Buckets

Do you ever feel like your mind is swarming with ideas and it feels so clear to you but the moment those thoughts leave your head they tumble into an endless jargon of nonsense? No? Ok, maybe it is just me that it happens to. Either way, there is a incessant tugging at my gut to figure this out and get clear on my direction and path. I do know where to start now but it took a lot of soul searching and brain dumping to get to a spot where I can begin.

As a leader, there is so much happening all of the time and so I think my rambling at the beginning of this post is relevant. Especially during this time where there is a pandemic, the world has shut down, and we are now leading our people virtually. We have to be clear on the direction that we are going and the audience that we are talking to. In my case, my audience is a party of one. As soon as I made that decision, that was when clarity started to surface from the foggy, muddy puddle of my thoughts. I stopped trying to serve everyone and chose to serve one. That one person’s needs brought a direction and focus to where I needed to go next. That person was made up but after spending hours choosing my ideal audience avatar, I realized that she was a lot like me. To my surprise, that one person represented a whole community.

The avatar that I created had a name, specific needs, and one purpose. I simplified my words, my reasons, my audience, and streamlined it to make it so much more doable. The organized chaos that I leaned on wasn’t serving me like I thought it was. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the fact that I could figure things out on the spot and improvise in a really effective way. But that only went so far. I needed the pathway first and in between the steps was where I could curate and improvise according to the audience I was working with.

I started to listen to my avatar and I heard the same question and need over and over again. All of a sudden, due to the Co-vid 19 virus, we were thrown into a virtual world of teaching, as a leader, how do we do this and still keep connection, mindset, and culture. In a nutshell, how do we lead our teachers through this? This was a very hard but necessary question that stirred up the flurry of thoughts of all the different things we could do in my mind again. I wanted to go back to my old ways of doing things by solving it all, spewing it out in a million different directions and then getting frustrated because no one could understand me. This was not what I was going to go back to. Instead, I stepped back and watched.

I watched what the teachers did with this new virtual way of teaching in amazement and then I started to devise a plan.

1. I started with a brain dump onto a page of all the ways I could respond in this crisis as a leader and then I chose one area of focus. That area was support.
2. Next, I gutted that word “support” and came up with so many ideas but I broke it down into three buckets: support through connection, support through assessment/curriculum, support through mindset.
3. I made a plan to pour into these three buckets each week with the “soul” purpose of supporting our staff. I did this through a batching session. I created a plan that will last til the end of June that is separated into weeks so that I am not improvising each week. I used a spreadsheet and made a point to fill these three buckets each week.
4. An example of ways that we poured into each bucket was: Week 1: Connection – We wrote hand written letters to each of them with inspirational quotes, messages of hope, and promises of support. Curriculum – We read through their lesson plans and gave them specific feedback and tried parts of their lessons on our own kids to give them a parent perspective and experiment before sending them out to the public. Mindset: We supported them with ideas and strategies that would help them when working from home. Week 2: Connection: We showcased some amazing ideas in our meetings of the work that they were doing. We made a list of students who needed some extra support and got to work helping teachers to connect with them. Curriculum: Assessment – We developed a roadmap to help them virtually assess with models, examples, and steps. Mindset: We offered some virtual meetings to just talk and did a lesson finding perspective, strength and joy in the hard times. We used a lot of Rachel Hollis and Jessie Itzler’s work. Week 3: Connection: We set up one on one zoom meetings with teachers and committed to doing a virtual breakfast each week that is optional. We all have our coffee together and hang out. Curriculum: We continued with assessment for learning with a focus on gathering and organizing the data we collect from students. Mindset: It was Holy week so we shared a lot about how Faith will come into play in this uncertain time. We had a virtual mass and rosary with the Bishop.

The plan was to chip away at our buckets each week. Next up, we plan to share a lot of motivational speakers to inspire, read, and advise, we will continue to support in assessment and virtual teaching practices by giving them clear steps that we will curate alongside our teachers, and we will build connection through joy lists, scheduling fun into our weeks, check ins with students and staff using the 3 minute miracle strategy from Jessie Itzler. We will continue stacking the positives each week to make us stronger and better humans because of all of this.

5. I look back at the end of each week, how it went, whether I need to continue with the same support in each bucket or move onto the next support for each bucket. On Sundays, I set my week for the buckets at work and my personal three buckets (family/friends, business, and mindset).

Guys, this is unchartered territory for us! We are all doing the best we can but I know that if we stack the negative thoughts over the positive that is exactly the culture we will build. It is so easy to speak how hard it is out loud and how anxiety driven this world is. But we need to speak the other side of our story more. Do not give pain a voice, always speak the positive. Pay attention to the words that you speak and to what everyone speaks and change them. We are all so vulnerable right now and it is more crucial than ever that we, as leaders, lead our staff through this with the story we speak and model. That story will come to fruition if we speak it over and over again. Nothing happens without mindset and the words that you speak as a leader.

Compliment, congratulate, and console your staff and look at ways to maximize this ride that we are on so that your culture becomes the most impactful, successful, adventurous and full of soul that it can become for the sake of the humans that are a part of that community. Go above what is expected and it will put you in a position where people root for you. This is the time to be a great human.