Hard decisions become a part of the job description, let’s be honest. However, hard decisions have to come with a backstage pass to tell the story behind the your decision. In this post, we are going to get real familiar with hard decisions that leaders have to make by taking a backstage pass tour of the pathway that should happen in order to make a hard decision a little less, well….”hard lined and transactional.”
Think of a music concert. Everyone gets to see the magic, the music, and the performance for face value. They see the confident band up there making it look so easy. What they don’t see is the hard decisions and the work that came before that concert looked so polished and seamless. Decisions are kind of that way too. Your community sees the decision at face value and sometimes they love it and other times, they hate it. Especially if it is a tough decision that impacts them in a way that they didn’t want. Especially if it is a nudge to get them out of their comfort zone. They need a backstage pass to that difficult decision so they can see just how much thought went into it before it was made. If they see the behind the scenes glance, they may just trust you a little more, so that when it comes to making decisions, they know that you always have their best interests at heart.
Just because you have to make hard decision doesn’t mean that you don’t care about your teacher community or just care about getting things done….unless you present it in that way. I am going to teach you a few tricks to get that trust injection and perhaps make those hard decisions a little less transactional and a lot more transformational (through making the promise happen) and instructional (promoting that vision that provides continual growth).
If you stay intentional with knowing what is right and you genuinely do listen to what your teachers ultimately want and need, and if you take the time to slow down to make sure that what you are doing is going to actually elevate the majority of your teacher’s experiences and help them get the transformation that they have wanted, then sometimes you’ve got to make decisions that aren’t going to please everybody. This is all part of the hard stuff that comes with leadership. But like everything else I teach, a system and a plan will help to inject more trust. With any system, that I teach, I always research as well as combine my learning from years of trial and error to ensure I am giving you my best value. The two gurus that I researched for this blog post are Amy Porterfield and Josh Palmer. They taught me a lot about what I needed to know and celebrated what we were already doing within our school. Validation and learning new things are eeeeeeverything! Let’s go backstage and see what we find…
- Your loyal subscribers to your messaging. Yep, they are key. They already know your intentions and the thought that goes behind any of your decisions. They have been listening, watching, and collaborating with you for a long time and so you don’t have to work as hard to get them to trust you. They already do. What a gift! But it is also because of the hard work that you were doing as a leader to get them to trust you. They are the key to helping you get others to see behind the decisions you are making as a leader. They are essential for sustaining growth. Those conversations in the hall that happen after a hard decision has been made really affect the overall culture. If you have loyal subscribers already trusting your decisions, they are the ones who can navigate and help to sustain communication and reasoning behind your decision making as a leader. They help to calm the residue of the decision.
- Your habit, behaviors, and leadership style that you are known for. Think of it almost like your brand. Think about how you respond or react and decide on your intentions that you want to surface more than those immediate shot gun reactions that we tend to go to in hard decisions or conversations. What do you want to be known for? What is the patterns of your moods? Which mood do you want to surface the most and be portrayed to your community? This is a really hard one but oh so worth it!
- Listen to your community and meet them right where they are at. Hear what they are struggling with and consider that when you are deciding tough things or setting up expectations. Put yourself in their shoes. Really think about who your community is, what inspires them, how they think, etc. Next, think about who they are not. I mean dig deep and really get backstage behind those pain points to their emotions. Put the community before the decision. Suit the decision to their needs of who they are at that moment. Think about the skeptics and how you might get them to see how your decision may not feel like a good fit right now but if they put in the work with your support, how things might start to happen. Just because they don’t see the light right now doesn’t mean that down the road they won’t see it. This is because of the backstage pass of loyal subscribers where you took the time to show them the story behind your decisions. It is because you took time to celebrate the wins, that they may eventually start to feel that you are less transactional and more transformational in your intentions. They may start to believe in and work towards the transformation!
- Give them a backstage pass to your story, your messaging, and your decision making. They need to know this so that it doesn’t just become another transaction from the top down. Be transparent and vulnerable. Let them see the process that happened as you thought about the decision or messaging. They will learn from that and perhaps implement a version of your system in decision making into their own life or teaching. Any time a person can see the story behind something spurs them emotionally in some way will inspire them to take action. I have a great example of this that just happened to me this past week. I saw Jessica Alba on instagram this week. I am a loyal subscriber already to her because her messaging was more transformational than transactional so she had me already. However, it wasn’t that that got me to take action. She wasn’t doing her usual Hollywood posts, but rather she was getting a little raw and talking about aging and skin care. She was trying to sell her product, let’s be honest. But I had seen her skin care line many times and had no intentions of ever purchasing it, until she gave me a backstage pass to her story. The video was of her talking about her fears of aging and then she simply started showing us how she takes care of her skin, talking about her pain points and struggles along the way. She washed her face while she spoke which for some reason made her seem more real. That was what sold me on her message and product. It was her backstage pass! As leaders, the power of a backstage pass can be a game changer to show them how they can transform and get results.
- Streamline and celebrate. Focusing on less priorities vs. more will lessen the overwhelm and frustration behind your messaging and decision making. Tell a story behind the process of your messaging and decision making rather than just telling them what they have to do. Make it raw and real. Slow down. Look up. Notice the work that is already happening. I bet it is right in front of you but you hadn’t yet set the intention to look for it. See the walls and work that are posted there. Listen to the learning as you walk through the halls. Make space to go inside the classrooms and write/post about the wins that are happening there. Make the celebrations visible in any way you can. Post it on a school wide google classroom, leave a sticky note on the door of what you noticed, make an announcement, give them a shout-out during your meetings. By doing these little things, you’ll be amazed at how you can shift your community to the loyal subscriber side that becomes leaders themselves. This is worth every second. Trust me. It makes them feel like you see them and that their hard work is not all for nothing. What they are already doing is good and then when it comes to you pushing them a little, they trust you. They know the intention isn’t to change everything but rather to move to the next step. Celebrate aaaallll the wins however and whenever you can. It is a massive boost to the morale and to the trust behind your messaging and decisions.
Ok, now let’s talk about the ones who are not happy no matter what you do. That is going to happen, especially when you are making hard decisions. But if you stay intentional with knowing what is right and you genuinely do listen to what your teachers ultimately want and need, growth will happen. If you take the time to slow down and narrow your focus to really make sure that what you are doing and the decisions you have been making are going to actually elevate the majority of your teacher community’s experiences and help them get the transformation that you have been promising, you will see growth and trust there too. Sometimes you’ve got to make decisions that aren’t going to please everybody. I think at the end of the day, where you’re able to sit with that and sit in integrity is if you’ve done a really good job of always putting your teachers first; always thinking about them in terms of the decisions you’re making, what’s best for them, and how can you support them. You need to think about what’s best for your whole school and not just for individuals.
The golden rule behind being a transformational/instructional leader is to do what you promised to do for them and help them to feel that transformation through the instructional work that you helped them to do. The transparency of a backstage pass will help, it may not solve it all, but it will once again place you in a spot where more people will root for you because you are showing them your heart behind your decisions. Yes, there are times that hard decisions feel transactional because a result needs to happen but don’t forget that with any result, there is the backstage of a transformation happening. Give them that backstage pass.
Want more?
I have a free guide that shows you a few ways to give them some backstage passes and get that trust injection that you have been looking for. Download my free “Cultivating A Thriving Culture Using the Three Bucket System” here!
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“Proven Strategies to Create Lifelong .” Hosted by Amy Porterfield and Josh Palmer, Online Marketing Made Easy, Podcast, 28 Jan. 2021.
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