Timeout for Leadership-your one-minute leadership idea

Op-ed #22

What are your three Rs?

Fact:

RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS AND RELATIONSHIPS

As I was preparing for this week’s post, I could not help myself from focusing on that television commercial selling life insurance.  The company asks the consumer to think about the three Ps when buying life insurance.  After a brief moment the celebrity hawking this insurance reveals that the three Ps are Price, Price and Price.  I want you to think about my three Rs in the same way.  In schools, in businesses, and organizations it has to be about Relationships, Relationships and Relationships.

I had some great responses from my lead up question this week including words such as responsibility, reliability, reality, readiness and rest.  Yes, rest.  That is one R (rest), that I am sure most leaders forget about.  I know I did. These are all great Rs.  Important Rs.

I appreciate everyone’s interest and responses but for me to have success as a leader, it all comes down to one’s ability to cultivate and maintain relationships.  Just like rest, I know that as a leader, I sometimes missed the importance of relationships.  I thought I could survive on my work ethic and innate leadership skills.  I thought my old coaching skills would always be there to save the day.

But as I continue to ponder this point, I think any success that I did have as a coach or principal and superintendent of schools ultimately came back to my ability to interact with my “players.”  Let’s face it, most coaches, or principals know all of the same content, in one way or the other.  The leaders that are successful get “it” about the importance of relationships.  And as I peel back the layers of my coaching success, it really was all about my ability to build relationships.

I deeply cared for my players both on and off of the field. They knew this.  I listened to them.  I trusted them and in turn they trusted me.  I was honest.  Sometimes to the point of perhaps being too cold in my honesty.  My players knew that no one was going to work any harder than me at my craft.  When they saw this effort, it was easier for them to do the same thing.  When we won, I attempted to shine the light on the players and coaches and when we lost, I would willingly shoulder the blame or responsibility.  I tried to always put the team ahead of every individual, yet recognized the importance of the individual as part of the team.  And yes, I could make the hard call and remove any individual from the team that acted otherwise (put himself ahead of the team).  And finally, I believe that I was able to walk with a player with my arm around his shoulder and figuratively kick him in the butt at the same time.  Once, I could successfully do this, I knew that we were on our way to a win. 

So, I knew that if this old coach was able to successfully translate these coaching skills to the principal’s office, I could then hope for some success.  I think it did not always work out that way because during the course of your day, when you are focusing on so many things, you tend to lose track of the important things.  And for any school leader, that important thing is the ability to build and sustain relationships with an entirely diverse set of people and roles.  Pause for a second and see the set of relationships that a principal or superintendent must build to win.  Namely:  students, teachers, parents, administrators, secretaries, paraprofessionals, counselors, custodians, safety officers, business leaders, the community at large, boards of education, union / association leaders and local politicos.  Write the names of all of these groups on a piece of paper and start building your “spider web” of relationships.  When all of the lines start crisscrossing all over the place you begin to get a real feel of the importance and difficulty of building relationships.

We went through a period in time in schools where we would set aside a part of each day for some DEAR time (Drop Everything and Read). I challenge each leader to incorporate some DEAR time into his or her day.  But this time I want DEAR to mean DROP EVERYTHING AND REALTIONSHIP.  (Yes, I know that I am taking some license with the language here but I think I make my point.)

IT IS ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS.    Never forget it!

Some identified personal skills to help build relationships:   honesty, ability to listen, trust, caring for the team member as an individual, unsurpassed work ethic, ability to give credit to team members and show gratitude, the ability to instill self-discipline.

What can you add to this?