The news events of the past few years, with an overwhelming arc of meanness, disrespect and disregard for others, fractures my heart. What has happened to common courtesy? Civility? Kindness and respect? What are our children learning from this mean-spirited time? How can we magnify kindness and respect in both children and adults? In this […]
Category Archive:
For School Leaders
Urgent But Not Important
Time management is not about managing our time. Time management is about managing ourselves. We spend our time on activities that are important or not important, urgent or not. In our world of 24/7 e-mail, computers, text messaging, cell phones and satellite television, urgent and important are easily confused. For effective self-management we want to focus our […]
Creating A Culture That Is Friendly To Error
Life is full of mistakes! Unfortunately, most of us don’t like to admit when we’ve made a mistake. After a choice I wish I hadn’t made, I’m usually ready to learn from the mistake and move on. Enough said! But…in our schools we need to create a feedback loop that encourages others to speak up […]
Planning Meetings With A Purpose
Have you been in a meeting where you squirmed in your seat and thought, “Why am I here?” Right! Who hasn’t? Painful, isn’t it? To plan meetings that matter for your next school year, ask yourself these two questions about each event: Why are we having this event? What do we want to do differently after our […]
Teaching Civility | Articles To Share
Here is a list of Kids Talk articles that might help you in your work of teaching civility. Click on the titles to read the entire article. Asking Permission For many of us it is easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. If you really want to do something, why risk being told ”no”? […]
Remember To Do This Every Day
My college professor walked into the classroom. “Pop quiz for a hundred points.” “What the name of the janitor in this building?” Only two out of about 45 students knew the answer. “What I want you to understand is that everyone in whatever organization you are in is important. Know who they are and […]
What Kind Of Busy Are You?
What kind of busy are you? Seth Godin wrote in his blog that there are two kinds of busy: “When I’m giving a speech, I don’t have the ability to squeeze in a phone call, think about what’s for dinner or plan tomorrow’s meeting. I’m doing one thing, and it’s taking everything I’ve got. So […]
Reinforcing Clarity
WWWD? In the 90’s the phrase WWJD became popular and it was common to see people wearing bracelets with the WWJD acronym for What Would Jesus Do? We can borrow an idea from that popular phrase to reinforce clarity in our organization. What we want our employees, when faced with a problem, is to be […]
Overcommunicating Clarity
Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Advantage, tells us of four disciplines that healthy organizations have. When an organization possesses these four disciplines, they also have a business advantage: Discipline 1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team Discipline 2: Create Clarity Discipline 3: Overcommunicate Clarity Discipline 4: Reinforce Clarity Here are common communication mistakes that leaders […]
Creating Clarity
What do we mean by having clarity within an organization? Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Advantage, describes clarity as the alignment of values, goals, strategies and behaviors so that there is little possibility for confusion, chaos or infighting within the organization. Lencioni tells us that there are six critical questions we must answer with […]