4. Use the steps in Aligning Priorities and Lenses (page 18) to narrow down your priorities to just three. Why? Because it’s hard to focus on more than three priorities at once. In fact, until the 19th century, the word priority had no plural (McKeown, 2014). Think about it. You could only have one.
5. Check out the chapters that relate to your top three priorities (chapters 4–15 each cover a specific lens). Which leadership lenses are involved? What other roles or tasks require you to successfully navigate those lenses? How might the suggestions at the end of this chapter help you better balance the demands of that lens?
6. Create a plan for action—a priority focus. Chapter 16 (page 209) provides the process for turning your priorities into a guide that includes answers to the questions Why is this important? and How will I know I’m making progress? This process gives you a real-time tool for development.
That’s it, a process you can use again and again to ensure you’re focused on the right priorities and actions for your current situation. In the next three sections, we’ll detail how you choose your development focus, how you choose your priorities, and how you can align those priorities with the Twelve Lenses of Leadership in this book.
ASK YOURSELF
What is a goal you already have for which you might use this process? Before reading further, take a moment to identify this goal, and then apply the criteria in the next section.
Choosing Your Development Focus
Each time, the development process begins with choosing a specific goal. Becoming a better leader is too general, but a wide variety of other goals works. You’ll find that different goals may call for completely different priorities, making this process very different from other systems for determining values that you may have used in the past.
Although it is by no means an exhaustive list, here are some ideas of how you might identify your initial focus.
♦ Lead a specific initiative or work toward a specific learning community goal: Your focus might flow straight from the strategic plan and could be as large as successfully launching a district- or schoolwide PLC or smaller in scope such as increasing expert use of student-centered discussions in your building.
♦ Improve a specific skill: For the time being, set aside technical skills such as using data to inform instruction. Think about the soft skills that are actually the hardest to develop (Cherniss, Extein, Goleman, & Weissberg, 2006). For example, you might read through the eight components of emotional intelligence described in chapter 3 (page 33) and choose one that will improve your ability to positively influence and motivate others.
♦ Focus on a new position: If you are about to step into a new role, your focus could be on what you perceive as your most important goal for the first four to six weeks on the job. Maybe you need to listen to understand the culture or maybe you need a deeper understanding of what will be expected of you. Maybe you need to establish a clear purpose and vision or need to review, revise, or implement a specific plan.
♦ Change your one key thing: Do you have a mentor, supervisor, or colleague whom you trust and who really understands school leadership? Ask this person, “What one thing should I work on getting better at so that I can be a more effective leader?” It’s amazing how often the answer people receive is surprising, a bit unnerving, and spot on. This may be the toughest starting place for a first foray into true leadership development, but the payoff can be huge.
Now, let’s check whether your natural priorities truly support achieving your purpose.
Use these margins to make notes of related goals you might set; and if you don’t like to write in books, attach a sticky note with your thoughts beside each one.
Choosing Your Priorities
Figure 1.1 lists forty priorities—priorities that leaders with very different strengths, mindsets, and styles view as naturally key to good leadership. None are bad or wrong; you are choosing between good and better priorities. In fact, some that seem unattractive to you for this goal may be key for a different goal. With your chosen focus in mind, select the top ten priorities that you think will be most important for reaching your goal. Another way to phrase it is, Is this priority crucial to my making progress on this goal?
Figure 1.1: The forty leadership priorities.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/leadership for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Here’s a tip for doing the sort: use small sticky note flags. Or, print a copy of figure 1.1 and cut apart the forty priorities so you can sort the strips of paper. Do not simply circle your top ten. Why? Because your brain reacts differently to setting aside a priority than to simply not circling one. Using the flags or paper strips expands your working memory to include the work surface in front of you—your brain holds on to the important focus of considering your goal while the surface allows you to move ideas around, group them in different ways, and reconsider discarded priorities.
Once you have your top ten priorities, let’s see how they align with the Twelve Lenses of Leadership as a first step toward examining any mindsets that could get in the way of your goal.
Aligning Priorities and Lenses
In figure 1.2, you’ll find the forty priorities distributed among the Twelve Lenses of Leadership. They’re in the same order as the list in figure 1.1. For example, the first priority, influencing, is under lens 1 and the last (fortieth) priority, fulfillment, is under lens 12 (the last lens). Notice how each lens lists two, core polarities (poles), a topic we explore in detail in chapter 2 (page 23).
FURTHER DEVELOPMENT
The priorities and lenses are designed based on the leadership strengths and priorities of leaders with different Jungian personality-type preferences,