Timeout for Leadership-your one-minute leadership idea

The Principal Coaching Clinic #14

What is your trade value?

You arrive at work today and your boss calls you into her office and tells you that you have been traded.  That’s right, just like a major leaguer. After you get over the shock of being traded, you ask what did your previous team get for you. When you find out that they received an old bag of baseballs and some broken bats for you, you become really depressed.  You over estimated your trade value.  You over estimated your importance to the team.

This happens every day in every school or in every business.  We tend to think that we are so important that we are untradeable. We navigate our careers thinking that our school or district can’t survive without us.  One of the messages that you must take away from this article today is that everyone can be traded and everyone can be cut, or let go.    And yet somehow, we continue to allow our egos not to accept this fact.

So, how do you make yourself so important to the team that it becomes almost impossible to trade you?  If you are in fact a current leader, take a moment to ask yourself who are your top five team members.  A great exercise is to have your leadership team sit in a room and conduct a draft of your staff.  And once the person is selected, the leaders must succinctly describe why that person is important to their team.  It is almost like playing a fantasy football game with your current staff. You have to put together a winning team. I guarantee you that if you do this exercise with a seriousness of purpose you will find out a great deal about yourself and about your staff.  At the end of this experience, your perspective about your staff and about yourself, could drastically change.

Let’s get back to the question from the preceding paragraph.  How do you make yourself untradeable?  Take a moment to answer the following questions:

• Do you possess a tireless work ethic?
• Do you have the positive can-do attitude?  How do you demonstrate this?
• Are you a life-long learner?
  • What professional organizations do you belong to?
  • What professional journals and research journals do you read?
  • What book (s) are you currently reading?
  • What professional development opportunity did you personally seek and what was your level of commitment to this opportunity?
• How do you contribute to your school, field and profession?
  • When was the last time that you presented at a conference?
  • What was the last article you submitted for publication?
  • What was the last new idea you brought to the table with a plan to accomplish it?
• Are you that person people seek out for input or help?  When was the last time someone did this?  If you cannot remember, you have a problem.
• Can you cultivate and sustain relationships? Do people have confidence in you?  When placed in a group, do you naturally lead?
• Are you able to articulate your vision and personal goals along with your goals for the organization or school?
• Does your word mean something?  Are you reliable?  Do you follow through?
• Are you able to admit when you are wrong?  Are you able to apologize to people when something went wrong?
• Do you play hard?

You and your leadership team can surely think of more questions to add relevance to your specific school or organization.

In this day of analytics, can we quantify these items and build a score for each person?  If we can, this would surely help our hiring, promotion and retention practices. 

Every time that I try to do this, I always stumble over the quality of “the team member who is just good in the locker room.”  For some people, their presence and their impact on team chemistry is too important to quantify or overlook.  This person is “your player.”  You connect on some different level.  Every team has this type of player and every coach always looks to bring “his or her own player” to their team. 

I know that with every promotion or new job that I took, I always tried to bring some of “my” people with me.  These folks were my untradeables.  I hope that my bosses looked at me as untradeable.  Becoming an untradeable asset is a good thing or someday you might find yourself being traded for that old bag of used baseballs.  You must be better than that!