If you get a stone in your shoe, what do you do?
Stop, take your shoe off, remove the stone, put your shoe back on and carry on. Right?
Because having a stone in your shoe:
- Can be painful, and
- it slows down how fast you can walk.
Simple problem, obvious solution (the only tricky bit can be keeping your balance!).
Now, go with me on this…
Imagine your school is a shoe. It’s got a stone in it.
The stone is at least one member of staff who isn’t behaving or performing to a required standard.
The solution? You have an effective difficult conversation to address and fix the problem.
Then you carry on faster than before.
Except…
Almost every school I come across has at least one of these stones in their shoe… and most of them don’t stop to take them out.
They don’t have the difficult conversations to address the issues; or they have the conversations unsuccessfully (that don’t resolve the issue).
Why? Because if you don’t know how to have effective difficult conversations; they’re hard.
You can ‘lose your balance’.
Unions can get involved.
Legal advice may be needed.
Yet leaving the stone in the shoe… leaving issues of behaviour and performance go unchecked… it slows down how fast you can go.
And this is why I bang on about difficult conversations.
When you know how to do them well and effectively; you solve small issues before they become big ones and you go faster.
And learning how to do them well is easier than you think.
It can be as easy as picking a stone out of your shoe.
Top tip:
Right now, jot down all those people and issues that are a ‘stone in your shoe’.
How long has it been going on?
When is it going to stop?
How many people in your team is it affecting?
How many children is it impacting?
Now look at what you’ve written, and ask yourself: is this ok?
And watch out for excuses like ‘it’s only a few’ (that’s like saying living with a few stones in your shoe everyday!).
P.S. If the ‘stone’ is now so big you’re into the capability area, then don’t miss my one day conference on how to manage capability and sickness. ‘Capability Conference: kindly and effectively tackling under-performance’ on 14th March, 2024. https://ukheadsup.com/events/capability/
Spotlight Resource
In a difficult conversation what do you do when…
I’ve made 150 and counting 2-minute top tip videos to help with you a range of challenges when you have a difficult conversation, and you can see them all here on my youtube channel: Heads Up TV (see playlist: Ask Sonia: 2 minute top tips on difficult conversations)
You might even want to binge watch!
I hope they help, do subscribe to my YouTubechannel to get the most recent tips 🙂
Is there a tip you’d like? Something you want to know how to handle?
Email me, and I’ll make a video (without saying who you are).