How many times have you heard it said: “Schools need to be run more like a business!?” What if businesses were run more like a classroom? After all, leading in a classroom and leading in a workplace, as it turns out, have some remarkable similarities. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not comparing your team to children…okay, I’m not comparing all of your teams to children. Rather, I want to draw your attention to one of the most underappreciated and highly skilled sectors of our society: Teachers. We get so caught up in budgets, state testing requirements, and classroom size, that we lose sight of the real lessons our teachers have to offer.
My daughters started school this week, and I can’t help but be impressed at their schoolteachers’ successes. If you’re a leader in your own workplace, you’d do well to take note of 3 of their core strengths!
1) Use Questions Instead of Commands. If you watch a great teacher at work, you’ll notice they ask questions of their students far more than they simply issue commands. These questions spark curiosity, inspire creativity, and invoke engaging inquiry. They draw people in. Questions, as we intuitively know, are far more effective than just telling someone what to do, regardless of whether that someone is five or fifty-five! But in the “real world” we believe we don’t have the time to ask powerful questions; we barely have the time to bark a command! Great teachers, however, make time. They don’t insist; they invite. And this invitation opens the possibility for risk; it’s possible, and even encouraged, for students to make a mistake. Mistakes are how we learn. If your team is afraid of the consequences of mistakes, they won’t take risks and they won’t question anything. That’s how opportunities are lost, solutions are left undiscovered, and the door to growth closes, locked and impermeable.
2) Recognize the Need for Repetition. Great teachers aren’t afraid to repeat themselves. Sometimes leaders are prone to believe that if we say something once, everyone will immediately understand it and always know it henceforth. That’s just not true of humanity, and it takes a level of grace with your team and your students to repeat yourself. Repetition, it’s been said, is the mother of learning. The human animal needs repetition to learn. Not only repetition (see #1!), but if we neglect it we can find ourselves not a leader but a tyrant, demanding too much of our team, giving nothing back and burning out engagement and commitment. Great teachers don’t fall into that trap, and neither should great business leaders.
3) Flexibility and Structure are Not Mutually Exclusive. Both of my girls’ favorite teachers are teachers who are known for being on the strict side. Discipline and structure are key elements to the classrooms they run, and yet my daughters adore them. That’s because within that structure there is a plethora of possibility – they allow fun to flourish. Discipline means students are aware of what’s expected of them; those expectations are clear, reliable, consistent and organic. Within that stable, reliable atmosphere, these teachers are also willing to be silly, vulnerable, and honest. They’re flexible within the boundaries of the expectations. They smile, they play — they aren’t rigid. Rules and rigidity are not the same thing. A workplace with both flexibility and structure is a workplace where creative leaders are born. And in the end, isn’t that the goal of a great leader… to build more leaders?
Welcome back teachers! And to the rest of you, take notice – if you look closely, you’ll see that they aren’t just teaching our kids.
