Leading & Developing High Performance

Today we have a great post from Ali’s daughter, Katy Stewart, who is a freelance writer. You can follow Katy Stewart on Twitter or read her travel blog, Starry-Eyed Travels.

What do teachers know about how to run a business?

How can teaching a group of children be anything like managing a team of adults?

I’m not saying that teachers would necessarily be good at running a business, but on a day-to-day basis, they manage 30 individuals, all with differing needs, abilities and working styles. Their job is to get the best they can out of each one of them and facilitate them to achieve their potential, encouraging them to work both independently and cohesively as a team, depending on the situation. Would you like the members of your team to achieve their potential and work effectively, both independently and collaboratively? In that case, some rules of the classroom might just be applicable to your workplace.

1. Know your team

The first rule of teaching is that you have to know your children very well indeed, and get to know them quickly. If you don’t know each child’s temperament, their unique skill set and their preferred way of working, things very quickly go wrong. If the understanding between you breaks down, the children become frustrated, there is no trust and very quickly, in a primary classroom, anarchy breaks out.

Adults, who have generally had time to pick up social skills and who risk being fired if they throw a tantrum, may not react in the same way, but if you do not know the individual members of the team and maximise the talents and skills they bring, then your team is not going to work very effectively. If there is a relationship of trust and mutual respect and understanding, you will know how best to motivate them. For both adults in a workplace and children in a classroom, this increases self-esteem, productivity and quality of work.

2. Explain things clearly

Have you ever come out of a meeting less sure about what you were supposed to be doing than when you went in? Communication is vital and if explanations are not clear, then all sorts of problems occur. In the classroom, children will do the first thing you tell them.

If you say: “I’d like you to draw a diagram…” they will instantly start opening books, getting out pencils, fighting over rulers, and will not listen to the rest of the explanation about what they actually have to do. In teaching, you start with the objective: what you want them to achieve as the final outcome. Then you explain the first step in the process of how to achieve that and let them begin working. You give them information in short bites, as they need it, because if you drone on for 20 minutes, they will lose interest and start throwing things. Anarchy reigns, once again.

Again, adults will (hopefully) not react in quite the same way to a convoluted explanation of a task, but even if they look like they’re still listening, their minds will be elsewhere. Professionals with a bit of life experience will not need as much direction as children, so you don’t have to check up on them every 15 minutes, but make sure the outcome you want them to achieve is crystal clear. Give as much or as little specific direction as you think is needed and be available for them to check brief points with you. It is far quicker and more efficient than explaining everything five times over.

3. “Magpie”

How to be a magpie is a lesson that trainee teachers learn very early on in their careers. There is too much to do to waste hours coming up with a new way to teach a lesson on volcanoes if someone else has already come up with a fabulous idea of how to do it.

Children learn to be magpies as well, whether this is sharing a great word they have learnt, using somebody’s explanation to help solve a maths problem, or looking up a top tip for designing a Roman vase.

In the workplace, you can have an environment of collaboration when it comes to ideas. Rather than fiercely protecting a good idea so that nobody else will ‘steal’ it, share it; with other people’s perspectives and thoughts it will be honed to be even better. At some point in return, you will be on the receiving end of a great idea, so this kind of collaboration can only be a good thing for everybody. This does not mean simply taking someone’s idea and shoehorning it into your own work, but adapting it for your situation.

This is the key to being a magpie – identifying a stroke of brilliance when you see it then adapting that raw idea into something of your own. In other words, don’t waste your energy reinventing the wheel; spend your time making it the perfect wheel for your needs.

The amazing thing is that when you have a really good atmosphere of collaboration, ideas zip and zing all the time, everybody chips in. You can hardly identify the original ideas in the finished ‘product’ – just like you cannot discretely point out the butter, flour and eggs in a baked cake – but everyone feels a satisfaction that they played some part in making it happen.

Teachers aim for this kind of classroom environment and if they achieve it on a sustained basis, it gives them immense job satisfaction. It comes if you have good relationships, a trusting atmosphere, clearly explained objectives and an ethos of collaboration. The energy in a room of 30 engaged, interested, motivated children is just incredible. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t “magpie” these lessons from the classroom and inject some of the same energy and satisfaction into your workplace. It will make it a wonderful place to be.