How to survive the shift into [leadership]
Some great advice from http://www.lifehack.org/articles/work/how-to-survive-the-shift-to-management.html on how to survive the transition into [leadership*], translated to work for schools:
- Build a plan to drive the overall strategy for your team and its role achieving the school's vision
- Tuning everyone???s workload so that your team delivers on the most important priorities
- Ensuring that there is alignment of your team, peers and managers
- Assessing your organization???s fitness for what it needs to do, and making changes, training, and/or upgrading talent where necessary
- Creating systems and frameworks to execute, track, and measuring the work so that you feel comfortable that you know what???s getting done without getting mired in specifics
- Supporting your team members in becoming better leaders themselves by promoting continuous learning
- Finding ways to steadily reduce the cost (in $ and time) of things you do every year to make room for new approaches
- Improving communication and relationships inside and outside your direct organization
- Making connections outside your direct organization to generate positive visibility for your team and create a broader base of support
- Finding senior-level mentors who can advise you on how to raise your focus
* They talk about management, but we're really talking about leadership here.