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Leadership 2: Leading People & Teams workbook

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Leadership 2:
Leading People & Teams

An online course from The Education Hub

This is the personal workbook of

Notes and reflections from Part 1. Positive team cultures

Your experience of workplace cultures
Notes from video – Why is a positive team culture important?
Develop your leadership

In the first Developing Leadership activity for Course 2, you are going to use a data collection tool known as a rubric to assess the quality of team culture in your early childhood setting. Take a look at the rubric here. You will see it is divided into key concepts that have been found important in creating effective team cultures, and for each of these concepts, the rubric gives descriptions of performance that enable leaders to distinguish the quality of the team culture. To be assessed as having a positive and enabling team culture, an early childhood setting would have high levels of each quality. A rubric is a great tool for reflecting upon where a setting’s strengths are, and where and how they might improve. The rubric helps guide the development of an area of team culture too, in that it can help leaders to identify exactly what they might work to improve to increase the quality of team culture in their place.

  • Open the rubric, and print it or use it on screen. Read the descriptions of performance for each area and think about them in relation to your team. In the spaces below, use the descriptions of performance to decide which level you would ascribe to your early childhood setting and team. What evidence (anecdotes, examples) do you have to justify your assessment? You might like to highlight the box or sentences that most closely match what you perceive and believe about your team (note you may highlight different parts within different boxes).
  • If you like, ask a colleague or team member to also complete the rubric exercise, and compare your assessments.
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Reflections on birds flocking
Notes on unpacking the rubric
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Look over your notes in relation to positivity, contribution, benevolence, and respect.

If you like, you can rearrange your notes to reflect this, or draw/create an image that reflects an integrated sense of an effective team culture using these concepts.

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Notes on Creating positive team cultures
Notes on the leader’s role in team culture

Bruce makes some clear recommendations for positive team cultures here.

Questions about interventions
Connecting birds flocking to your practice

Think back to the flocking birds that demonstrated the mutual influences through which the practice of flocking is developed. You might remember that there were three rules by which the birds abided in order to coordinate their action and maintain the flock. Decide if you can use the idea of three (or more) principles for you as the leader that might support you to create a more positive and productive team culture in your place. You might draw on the values of positivity, contribution, benevolence, respect, and connectivity.

You might like to talk about this idea in a team meeting!

Mapping your vision

As we move through Course 2, we want you to collect some ideas for the kinds of positive change you would like to see in your people and teams. So now, as you complete this part, look again at the rubric for team culture.

Take some time to really imagine and write about how your team would function if you were able to achieve some of these goals for team culture. How would teamwork with children look? How would staff meetings look? What would you see when team members arrived and left each day? Write down a description or create an artwork that expresses what you imagined.

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After you’ve recorded your ideas, look over them again and pick out the key ideas to form a summary. Write this summary of how you imagine your people and teams functioning if your goals for enhancing your team culture were met in the right-hand side of the first row of the blank rubric below. These notes form the beginning of a vision for leading people and teams that we will add to in each subsequent part. In the final part of the course, we will use this rubric to provide you with a self-assessment that you can use to help you progress towards your vision for leading people and teams. For now, leave the middle three columns blank, and complete only the final column.

My Vision
Team Culture
Individual wellbeing
Conflict culture
Leaderful practice
Professional learning
Courageous conversations
Mentoring
Professional learning bubble

After the meeting, you might like to think privately about the following questions:

Thoughts and reflections from Part 2. Teacher wellbeing

Develop your leadership
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Notes on Why teacher wellbeing is important
Reflection on toxic positivity
Notes on trauma-informed leadership
Notes and reflections on empathy
Reflection on psychological states
Notes on practical strategies
Reflections on promoting wellbeing
Mapping your vision

As we move through Course 2, we want you to collect some ideas for the kinds of positive change you would like to see in your people and teams. Spend some time thinking now about how well your practices, processes, and culture currently support team and individual wellbeing. Also think about whether there are any connections between how well you perceive them being supported, and the kind of data that you collected about your leadership behaviours in the Developing Leadership activity.

Spend some time, as you did in the last part, imagining what your people and teams would look like and how they would feel if you were to achieve your goals for improving individual wellbeing. In particular, think about how your leadership would feel like to them? What would they feel in your presence? Think about what you would like your team to say about you if you were to collect anecdotes about your leadership from them again. Finally, what would you see and feel that would let you know that everyone’s wellbeing was supported? How would you see everyone in the team supporting each other’s wellbeing?

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Personal learning bubble

Notes and reflections from Part 3. Constructive conflict

Develop your leadership

For this activity, we want you to analyse the current ‘culture of conflict’ in your early childhood setting – in other words, the way that your team perceive and respond to conflict. To do this, you first need to make a list of a number of conflicts, past and present, that you have noted, ignored(!), or resolved in your setting. Try to come up with 6-10 conflicts. If you don’t have these experiences to reflect upon, you could think about other contexts in which you have experienced conflict, including your family, or another social group. They don’t need to be major conflicts – it could be something as simple as a disagreement about whose turn it is to unload the dishwasher. You might write a short description or anecdote to describe each conflict, using a post-it note or small card for each.

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Then, in response to each of the questions below, try to categorise each example. For example, in response to the question ‘did this conflict involve open and honest communication to the people involved, or was it covert, hidden, or ignored?’, you can sort your post-it notes into two sets, those that reflect open conflict and those that constitute more hidden forms of conflict. It is okay if it is not always easy to determine which category to place a particular example in – the idea is to get a rough of idea of which conflict practices are most prevalent.

Here are your questions for analysing the conflicts. Did this conflict involve (remember to note how many of the examples fall into each category before moving to the next one):

E.g:

  • open and honest communication to the people involved, or was it covert, hidden, or ignored? 4 open and honest but 6 ignored.

Use your observations to draw some conclusions about the way that conflict is perceived and handled in your early childhood setting (or the family or social group you chose to analyse). It may be that there are different approaches to different forms of conflict, or amongst different groups. Can you use these conclusions to make a list of the unspoken rules about conflict in your place? For example: ‘Everyone needs to pick a side’ or ‘Conflicts are a natural and healthy part of teamwork’. How are these rules learned and communicated, do you think?

Reflection on conflict

Think about a specific family or workplace conflict that you have experienced, especially one that went unresolved.

Be really honest with yourself.

Notes from A positive culture for conflict
Conflicts for learning
Preventing conflict
Reflection on your values

Think about your values and what they suggest for the way you might think about and work with conflict. If you took our first Leadership course, ‘Leading Authentically’, you might like to look back at the values you listed on the planning and evaluation tool you created there, or your rainbow of values from Part 2 of Course 1. If not, take a look at these instructions, adapted from Course 1, for generating a list of values. 

Reflection on your approach to conflict

How often do your conflict behaviours reflect a learning orientation to approaching and resolving conflict? Specifically, how often do you:

Communication blocks

What are some of the behaviours that block communication and collaboration? Write your ideas below.
What kinds of behaviours support communication and collaboration? Write your ideas below.
Notes on When conflict is not constructive

Drawing on Denise’s idea that sometimes, before rushing to solve a problem, we should spend time reflecting on our interpretation of the problem, think about a person whose behaviour (now or in the past) you have found difficult.

Noes from how to support people to resolve conflict
From dysfunction and division to connection and understanding
Using a mediator

Notes and reflections from Part 4. Distributing leadership. Leaderful practice

Develop your leadership
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Collective vs positional leadership
Reflections on distributed leadership
Relational leadership
Reflections on collective leadership
Leaderful practice and your values
The four Cs

The aim of collective leadership is that everyone shares in the activity of providing leadership.

Promoting leaderful practice in team-oriented settings

A first step in developing leaderful practices and collective leadership in your context involves working on yourself, and ensuring that you have the skills and dispositions to enact and support leaderful practice. Spend some time now truly reflecting on your ability and inclination to give up control.

Promoting distributed leadership
Mapping your vision

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