Effective leadership, effective teams Motivating staff, getting the best from them; and building effective teams

Truly successful schools have a well-motivated and engaged staff who form effective and successful teams. This sounds like an easy leadership challenge, but just how do we accomplish it? In this article I am going to share ideas on that will go some way towards achieving that goal.

Motivation – a key driver for success.

In order for our staff to feel motivated, valued and supported, we need to ensure that they feel safe and secure in our leadership and in the systems and structures by which we lead and empower them.

The psychologist Maslow might argue that, for this to happen, our staff need to have their basic physiological and psychological needs met. They need to feel safe and secure. They need clear and consistent systems and procedures. They need to feel ownership of their actions i.e. the locus of control is internal and not external.

Staff need to be fully engaged with, and have ownership of the schools in which they work. If we want to motivate our staff and get the best from them, we need to lead and manage them as we have all successfully led and managed children in our classrooms.

Treat your staff like children!

Successful teachers have clear and well established strategies for supporting the learning and progress of their learners that are based around three things:

1. ?Strategies which are praise focused,
2. Support that is individualised and based around knowing where the child is in their learning and where they have the potential to be
3. Clear, positively worded and S.M.A.R.T targets

In leading our staff, we aim to accomplish these three things through clear, strategic and distributed leadership that:

1.??????empowers our staff,

2.??????engages them with change,

3.??????operates in a no blame culture

4.??????is appropriate to each and every individual colleague.

How you strategically appraise the effectiveness of your staff is based on your judgements to two key things:

The COMPETENCY level of your staff – How good are they at what they do; and how do you know?

The COMMITMENT of your staff – Do your staff want to improve, know how to improve and are they willing to improve?

Just as we need to adopt different leadership styles in different situations, we also need to lead our staff in different ways based on their levels of competency and commitment.

This chart shows how best to lead colleagues based on your judgement of their individual levels of competency and commitment:

If we use the most appropriate leadership style for each of our colleagues, they will be supported in their actions, given the appropriate freedom and support for them to flourish and, gradually, strategic distributed leadership will flourish across the school.

Going back to our analogy that leading staff in school is like leading a class of children, we are addressing the second of the three points on our check list: ' Support that is individualised and based around knowing where the colleague is in their learning and where they have the potential to be’.

Lead them towards a team ethos

Generally, the idea that whatever works with learners will work with your staff is a good one to lead colleagues towards effective team building. If we compare those needs that make our learners effective in classrooms and those needs that make our staff effective team players, we can see clear comparisons:

Good teachers will create a learning ethos in their classrooms that is learner driven. They see learning in a positively and value mistakes as part of that positive learning process. Learners are valued for the contribution they bring to their learning teams and are encouraged to shift the locus of control from a teacher led learning model to one of growing independence in which effective learners have full ownership of their own learning.

In motivating and empowering our staff we need to do much the same thing. Our staff are valued for the positive contribution they make to school improvement and development, we value mistakes that are made as part of the learning process; and we value the contribution that each and every colleague makes to our successful schools. In doing this, we shift the locus of control from a leadership centred model to one where staff have fuller control over key leadership decisions, they work together effectively in productive teams and, are highly motivated towards achieving the shared goals of the school.

Steve Burnage

About the author

Steve has a breadth of experience of leading challenging inner city and urban secondary schools. He now works as a freelance trainer, consultant and author for senior and middle leadership, strategic development, performance management and coaching and mentoring. Steve may be contacted by email [email protected]