100 Posts in 100 Days
In yesterday’s post, I shared 10 shifts I made this year in the way I plan our leadership meetings. Shift #3 was about levels of empowerment and shift #4 was about planning for decision making. Making decisions can be hard. Making decisions in a group can be harder. That “inside voice” can be full of questions: did everyone get to have their say? Is everyone going to be on board? Is it the right decision? What if it’s not the right decision? The voice can go on and on.
It is said that educators make over 1,500 decisions per day. And the kinds of decisions to be made vary widely: from solving a problem to encouraging students to resolving conflicts, it can be dizzying. Planning ahead for who will make decisions and for ways to make decisions together can help to minimize that cognitive and emotional load, just a bit.
Example of Levels of Empowerment
As a building principal in a US public school, we had a Building Leadership Team (BLT). It was comprised of myself, our administrative assistant, teacher representatives, and parent representatives. One of the tools our leadership team had was a decision-making matrix. Out matrix listed the kinds of decisions we made on an annual basis, who would give input, and who would have the final decision. It also had the criteria for consensus-style decisions. Here is an excerpt:
Example of Decision-Making Processes
The leadership team I am currently a member of considered something like a decision-making matrix. We struggled, though, because we recognized that the kinds of decisions we make vary. In many cases, then, the specifics of who is involved should also vary. So, I began to collect ideas of different ways to make decisions. I have compiled them into a bank of “Decision Making Processes & Strategies”. All of these processes and ideas are from other sources. I’ve found that having them collected in one place with the short synopsis of each strategy or resource has been invaluable. I can match a process to a purpose, I can describe it easily, and I can share information with others.
In some ways, I’m right back to James Clear’s quote I first shared in my 2nd post:
“You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”
Having systems for making decisions certainly helps the groups and teams I have been a member of make progress and achieve more quickly.