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

What kinds of adjectives or labels would you use to describe different workplace cultures that you have experienced (in early childhood or elsewhere)? What kinds of behaviours created and were sustained by those cultures?

Notes from video – Why is a positive team culture important?

Key words that summarise the particular quality that each speaker emphasises as important to positive team cultures in early childhood settings.

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).

Connectivity Poor Developing Effective Strong What evidence (anecdotes, examples) do you have to justify your assessment for connectivity? Positivity Poor Developing Effective Strong What evidence (anecdotes, examples) do you have to justify your assessment for positivity? Contribution and purposefulness Poor Developing Effective Strong What evidence (anecdotes, examples) do you have to justify your assessment for contribution and purposefulness? Benevolence Poor Developing Effective Strong What evidence (anecdotes, examples) do you have to justify your assessment for benevolence? Respect Poor Developing Effective Strong What evidence (anecdotes, examples) do you have to justify your assessment for respect??

• If you like, ask a colleague or team member to also complete the rubric exercise, and compare your assessments.

Which areas are areas of strength? Which are areas of development? You might want to take a photo of your feedback and upload it here:

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Reflections on birds flocking

Can you extrapolate the insights from flocking birds as a complex adaptive system to interactions and behaviours of people in early childhood settings? In relation to an early childhood team, what is an example of people being influenced by the team culture? What is an example of a person influencing the team culture? You might think about a particular aspect of practice here, such as the way people greet each other in the morning, or the way they make their coffee, how staff meetings are structured, or what people commonly do when responding to a family complaint, for example.

Notes on unpacking the rubric

Notes on positivity Notes on contribution and purposefulness Notes on benevolence Notes on respect If you took notes offline, you may wish to upload a copy here:

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Look over your notes in relation to positivity, contribution, benevolence, and respect.

Which of these qualities of interaction would you choose as the most important? Can you spot the interconnections between these concepts? For example, is there one concept that might subsume the others?

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.

You might like to upload your notes or image here:

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Notes on Creating positive team cultures

Which qualities are being promoted by each strategy? What is the likely impact on team members of each strategy?

Notes on the leader’s role in team culture

Bruce makes some clear recommendations for positive team cultures here.

Can you describe your understanding of these, before reading on for our summary?

Questions about interventions

Reflective questions:

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.

Your principles: What would happen if everyone adhered to these rules? What kind of team culture might be created?

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.

What strikes you as the most important areas to work on? Are there any aspects of team culture that are holding you back in being an effective team? Are there existing strengths and potentials you can build on? How would this look?

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.

Add your description here: Or upload your artwork here:

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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:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using rubric tools to evaluate practice? In what ways can a rubric tool be useful for developing a shared understanding of desired practice? What kinds of processes and structures for the use of a rubric tool would you provide for teams when using a rubric to evaluate practice in your setting?

Thoughts and reflections from Part 2. Teacher wellbeing

Develop your leadership

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Notes on Why teacher wellbeing is important

Examples of positive language used:

Reflection on toxic positivity

What do you think of the concept of toxic positivity that is introduced in the reading? Is this something you have experienced personally? What might be a better way to support someone who is experiencing stress and difficulty? Examples of toxic positivity:

Notes on trauma-informed leadership

What values are innate in the use of trauma-informed practices? How do these fit with your values? How do Alistair, Jacqui and Rachael want individuals to feel as a result of their interactions?

Notes and reflections on empathy

What strategies do you use to help bridge differences between your own identity and experience, and those of the individuals you work with? Reflect on the members of your existing team. To what extent do you think you have achieved a state of trusting relationship with each team member, in which they can be vulnerable and freely share personal and cultural values and beliefs? According to Jeanette, what does, and what doesn’t, count as an empathetic approach?

Reflection on psychological states

What connections can you make between self-efficacy, resilience, hope and optimism, and engagement? Are some of these concepts more important in your context, or can you link these psychological states in ways that create a hierarchy of concepts?

Notes on practical strategies

What kind of rewards do you think different individuals in your team currently enjoy often? Are there other forms of rewards that you think they might value?

Reflections on promoting wellbeing

Although the anecdotes and examples collected were related to one of the key areas of team culture, how do they also connect to the recommended practices for supporting individuals (showing empathy, supporting feelings of self-efficacy, resilience, hope, optimism, and engagement)? Where might you like to focus your reflective practice in order to support individuals better?

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.

What aspects of your leadership of people and teams do you see as a strength, and how are these linked to team and individual wellbeing? How could you enhance these further? What aspects would you like improve?

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?

Describe your goal for wellbeing here: Or upload your artwork here:

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Personal learning bubble

Your reflections:

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.

You might want to take a picture of your notes and upload them here:

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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.

• open and honest communication to the people involved, or was it covert, hidden, or ignored? • respectful discussion or direct/indirect arguments, abuse, and accusation? • gentle expression of emotions about issues, intense and reactive expression, or complete repression of emotion? • everyone in discussion together or individuals taking ‘sides’? • participants in the conflict feeling empowered and capable of resolving the conflict, or recourse to an outside party as mediator? • resolution in a way agreeable to all involved, or in a way in which one party to the conflict appeared to ‘win’ over the other? • resolution that enabled the people involved to put the conflict behind them, or ongoing resentment and discontent?

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?

The rules of conflict in my workplace:

Reflection on conflict

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

How did it impact you personally? If the conflict went on for a time without resolution, what impact did that have on you personally? What impact did it have on others and on group dynamics?

Be really honest with yourself.

How openly do you address conflict? Do you experience any feelings of hesitation and doubt that impact on your approach to addressing conflict? If so, what values and beliefs do you think underpin these feelings?

Notes from A positive culture for conflict

Why does Denise believe we should embrace and even encourage conflict? Do you agree?

Conflicts for learning

Thinking about a current (or recent) conflict in which you are involved, what words would you use to describe how you feel and what you do? Reflection:

Preventing conflict

What is the difference between early and regular checking-in conversations and a performance management conversation?

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. 

Is there a conflict between the way you habitually go about handling conflict, and what your values suggest?

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:

• acknowledge the contributions of people with whom you are in conflict to your learning and improvement? never sometimes often always • discuss disagreements openly, and not allow them to be swept under the rug? never sometimes often always • use questions to encourage people to talk more and potentially reveal the underlying issues triggering the conflict? never sometimes often always • make your own disagreements explicit, and respond to those in conflict with you directly, honestly, and respectfully? never sometimes often always • recognise common ground with people with whom you are in conflict? never sometimes often always • engage openly in self-criticism about your role in conflict, admitting behaviours and beliefs that have not been helpful? never sometimes often always • publicly draw attention to avoidant, aggressive, and passive-aggressive behaviours in yourself and others, and discuss whether they are helpful? never sometimes often always • take criticism as an invitation to learn, and listen most intently to what is being said and what is meant? never sometimes often always • ask others about how you are interacting, and how they would like you to interact with them in future? never sometimes often always • focus on forgiveness and reconciliation, within yourself, with team members, and with people with whom you are in conflict? never sometimes often always • listen closely for signs of internal tension within the team, and try to draw out conflicts before they occur? never sometimes often always • acknowledge the importance of avoiding public or private insults and accusations, and openly resist the temptation to fall into ‘us versus them’ thinking? never sometimes often always • demonstrate an ongoing intention to resolve conflicts with positive and enduring outcomes by translating all insights and agreements into specific actionable steps that can be observed and measured? never sometimes often always • actively promote values that encourage resolution, without imposing them on others? never sometimes often always

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.

What specifically is the behaviour you find difficult? Reflect on why this is so disturbing to you. Do you think others in the team are bothered by the same behaviour? If not, why not?

Noes from how to support people to resolve conflict

Words that denote the values that sit behind the steps:

From dysfunction and division to connection and understanding

Take notes on the four steps:

Using a mediator

What values is the process based on?

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

Develop your leadership

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Collective vs positional leadership

What are the different characteristics of collective and positional leadership?

Reflections on distributed leadership

What kinds of leadership opportunities, outside of formal positional roles, are available for teachers in your early childhood setting? To what extent are they relational, emerging purely from interactions between teachers in the moment, and to what extent are they more formally distributed or delegated? Are these examples of distributed leadership or of leaderful practice?

Relational leadership

What do you understand by the term relational leadership? Do you think leaderful practice is a viable alternative to distributed leadership? Or might they be complementary? (If so, in what ways?) For example, what potential is there for a teacher with a distributed leadership role to be supporting and enhancing leaderful practice in the rest of the team, and in what ways might leaderful practice lead to more formally distributed leadership roles?

Reflections on collective leadership

What qualities and practices do you think need to be strong in teams in order for leaderful practice and collective leadership to emerge? What kind of team culture (thinking back to Part 1) do you think supports collective leadership? Can you think of an example in your early childhood setting where leadership has emerged from multiple team members, collectively and concurrently?

Leaderful practice and your values

Revisit the values that you drew together to inform your personal leadership style in Course 1 (or, if you haven’t taken Course 1, you can use the values list that you drew up for the exercise in the last part). How well do these four features of leaderful practice align with your values? If there is high congruence, this may mean that leaderful practice will be an important tool in your authentic leadership of people and teams.

The four Cs

Write down one thing you noticed for each of the four qualities: collectivity, concurrence, collaboration, compassion.

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

What do you think is needed to fulfil that aim? Is it a case of leaders ’stepping back’, or is there a role for positional leaders? What might that be?

Promoting leaderful practice in team-oriented settings

What does the reading suggest are the key implications for positional leaders?

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.

Is this something you can genuinely relinquish? Are you ready to share control with others? Do you believe in the capabilities of your team? In all areas of practice? Are you prepared to put your own opinions and ideas up for debate and learn from others? Alternatively, do you feel that at this stage a delegation form of distributed leadership might be more appropriate for yourself and/or your team? If this is the case, could you use delegation as a stepping stone to distributed leadership and leaderful practice?

Promoting distributed leadership

What are some of the key actions for promoting shared leadership in early childhood teams?

Mapping your vision

What changes do you think are needed to promote or strengthen leaderful practice in your community? What could you and your team do differently to be more leaderful in practice?

Learning bubbles

Would you have placed each observational note in the same column? Is there potential for an observation to be placed in another column, or in more than one column? Would you have placed each observational note in the same column? Is there potential for an observation to be placed in another column, or in more than one column? What do you conclude about leaderful practice for this group of people? What leads you to say this? Could there be another way to interpret this data (for example, could there be contextual reasons impacting on what was observed)? How do you see your data differently as a result of this paired activity?