The seven building blocks of success

Our vision answers our question of where we are going. Our job with that clear leadership vision set in place is to motivate our teams to get us there. Through motivation a leader can channel energy and potential, but how do we motivate our team?

A goal for any member of a team is to feel appreciated and valued. These characteristics instil a sense of commitment and engagement to your role in the team. When individuals and teams work above and beyond expectations to achieve great results, celebration and recognition are how you encourage continued commitment to the vision, mission, and goals. It is how excellence is encouraged over time, and how it stays strong even in the hard and stressful times. What gets rewarded gets repeated and simple recognition can go a long way to help motivate your team.

Communication is a powerful tool that leadership can use to create an environment that brings forth employee motivation. Communication provides information, makes employees feel important and recognized, and provides the glue that binds a team with their leadership and their organization. Transparent communication of goals, results, and improving service is imperative if you want employees to bring their hearts and spirit to work. Communicate with transparency, authenticity, and clarity. Whether you have a scheduled morning meeting each day, make group visits or take lunch with your team, make it a priority to make time to talk to each member of your team on a regular basis. You may be busy, but, the truth of the matter is that you really can’t afford not to communicate frequently with your team.

Effective leadership in kindergarten setting requires knowing how to communicate with all elements of the organization, including team, management, students and parents. Each group may require a different communication style. Leaders must be able to adapt based on the group they are communicating with at the time. Effective communication skills are an important aspect of any leader’s portfolio of skills and experience.

Verbal communication is the most obvious form of communication. However, research has shown people pay much less attention to the words that are said and much more attention to the actions and nonverbal cues that accompany those words. Nonverbal cues include facial expressions, use of hand motions, body posture and eye movements. Leaders should strive to always match their nonverbal cues to their words; when they do so, they are more believable and trustworthy.

A good leader adapts their communication style depending on their audience. When speaking to team members, we may need to have a much more directive style than when we are delivering a presentation at a parent evening or parents at drop-off or pick-up. Leaders should identify the audience and their characteristics and interests, then adjust their communication style based on what the audience needs and what will encourage them to react to meet the goals of the communication. Throughout the course of a day, the leader may have to switch between an authoritative or inspiring style with the team and an empathetic style with parents.

“Empathy is a universal team value that promotes high commitment and cooperation in the workplace”- Dianne Crampton, Gonzaga University

Empathy is the ability to experience and relate to the thoughts, emotions and experiences of others. Simply empathy is the ability to step into someone else’s shoes and be aware of their feelings and understand their needs.

One of the struggles that a lots of kindergartens face is retaining talented staff. One of the most common cited reasons for people leaving an organization is lack of trust and appreciation from those they report to. Empathy increases trust, a sense that team members are valued and cared about. Whether in our personal relationships or part of an organization, we will be more likely to stay when we feel like we are heard, appreciated and cared about.

In terms of team engagement, it is known that when a leader demonstrates to their team that they care, the mutuality reaction kicks in and they want to put in more effort. As leaders we should continuously look for ways to notice, feedback, and find ways to show appreciation to our team. When empathy is demonstrated at the top, it is passed down throughout the team, resulting in an increase in teamwork, a decrease in staff conflict, and a decrease in workplace disruption. This collaboration will result in better coordinated work effort and team work.

Creativity is one of the most important qualities of a modern leader. Creativity itself is the abandonment of rigid structures, a very desirable trait for individuals in leadership positions to have in an educational setting. Creative leaders can look at things in new ways and solve problems by seeing things others don’t. When you hear the word creativity you think of words like inventiveness, imagination, innovation, vision, progressiveness, originality, and resourcefulness just to name a few. All of these are characteristics of successful creative leaders who are currently changing our world today, but how does this translate to the field of education.

The role of creativity in leadership is vital to any organization’s survival in the ever-changing educational and cultural climate that exists today. There are many advantages to creative leadership within organizations, including; Problem solving, goal setting, mentoring and collaboration in the workplace and even the possibility of finding perspectives within the education.

Creative leadership helps organizations by opening new opportunities for problem solving and growth within our teams. With our wonderfully diverse staff we can take new perspectives on problems from a creative approach that can lead to new and perhaps previously unknown or unheard-of solutions. We are so lucky to have this wealth of knowledge and diversity, it is up to us as leaders to bring this out in our teams and our daily work. We as leaders need to be open to doing things a new or slightly different way than we are used to if we want our teams to grow.

When leaders approach goals from a creative point of view, they gain the ability to reach goals more easily. A creative leader sees unique paths to reach these goals. Whether it is how to increase language development or expand creative offerings for our students, the creative leader can map out a path to reach new levels of success. A creative leader will be able to reflect critically on daily practice and then with their team develop a plan of shared ideas and practices to reach their goal.

As team begins to grow and our processes change over time, some staff can often feel ostracized or forgotten. Creative leadership presents several opportunities to remedy this mindset by implementing non-traditional techniques and ideas to include people and teams into the company’s success. A creative leader might suggest having all employees brainstorm ideas from their point of view, instead of taking ideas from the leadership standpoint. Employees don’t always have the same information as management, so seeing problems or innovating ideas from within could lead to new or profound ideas to help form solutions to problems.

In order to thrive, a team or organization must grow, adapt, and create its own path to success. Creative leaders must sometimes embrace unlikely and unpopular viewpoints. Unlikely or unpopular perspectives can often allow for new and exciting avenues to be revealed, which can be used to devise new and exciting changes to help a team or kindergarten thrive and grow. This is not always successful and sometimes ideas fail or just don’t take off, but it’s the ability to try and reflect on these decisions which help a team to grow together. We can often only adapt from the mistakes we make

Creativity creates many enticing opportunities for both the leader and the team in the workplace. As a team expands, leaders often spend more time on managing the business side of things and can miss out on chances to be a creative leader to their team. So how can I become a more creative leader in a busy, thriving workplace?

Employees who possess a strong sense of accountability go above and beyond the minimum and focus their work effort on the activities that have the highest return in order to make a meaningful contribution to a team’s success. Organizations need people who take it upon themselves to honour the commitments they make to others, whether day-to-day or in challenging circumstances. It involves taking risks by confronting and holding others responsible for commitments, addressing situations with courage and sometimes making a personal sacrifice for the organisation’s benefit.

As leaders we must create culture of accountability. In order to provide a constructive work environment, leaders should provide a climate where their team is absorbed in their work or as we have mentioned before have “ownership of process”, where they feel involved in broader decision making and where they feel compelled to honour the commitments made to others. A team that can develop this climate can then also create conditions that foster accountability including; clarity, linking team members to results and knowledge of results and feedback, all of which move their culture from “just another day in Kita” to meaningful, sustained progress.

It is important that a leader models this accountability. While everyone is accountable for their own performance, management plays a significant role in modelling positive behaviours in the workforce and therefore must improve their own accountability before increased accountability can occur amongst their teams. Once we are aware of our own accountability, leaders can actively encourage accountability amongst their peers by employing different actions to help team members achieve their potential.

Successful change is one of biggest problems that most organizations face. Whether is it implementing a companywide decision or dealing with an unexpected change we know that effective leadership is essential to successful change. But what makes up this effective change-management leadership.

Most of the time this comes back to communication. If we tend to focus on the “what” we are leading ourselves down the path of failure. If we can focus on both the “what” and the “why” then we are taking the path to a better more clear and open communication.  Leaders who explained the purpose of the change and connected it to the organization’s values or explained the benefits created a stronger buy-in and urgency for the change.

We cannot execute any of these changes alone. Bringing people together to plan and execute change is critical. Successful leaders worked across boundaries, including management, team members and parents. They also included some if not all these groups in decision-making early on, strengthening their commitment to change.

Successful leaders make sure their own beliefs and behaviours supported change, too. Change is difficult, but leaders who negotiate it successfully are resilient and persistent, and willing to step outside their comfort zone. They also give more of their own time to the change effort and focused on the big picture.

Strategic change doesn’t happen on its own. Effective leaders guide the process from start to finish. Effective change leaders begin by making the case for the change they seek. This can include evaluating the context, understanding the purpose of the change, developing a clear vision and desired outcome, and identifying a common goal. Leaders must develop a strategy and a clear action plan, including priorities, timelines, tasks, structures, behaviours, and resources. It is important to identify what will change, but also what will stay the same. Translating strategy into execution is one of the most important things leaders can do.