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by heymijo 2113 days ago
Listened to people.

The organization I worked at had no direction. Low morale. Lots of complaining. No leadership from people in management positions.

A colleague and myself tried some of the things mentioned by others below to build camaraderie, etc. Minimally effective.

Then, we started talking to colleagues.

"What's going well?" "What challenges are you facing?"

Listening alone, letting these people know their voices were heard by anyone, went a long way in building relationships, alignment, and getting things done.

Then we took what we were hearing, developed an initiative, pitched it to leadership. They rubber stamped it without really paying attention or asking questions.

We executed.

People were shocked. Their voices had been heard, and something had been done to address common concerns they had. I don't know how to measure or describe this impact, but it's the most significant thing I have ever accomplished.

2 comments

What was the after story, if you don't mind going further? This is super interesting, I'm curious what happened with you/the company afterwards or on a longer horizon
Sure. This was a school/school district. We thought big, and started small. Our initial initiative was for K-6 only. In the following years, this spread to both the middle school, and then the high school. Driven by demand from the teachers themselves.

The modern era of education reform goes back to the Soviets launching Sputnik, so 60 years. It has been omnipresent reform efforts in K-12 education since then. Lots of change, little improvement.

We created not only a durable change, but a positive one that is still pointed in the same direction five years after we got this off the ground.

There's more detail about what we did in a reply below you.

What was the initiative you had? The common concern that you fixed?
This was a school/school district.

The common concern was lack of direction and changing direction with new change initiative one/two/three/four times per year.

We created an initiative for teacher created and led professional development. We used students for live class recreations where teachers could analyze in real time. It was coordinated, structured, and sequenced in a way no teacher's in our district had experienced.

At the same time we took all of the feedback we got from every teacher we interviewed (and we interviewed all of them) and created a vision statement for both teachers and students. We took it back to the teachers and showed how each person's feedback was reflected in the vision. We got the district to adopt the vision. Then we held leadership's feet to the fire and didn't let them do anything that didn't align with the vision. We put the onus on them to explain how any decisions did align.

We used the vision to design professional development, adopt curriculum, craft special education services, and more.

This started as a K-6 initiative, which was wildly ambitious at the time. In the following years the middle school got on board, and then the high school followed suit, led not by administrators but by the teachers themselves. Something we never in our wildest dreams thought would happen.

Five years on the direction is the same and positive change continues.