The Assistant Principal Podcast

 2022-10-21_68_Five for Friday Final Audio Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast I'm your host, Frederick Busky. The goal of this podcast is to improve life and leadership for assistant principals. Today's episode of five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of October seventeenth through twenty first. With a caveat. Although we did indeed publish these emails this week, they are actually repeats from our list of greatest hits. This week as well as next week, I am in Kenya and so we just thought that this would be a fun way to kind of cover our bases, but also still continue to provide you some value while I'm away playing and learning and being in schools in Kenya. So I hope you enjoy this recap. The topic of Monday's message was leadership, isolation, and I hope you're subscribing to the daily list because one of my all time favorite photographs was included as part of this daily email and it is a black and white photo of somebody standing in a puddle with a box over their head. When I first saw this photo, it just made me think of the isolation and the loneliness that can come with leadership. I didn't really go into anything in the email that talked about how to break that, break that isolation down, but I just asked readers to come sit with that and think about their own feelings. Think about how you can take care of yourself. And break down some of that isolation. You see things and you say why, but I dream things that never were, and I say why not? That quotes from George Bernard Shaw in 1949 and the topic of Tuesday's email is vision. I thought this was a nice juxtaposition from Monday's email of a leader with a box over their head. I have to admit that I have a love hate relationship with vision. I used to believe very strongly and passionately that it was a leader's job to provide vision. And then I had a leader that came into my organization and completely trashed it. In my mind he trashed it and he had his own vision. And despite there being lots of people that had invested many years in the organization, he came in from the outside and just imposed his vision over everything. And that constituted a lot of destruction of programs and really damaging people. So I've become. Kind of very skeptical about the idea that leaders come in and impose a vision from outside. I think what we need to be focusing more on is the development of shared vision. And when we talk about visionary leadership, I think what we really should be talking about is the expectation that leaders can come in and create space for people to talk about their own dreams and goals and aspirations, and that leaders can facilitate a group of people sharing that and finding the commonality and developing a vision that is common to the participants. The people within the organization and that then the leader can really give voice to that and help keep people focused on that vision. Speaking of vision, Wednesday's email was about the difference between Mission, vision and goals, and I told the story of a trip that Pam and I took in the summer of 20. 21 So Pam is my wife, the other doctor Buskey. And in the summer of 2021 we jumped in an SUV and drove across country visiting all kinds of parks and things. And so I used that trip to talk about the mission, which the mission was to reconnect with family and friends and to have memorable experiences in nature. That's what we were going out to do. Vision is about the outcome resulting from enacting or fulfilling your mission. So our goal was to reconnect with family that were, excuse me, our mission was to reconnect with family and have memorable experiences. The vision was that we would drive home renewed in multiple ways, with a new set of memories and a great appreciation for our country, its people, and its beauty. Now, goals are the achievements that will help you fulfill your mission. So for our trip, some of our goals were backpack in the Badlands Backpacking Glacier Park, visit my friend Nat and Klamath Falls, spend time with my mom in San Francisco, and visit other family on the way home. Now, as it turned out, we did not meet all those goals. Yet we still achieved the mission and we still fulfilled our vision. So remember, the goals were places we would visit and things we would do. The mission was to reconnect with family and have memorable experiences, and the vision was that those experiences would leave us renewed and connected when we got home. So how could we achieve the mission and the vision if we didn't achieve the goals? Well, what happened was the summer of 2021 there was a massive heat wave across the northwest. And so some of the things that we wanted to do we just, we got cooked out of and so we had to change our plans. So we wound up not backpacking in the Badlands and we didn't backpack in Glacier Park. But that's OK, because one of the things that we sometimes do is we get so focused on goals that we forget why we have the goals, right? The goals are just kind of measurement steps on the way to achieving the mission and the vision. And there are a lot of times when the goals stop making sense for whatever reason. So when you're thinking about your organization and the mission and the vision and goals, yes, you want to attend to the goals, but don't get too focused on the goals. Always check and make sure that you're actually making progress on the mission. Because that's the most important thing. The title of Thursday's email was are you a force multiplier? And this email was inspired by something my good friend and colleague Doctor Robert Maddox sent me about the human touch and the human touch as being a force multiplier. The idea here is that connecting with people builds community, and that community creates strength, resilience and hope. So I offered three things that people could do. Each one of those would take less than three minutes and challenged readers to execute on one of these things to create connectivity and build community and thereby be a force multiplier because leaders are force multipliers. So the first thing was to me, call or email someone that you worked with this week and express gratitude. The second thing was to get together with another leader and identify a strategic behavior that you can implement next week. For example, engaging in five minute coaching and commit to being each other's accountability partners in executing that strategy. And the third one was a little bit selfish. I encouraged people to email me with an example of how something this week helped you to help someone else or a topic that you'd like me to write about in the future. And I do hope, if you are on the email list and you got this email on thursday, I hope you acted. I hope you took that opportunity to be intentional and to do something to reach out and create connectivity and build community with someone, whether that's me or somebody else. And if you're not on the email list and you're hearing this now on a Friday afternoon or maybe a Saturday. I encourage you to challenge yourself me call or email someone you worked with this week and just express gratitude. Work with another leader and think about a strategy that you could use next week to build community, build connection with people, and then hold each other accountable for doing it or. When you're done with this podcast, go ahead and email me and tell me something about this past week that you did to help someone else or send me a topic that you'd like me to write about. And finally, on Friday, we revisited the idea of m - V divided by E motivation equals value divided by effort. There was a graphic included in that you could print out and put up by your computer or on a wall somewhere. I just think M - V divided by E is so powerful. I won't elaborate on it hugely, but the idea is that increased value, decreased effort leads to increased motivation. And if we want people to be more motivated, what we can do is either increase value, decrease effort, or do both of those things. And I think where the power lies in this is that it gets us out of the judgment game. If we're trying to lead something or do something and people aren't following, people aren't doing what we want them to do. It's not about them being lazy or unmotivated or resistant. It's simply a mathematical formula. If people aren't doing what we want them to do, it's because that the given value or what they perceive as a value is not worth the perceived effort. And so we need to stop judging and start moving into problem solving mode and figure out how do we increase value? How do we decrease effort? So that's the week. I can't tell you that there's a single big takeaway. I think it's just really about being intentional and being mindful, checking in with yourself. Checking on that isolation, but then also checking in on other people and working to build community and connect to think about as a leader. How you're bringing people together and helping them articulate a vision and how you're expressing a shared vision and then got not getting too hung up on the goals. Yeah, their guideposts, but sometimes we need to go around them or go off in a different direction, direction. What's really important is the mission. Ok, this wraps up this week's five for Friday rendition of the Assistant Principal podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe and rate this podcast. Rating the podcast really does help other people find it. I'm always trying to improve this show, so if you have feedback for me, please email at frederick buskey dot com. Or if you want to share something else, one of those stories about how you helped someone this past week or direction that you'd like me to write about that would be great. If you'd like to find out more about what I'm doing to support assistant principals, you can head over to my website at frederickhusky.com backslash the assistant. Principal i'm frederick busky. I hope you'll join me next time for the Assistant Principal podcast cheers.