Why Connection Comes Before Change | Change Series 1.4

Today, I'm going to ask something of you, something I want you to do before you jump into the next big thing at your school. Intrigued? Stay tuned to learn with me. Hey, everyone. I'm Shane Leaning. Welcome to Global Ed Leaders, the chart-topping leadership

podcast for international schools. I'm an organizational coach, and in this show I get to know the teachers, leaders, and innovators making a difference in education right across the world. And every other week, I share with you bite-sized strategies to supercharge your leadership, and that's what this episode is. Now, before we jump into the conversation, I'm delighted that today's episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association.

Stay tuned to learn more. Okay, so this episode is a continuation of the change series. There have been three episodes, and this one is all about after we've identified a potential challenge, it's all about taking the step back and connecting. It's called the connection phase of organizational change.

So if you want to go back and listen to the other episodes on organizational change, go back. You can see they're called change series. But even if you haven't listened, I think this is going to be useful for you. So change always starts with a challenge, a perceived challenge, and then we get moving on it. Now, in the work collaborative model for

organizational change, we talk about first going through a period of expansion and contraction with your thinking to really understand, is this the real challenge? But actually, there is something you should be doing before and alongside that, and that is connection. Connection with your team, connection with the people who you work with. The reason is, is that when you're building connections, you're going to naturally discover insights. They're not separate steps, but they're

an interlinked process. And the trust built within real authentic connection really helps to aid discovery. The stronger your connections, the more authentic your discoveries will be. Now, discovery, if we remind ourselves, is that phase where we're going wide. It's that foundational

concept. We're going wide and we're going, can we validate our challenge, that sponsors perceived challenge, the perceived challenge we've identified that we're running into. It stops us from jumping into solutions before understanding the real issues and really gives us an evidence-based starting point for change. Now, connection is linked to this, but it's kind of linked in another way. It's linked to the idea of organizational readiness. Is your organization

actually ready for a change, irrelevant of this change? So through connection, you're going to understand things like, is the timing right? Are there any barriers that we can identify now before they become obstacles? But also really importantly, we're going to show respect for the existing knowledge, the existing values, the existing experience of your school, of your organization.

Too often when we jump into a change, it's all about the new, it's all about the difference. And actually there is so much lying within an organization that you need to explore. You're going to be at this stage gathering a lot of that qualitative style data and you're going to be building a real floor of what Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety. I want to take a moment to tell you about the International Curriculum Conference that is coming up from the International Curriculum Association. This will be held from the 11th to the 13th

of November in 2024 in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. It is so exciting. The theme of this is global perspectives, local impact, and I was at their conference last year. I can't recommend it highly enough. This is a focal point for the global community of schools, part of the International

Curriculum Association. There is going to be amazing keynote speakers and a wide range of school-led workshops delivered by classroom teachers sharing their practice and experience. Seriously, with the incredible insights and showcasing of learning, I really do recommend the International Curriculum Conference because it offers a unique level of enrichment connection and learning for all. If you're interested, check out the link in the show notes to register.

Please go there. It's going to be great. So what are you going to do in this phase? Well, you're going to be asking questions of your different community members, some powerful questions that try to get to the heart of how they are. You're doing a temperature check. So you might be first checking in on the

psychological safety. Psychological safety is when an organization feels safe enough to take risks, to make mistakes, to move ahead. If you haven't got that and there's an era of risk or the psychological safety is low, it's going to be very difficult to move forward on any change. Psychological safety will bring about honest discovery, and this really is important for any change. Often we run into change, think it's going to work, wonder why it didn't

because we ticked all the boxes, and actually it's because our team didn't really feel safe to move forward with the change. So ask yourself, how safe does my team feel? And ask them, this is where surveys as well can come in really handy to gather that anonymous feedback and to really listen into it. You need to be thinking about this stage. How do I encourage open

dialogue about challenges? And this is important, right? If you can't at the very beginning of a change, say let's have a vulnerable conversation about challenges that we face or about difficulties or about things we're not sure about, then you're going to be in real trouble when you're halfway through implementing a change and a challenge comes up, which it will. What are you going to do?

You're not prepared for it. You've not got that grounding. Some things you can do is to look at your past and look at where you've done things well before or look at where you've failed before and maybe you've failed well, or maybe you've failed poorly. What do I mean by that? Well,

again, it comes back to Amy Edmonds's brilliant work on failure. There is such a thing as failing well. In fact, many of the top organizations fail well all the time. It just means that you're willing to experiment. You're willing to push boundaries and failure is not seen as a bad

thing. It's seen as an inevitable part of growth and change. That takes a lot of psychological safety to make that happen. Failure could also just seem as a bad thing. If it comes across as

a bad thing, are your team really going to be willing to take risks, to jump into new things, or is the status quo going to be reinforced? It also allows us, if we go through a period of real connection, to limit some biases that come in, like confirmation bias, things that will make us just want to keep moving forward because it allows that natural open exploration. It stops us from only hearing what we want to hear, right? It also helps by actively saying, when we start a project, we start with connection. It also helps with limited perspectives. You're going to go,

okay, we need to talk to parents. That's essential. We need to talk to students. We need to talk to admin. We need to talk to our community before we're in the change. Often it comes later, right?

We go, okay, we're into the change and then we go into buy-in and then we start engaging our community. No, start to talk to them before. Start digging into their thoughts, their values. You're going to have a much richer time afterwards. So just a super short episode today. The essential

thing I want to take away is that connection is linked very deeply with the idea of discovery, with finding out what that problem is. They work together. They're not separate. And it's important that here you take the full time to understand the full picture of what connection looks like, feels like, sounds like in your setting. I'm going to tell you now, if you feel connection is lacking,

do not move with the change. I repeat that. If you feel connection is lacking, do not move forward with the change you want to do. It is so unlikely to work without good quality solid foundation.

And it's always worth remembering that sometimes, even just taking a few months off to work on connection before we introduce change can pay massive dividends in the future. Globaler Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning, thanks to my show editor, Pete Miguel, and the original music by Guillerme Silver. Thank you so, so much for tuning in today. And if we don't speak before, as ever, I'll see you here next week. Remember to find out more about the

international curriculum association and that fantastic international curriculum conference in November. Check out the links in the show notes.