Post 15: Chris Widener: The Art of Influence: Golden Rule #2

This is part three in the series of emails I've sent to my AVID Coordinators on leadership.  This post will discuss Widener's Golden Rule #2, Always demonstrate a positive attitude
__________________________________

This is part 3 in the Leadership Series adapted from Chris Widener’s book, The Art of Influence.  As an AVID Coordinator, you are leading from the middle or a 360-degree leader as John Maxwell calls it.  You need to lead those beside you, under you, and above you.  Recall that Widener elaborated on his Four Golden Rules of Leadership in his book.  These four rules for leaders are:

1) Live a life of undivided integrity 
2) Always demonstrate a positive attitude 
3) Consider other people’s interests as more important than your own
4) Don’t settle for anything less than excellence

In this email, I’ll talk about rule #2, “Always demonstrate a positive attitude.”

The most important word in this rule is “always.”  It’s easy to be positive when times are good, but this is when a positive attitude is easy and frankly least useful.  The hard times are when your followers need you to have a positive attitude the most.  Widener points out that one of the best ways to overcome these times of difficulty and hold on to your positive attitude is to stay focused on the goal.  When you do that, then the small defeat that you’re dealing with seems insignificant in the face of things and your goal to get underserved students into college brings the conversation back to a positive tone.

We’ve all been in meetings where a brainstorming session has just ended and somebody chimes in and says, “Let me be devil’s advocate.”  All of the shoulders in the room droop, everyone slouches in their chairs, and smiles wipe from the faces around the table.  This is not the effect that you want to have on a group.  Try to be the “angel’s advocate.”  When conversations are going sour, jump in and send the conversation in a constructive direction.

Besides focusing on the goal, Widener also recommends focusing on solutions.  It’s important to define a problem before figuring out how to fix it, but once the problem is defined, begin working on solutions.  It’s so easy to slip into complaining mode during meetings, but it doesn’t accomplish anything except a negative attitude.  AVID coordinators are great at setting up positive Site Team Meetings and certification meetings (the good times) but your positive influence is important in other meetings that you don’t control also; leadership team meetings, school site council meetings, department meetings, etc.  It’s important that you help set the attitude in these meetings as well for the good of the students.

When you are in control of the agenda of a meeting, be sure to purposefully put time in the agenda for positivity.  Add time to share positive personal stories.  Have students or former students come in and tell teachers what a difference they’ve made in their lives.  Play an inspirational video like “212 Degrees” or the hundreds of videos of student speakers on the AVID Center YouTube Channel.  Acknowledge awards and accomplishments of those in the room.  Ask yourself, “What can I do at this meeting that will make people look forward to the next meeting?”

Not only will a positive attitude help make meetings more valuable and enjoyable, but it will also make people want to follow you.  In other words, it will increase your influence amongst your peers, students, and leaders.  In order to spread AVID strategies schoolwide, you’ll need that sort of influence.

________________________

How do you set a positive tone in your meetings?

Here's the 212 degrees video:

Post 14- Chris Widener, The Art of Influence: Golden Rule #1

In post 13, I copied an email that I sent to the schools that I coach summarizing Chris Widener's advice for leaders from his book, The Art of Influence.  This is the second email in the series about his first Golden Rule of Leadership, Live a Life of Undivided Integrity.

_____________________________

             "In the first email of the year, I mentioned how important it will be in the future for coordinators to have strong leadership skills.  These skills are important in the classroom, on the site team, on the school’s leadership team, and in trying to spread AVID strategies and culture school-wide.  In that first communication about leadership, I quoted Chris Widener’s book “The Art of Influence” and his four golden rules of leadership.  They are 1) Live a life of undivided integrity  2) Always demonstrate a positive attitude  3) Consider other people’s interests as more important than yours  and 4) Don’t settle for anything less than excellence.

                Over the next several months, I’ll go a little deeper into each of Widener’s individual golden rules of leadership.  In this edition, I’ll cover the first rule, “Live a life of undivided integrity.” 

                It goes without saying that people will not follow someone who they do not trust.  Have you ever had a leader you couldn’t trust?  You cannot believe anything they say, you question the motives of everything they do, and constantly second guess their requests.  This is no way to lead a movement.

                Instead, a person who lives a life of integrity . . . who does what they say, who shows up on time, who plays by the rules, who tells the truth, and who doesn’t make excuses . . . will never have their motivation second-guessed.  This sets up an atmosphere in which it is much easier to follow such a leader.

                Even the smallest crack in the integrity of the leader can cause their integrity to crumble.  One instance of stretching the truth (“Your email must have ended up in my spam filter”), refusing to apologize when a mistake has been made, or forgetting who the school is supposed to serve and many years of honesty can be flushed down the drain.  When Widener says “undivided integrity,” he is saying that it doesn’t even matter if the lapse in judgment is personal or professional, the damage is the same.   If your colleagues were to find out that you buy pirated movies, the damage would be the same as if they found out that you don’t enforce the tardy lockout rule or mismanage school money.

                So, as you build your leadership stature at your school, keep in mind that although nobody is perfect, apologize when you’ve made a mistake and practice integrity in all aspects of your life.  Upon accepting my first leadership position, my predecessor gave me some advice, “Before you do anything, think about how it would look on the front page of the newspaper.”  He was basically telling me to live a life of undivided integrity.”

Please describe in the comments section a leader you've worked with/for who lived a lived a life of undivided integrity.

Post 13: Chris Widener: The Art of Influence- Four Golden Rules of Leadership

Motivational School Leadership Post 13 with Michael Horton

One of my roles at the county office is to coach the AVID programs at 30 schools.  When the state grant for AVID was cut and the fate of our relationship with our AVID schools was in question, I concluded that it was very important to build the leadership capacity of the AVID Coordinators in our schools.  Now that our programs have stabilized, I realized that site leadership is still incredibly important.  So, I started writing a series of leadership articles summarizing some of the material I was reading on the subject.  Periodically, I'll post these articles here no the blog all beginning with the title, "Chris Widener: The Art of Influence."

Here's the first in the series:

A book that I read recently had a very simple recipe for what makes a great leader.  I’ll share the recipe with you here and then elaborate on each part in future messages.  The book is called, The Art of Influence by Chris Widener.  First, he defines a leader as someone who influences others to reach a common goal.  He points out Aristotle’s list of attributes that a leader must have in order to influence others; “Logos, Pathos, and Ethos” translated: Logic, Passion, and Ethics.  This aligns well with Widener’s Four Golden Rules of Leadership:

1)      Live a life of undivided integrity 

2)      Always demonstrate a positive attitude 

3)      Consider other people’s interests ahead of your own 

4)      Don’t settle for anything less than excellence

RIMS AVID is lucky to have had two leaders in a row (maybe more, I haven’t been around that long) who exhibit each and every one of those Golden Rules, Wanda Schneider and Miceal Kelly.  You couldn’t meet two more ethical, positive, giving people.  It’s a pleasure to work with leaders like these and I would follow them to the ends of the Earth.  This is the atmosphere that every leader should try to create.   

How can you begin to use the Golden Rules of Leadership with your teams to start creating the vision?  How can you help increase the leadership skills of your teams to influence the teachers that they interact with?  Share your ideas in the comments below.

Click here, to watch Chris Widener speak about leadership and what makes people successful

Post 12: Carol Dweck Part 3- How to "Fix" a Fixed Mindset

In two previous blog posts (here and here), I talked about Fixed Mindsets versus Growth Mindsets as coined by Carol Dweck.  For school leaders, this is very important because a teacher’s mindset helps to guide their response to change and their expectations of students.  And we’ve all seen the research on how important expectations are.  In this post, I’ll discuss how to begin to change colleagues’ Fixed Mindsets to Growth Mindsets.

Carol Dweck doesn’t actually talk about how to change someone else’s mindset so much, but she does talk about how to change your own.  That is step one, to develop and communicate your own Growth Mindset. 

Step One: Communicate your own Growth Mindset-  You cannot expect those around you to have a Growth Mindset if you don’t.  And you have to make it known that you have a Growth Mindset.  You have to communicate that you believe that with enough work, any teacher can be spectacular and any student can be successful.  Hold high expectations for everyone around you and provide the support necessary to meet those expectations.  Reinforce that great teachers aren’t born, they are planned.  Great teachers plan great lessons. 

Step Two: Tell your story-  When two people hear the same information (a new idea, data, a new vision for a school) and come to two different conclusions, it is because they told themselves different stories.  They each have different experiences, have read different books, and have different backgrounds.  So, when you suspect that some of the people in the room are going to reach a different conclusion than you are, tell your story.  When they understand why you believe the things that you do, not only are they more likely to agree with you, but they’re also more likely to start thinking the same way.  And as long as you’ve followed Step One, then that’s a good thing because you have a Growth Mindset.

Step Three: Ask for their story- After you’ve told your story, ask them to explain theirs.  This will help them identify their “Fixed Mindset Voice” as Dr. Dweck calls it.Until they can hear this voice, they cannot stop it.  It’ll also let you both see why you might be disagreeing and help you debate the actual issue (the story) and not the surface issue (the change itself).  This is what Kerry Patterson, in Crucial Conversations, calls "Master Your Story."

Step Four: Answer these two questions before they even ask-  There are two questions that people ask themselves when facing a change . . . “Can I do it?” and “Is it worth it?”  Make sure that when proposing a change that you answer those two questions up front so that there is no doubt.  Providing Fixed Mindset people with changes that they are capable of doing and reinforcing that they are capable of doing it will help them start to see that the number of things that they can do is huge . . . and that’s a Growth Mindset!

Step Five: Don’t criticize responsible risk-taking- The worst thing that you can do to a Fixed Mindset teacher is to criticize them when they try something new.  They finally decide to try something new, they step out of the comfort zone, and they fail.  If you criticize them for it, then one thing is for sure, you’ll validate their Fixed Mindset and they’ll never try anything new again. Encourage responsible risk-taking and support those who try it.

Step Six: Be careful what you praise- If you praise “greatness,” you will inadvertently send a Fixed Mindset message.  If you praise effort and preparation, you will send a Growth Mindset message.  Compliment the effort and the courage that it took to try something new and then discuss what went well and what didn’t.  When rewarding “Teacher of the Month” or other honors, focus on the work that these teachers put into their great lessons or programs.  Don’t send a message that they were born that way and that nobody else can ever be like them.    

What other methods have you found to inspire a Growth Mindset in the teachers in your school?  Post them in the comments below.

Watch this TEDx video where Eduardo Briceno argues that hard work and persistence are by-products of our mindset.  

Read Part 2 here
Read Part 3 here