My Teachers have spoken – on my Leadership

2012 is my first year as the People Developer and so I wanted to spend time to assess my current leadership level. Both teachers under my charge were asked to fill out an electronic survey anonymously in July. Below is a “summary” of my leadership survey result which indicate that my current leadership level is at level 2 (Permission: People follow me because they want to) with both teachers. 

Being also my first year as the People Developer (PD) to both my teachers, the survey results showed that I have managed to win over my teachers to level 2 and that both of them has allowed themselves to be won over.

In retrospect, below are five behaviors and beliefs which I thought are related to my current level of leadership.

1. Accept my teachers as a part of leading – Learn to accept responsibility to help my teachers and deal with messy side of my teachers as well

2. Getting teachers to understand where I am coming from – Recognize that I try to balance between people and work. While I put people ahead of academic results, students’ learning is ahead of people.

3. Become my teacher’s Encourager – Give my teachers confidence and make them feel good about themselves

4. Express value for each teacher – Take time and come up with positive things to honestly say of my teachers

5. Evaluate where I am with my teachers – Set aside time to get to know my teachers better

The survey results also indicated areas where I will need to give my attention when working with my teachers to improve my leadership ability to level 3 and 4. Below are two areas of improvement which I will focus on this year. These include working with individual teachers and providing specific processes to help individual teachers improving her teaching capability.

- Although the teachers felt that as a team, we have become more productive. There is a need to develop individual teachers so that the teacher can become more productive as a result. I will need to develop my individual teacher as well so that she can lead together.

- Although the teachers saw that I have attempted to model and helped them to develop. I need also to equip my teachers with specifics skills so as to enable them to do their job and do them well. Hence, I will endeavor my mini-observation using the five-step equipping process suggested by John Maxwell namely

Step 1 – I do it (competence)

Step 2 – I do it and you are with me (demonstration)

Step 3 – You do it and I am with you (coaching)

Step 4 – You do it (empowerment)

Step 5 – You do it and someone is with you (reproduction)

Keeping this survey results in mind and focusing on the two areas of improvement, namely working with individual teachers and providing specific processes to help individual teachers improve teaching capability, I hope to better develop my leadership skills so as I advance both my teachers and team.