity to implement change, all system actors responsible for delivery must be constantly going through the cycle of acting, reflecting, making adjustments, and trying again, each time refocusing their efforts on the actions that are found to be most effective.  In this culture, all contributors to delivery are constantly increasing their effectiveness.  As Michael Fullan (2008) put it, "Learning on the job, day after day, is the work".

From: Deliverology 101 by Michael Barber
Published by: Corwin Press, EDI - U.S. Education Delivery Institute, OPC - Ontario Principals' Council