2 practices to refresh and reset relationships with your team

One thing I’ve come to appreciate as a leader is the power of new beginnings – the ability to create moments to reset, restart and recommit to our team’s values and goals. Creating those opportunities at the start of a new term in our building isn’t exactly the same as the conversations I had when I first got here. But I’ve found that repeated investment in deep listening and continuous feedback, in a similar spirit to my first year, are key to improving staff experience and sourcing actionable solutions that make a difference for every student. I want to share a few practices we’re using right now to boost whole-team morale and collaboration as well as bring practical solutions to light that you can implement sooner rather than later.

In addition to our weekly check-ins with all staff, our leadership team implemented a staff survey. We made sure to include questions on key areas like professional learning as well as more open-ended options to get at what’s top of mind for each educator. Importantly, I wasn’t the only person on our team reviewing the responses. We set up a dedicated focus group of administrators to comb through the responses and identify the most actionable feedback. Six of us met on a weekly basis to review responses, sort them into broad categories of interest and identify opportunities for implementation. After all, a core part of ensuring that our staff feel heard is to follow up deep listening with clear action. 

Now, this may sound repetitive, but one of the top areas of feedback on our staff survey was on keeping our lines of communication open. That was a clear signal to our leadership team that we needed ongoing, creative ways to have meaningful and effective conversations. Our check-ins and surveys are part of keeping those lines of communication open, but we saw the need to improve our communication systems overall – in service of an attentive, responsive and trust-based building culture. Sustaining this culture is an indispensable part of navigating our team’s success standards and tracking toward our goals year after year. 

That’s how the Conversation Corner came to life. The Conversation Corner is an intentional and nonjudgemental space for staff to bring topics to the leadership team. We hold one every three weeks for the full school year, with one administrator whose role is to listen and take notes capturing the essence of the topic, the current impact on the building and any and all ideas for solutions that staff bring to the table. 

Now, having the Conversation Corner be a genuine and beneficial support that improved open communication on our team required more thoughtful preparation than might be immediately obvious. Here are the steps we took in our building to ensure this practice had the most positive impact: 

1. Do the pre-work 

It’s important to have a sense of the team’s previous experiences and overall relationship to feedback and dialogue. Having a sense of where you all have been helps determine how best to introduce a new kind of conversation opportunity. Rather than simply craft and send an all-staff email inviting everyone to participate, we made sure to have some dedicated time (in our regular meetings) to frame the Conversation Corner as part of our efforts to cultivate a transparent, respectful and affirming culture. We grounded the new effort in context of our shared team values – empathy, kindness, integrity and safety – and helped staff understand what to expect when they chose to participate. 

2. Invite solutions-focused feedback 

We wanted the Conversation Corner to have a clear point of focus – not simply bringing issues to our attention but surfacing ideas for solutions. Introducing this practice in context of our shared values provided an initial orientation toward this goal. Then, the consistent opportunity to engage and build trust through those interactions encouraged our team to be more specific in our observations and confident in proposing creative solutions. 

3. Provide asynchronous options

So much can happen in the space of one school day. But we don’t want to miss the opportunity to gather feedback or leave busy educators with the sense that participating isn’t really a priority. So in addition to in-person conversations, we have a QR code set up at every Conversation Corner area that links to a short response form. Staff can quickly scan the QR as they’re passing by and come back to the form to send their feedback when they have more space in their day. The QR code – on top of being a positive, practical addition – is a great signal to our team that their voice matters and we’re committed to receiving it. 

4. Share the listening role

Similar to our survey focus group, sharing the responsibility of the listening role is key for a variety of reasons. Splitting the time commitment among our leadership team supports us in keeping our schedules sustainable and ensuring we can have the Conversation Corner year-round. Sharing the listening role also helps promote mutual accountability to our purpose. 

That means rather than falling into a trap of explaining decisions to participating staff or discussing initiatives already in process, the person listening encourages, empathizes and asks clarifying questions in order to tap into ideas that might otherwise escape us. This role has been a crucial part of keeping the Conversation Corner distinct among our communication systems and in cultivating the trust and confidence that bring the best ideas to light. 

The Conversation Corner has helped our team improve a range of topics in our buildings – from traffic flow during afternoon pick up to supporting students’ focus as they move between classes. But I want to emphasize that getting to quality, easy-to-implement ideas has a direct relationship to our ongoing work building compassion and self-awareness among our team. That shapes our ability to give and receive feedback as well as improve our communication systems without falling into a sense of overwhelm when we get the information we seek. 

So to complement practices like the Conversation Corner, we include low-pressure, practical skill-building opportunities that support team self-awareness. This year, we’re exploring some light gamification of those skills with what I’m calling Self-Awareness Bingo. Here’s a look at one of our cards:

Including options like this, rolled up in a familiar and light-hearted game, creates a lot of points of entry for continuous skill building – as well as opportunities for staff to deepen their relationships across all our teams. It’s another shared tool we can use to continuously orient toward our shared values and success standards as a whole team. 

Treating communication and self-awareness as a complementary pair has taken our team leaps and bounds toward the kind of culture we want to see in the building.

What’s more, we’re steadily strengthening our shared abilities to respond to the needs of our school community and create an environment where staff and students can be at their best. I hope these two practices inspire you to harness the power of continuous feedback this term and explore the complementary practices that can support the best in your team.