Feedback and Growth

 One of the most important things we do as leaders is provide feedback to help people grow. We have to consider our audience and build relationships with those that we are providing feedback to in order to know how to best motivate them and ensure continuous growth in our organizations. We have a responsibility to consider both the individuals goals and the organizations goals.  

If you have read any of my prior blog posts, you likely know that during the pandemic I have doubled down on reading and joined the Pop Sugar reading challenge last year. One of the reasons that I love to read is so that I can learn more about different perspectives and how to best support these perspectives that differ from my own. As a leader in education right now, I am faced daily with people, both staff and students that have widely different views on the same topic. Masks versus unmasking kids, distancing in classrooms versus the concerns that we have significantly emotionally damaged our current students because of closing schools, and on and on. Two books I read recently, one by AJ Juliani, Adaptable and the other by Ben Bergeron, Unlocking Potential both reflect on motivating staff and using this key phrase when providing feedback "I'm giving you this feedback because I have very high expectations of you and I know that you can reach them". 

The first time I read this in AJ's book, I thought that it was a powerful statement to motivate both students and staff alike. Side note:  If you don't know AJ, his books are definitely worth reading. He shares on his website that his book was written in order to " provide a framework to create curriculum that works for our ever-changing world and learning experiences that engage and empower our students regardless of where they are learning". He wrote this book in the midst of our current pandemic so he provides a lot of inspirational insight into his thoughts on how we should use the lessons learned and the changes in our world to build a better future for today's learners. As you may have read in my old blog posts, I am hugely passionate about not going back to our comfort zone of pre-pandemic teaching, learning and curriculum and yet the longer the pandemic continues to go on, the more I am seeing this approach used as the chicken soup our educators need right now as they struggle with the shifts and changes that need to happen in schools to support a tomorrow that will require different skills than our world today does. We need to use the portrait of the graduate to structure our schools and make decisions related to what schools could and should be in the future. To design curriculum, lessons and programs that our schools offer to ensure we are collectively working towards making our world a better place for the youth that we are responsible for educating. A world that is without a doubt different than the world prior to March 1, 2020. 

Ben Bergeron, who wrote the second book is both a leader and a coach of CrossFit and those who know me personally, know that I LOVE CrossFit. I was first introduced to Ben when I heard about him at my 5:30 a.m. class and went home that night and ordered his first book, Chasing Excellence which I devoured in a weekend because I could not put it down. I frequently go back to this book when I need motivation whether for the gym or with something going on professionally. When I did not get a job I really wanted and felt ready for, I went back to his book for inspiration and to help myself move forward with an action oriented plan to come back stronger and to visualize the rejection as an opportunity to grow myself. While Chasing Excellence was about building some of the best known athletes in CrossFit, Unlocking Potential is about leadership and how to double down on developing a culture that inspires in order to align the organizations vision across the organization and ensure consistent execution after these initial steps are in place. Ben and his co-author, Christine Bald, share inspiring personal stories of how they built and continue to build their businesses through this approach. It is an approach easily applied to schools and school leadership. It is also an approach that is easily applied to teachers in their approach to working with students and colleagues. If we used the portrait of a graduate as our common vision for each student and each employee that we hire, it becomes about our execution of this daily through our curriculum and the relationships we build across the school setting. 

If you reflect on some of the harshest feedback you have received, either as an adult or student, much of our memory is often about the delivery of that feedback and the relationship we had with the person delivering it. If I think back to some of the harshest feedback I have received, it often felt that way to me because I didn't feel that the person delivering the feedback really understood my vision of who I wanted to be and they did not provide helpful suggestions to move forward. Instead, they tried to move me towards their vision and did not value my vision and values as a professional or person taking in this feedback. I have always been someone who will reflect for hours on negative feedback and seek to improve myself, usually to prove them wrong, and most often I probably don't because we aren't working from the same framework to begin with. It is important as leaders that we model building relationships through the feedback that we provide to others and that we have a common framework for our culture and vision to provide this feedback from. This is one of the reasons that I love the design thinking approach because it allows for us to continue to have a discussion and iterate as we learn and grow through the process. 

As you move through the next few days or next week, consider the feedback you give and receive. Consider adapting the approach of beginning with "I'm giving you this feedback because I have very high expectations of you and I know that you can reach them". See if you get better results, I certainly have grown both myself and others through adapting this approach.