Before we get started, I have two quick announcements

1.     I’ve been hearing a strong interest in how to support beginning teachers. I went into some key practices last year in episodes 214 and 215, so if you are in the mode to think about how to support your BTs (and ECTs), give a listen to episodes 214 and 215

2.     The July 22 episode of The Assistant Principal Podcast we feature a panel discussion with myself and five assistant principals. Some are national/state AP of the Year awardees and others are just wrapping up their first year as assist principals. The focus of our discussion is being a first year AP! We would love to hear from you. If you have questions, topics, advice, or stories, please consider sharing. Please email them to me at [email protected]. I would love to be able to name contributors but will only do so if you explicitly give permission for us to include your name and affiliation. We are recording on July 15, so don’t wait.

Okay, now onto the episode…

 2022-10-21_68_Five for Friday Final Audio Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast I'm your host, Frederick Busky. The goal of this podcast is to improve life and leadership for assistant principals. Today's episode of five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of October seventeenth through twenty first. With a caveat. Although we did indeed publish these emails this week, they are actually repeats from our list of greatest hits. This week as well as next week, I am in Kenya and so we just thought that this would be a fun way to kind of cover our bases, but also still continue to provide you some value while I'm away playing and learning and being in schools in Kenya. So I hope you enjoy this recap. The topic of Monday's message was leadership, isolation, and I hope you're subscribing to the daily list because one of my all time favorite photographs was included as part of this daily email and it is a black and white photo of somebody standing in a puddle with a box over their head. When I first saw this photo, it just made me think of the isolation and the loneliness that can come with leadership. I didn't really go into anything in the email that talked about how to break that, break that isolation down, but I just asked readers to come sit with that and think about their own feelings. Think about how you can take care of yourself. And break down some of that isolation. You see things and you say why, but I dream things that never were, and I say why not? That quotes from George Bernard Shaw in 1949 and the topic of Tuesday's email is vision. I thought this was a nice juxtaposition from Monday's email of a leader with a box over their head. I have to admit that I have a love hate relationship with vision. I used to believe very strongly and passionately that it was a leader's job to provide vision. And then I had a leader that came into my organization and completely trashed it. In my mind he trashed it and he had his own vision. And despite there being lots of people that had invested many years in the organization, he came in from the outside and just imposed his vision over everything. And that constituted a lot of destruction of programs and really damaging people. So I've become. Kind of very skeptical about the idea that leaders come in and impose a vision from outside. I think what we need to be focusing more on is the development of shared vision. And when we talk about visionary leadership, I think what we really should be talking about is the expectation that leaders can come in and create space for people to talk about their own dreams and goals and aspirations, and that leaders can facilitate a group of people sharing that and finding the commonality and developing a vision that is common to the participants. The people within the organization and that then the leader can really give voice to that and help keep people focused on that vision. Speaking of vision, Wednesday's email was about the difference between Mission, vision and goals, and I told the story of a trip that Pam and I took in the summer of 20. 21 So Pam is my wife, the other doctor Buskey. And in the summer of 2021 we jumped in an SUV and drove across country visiting all kinds of parks and things. And so I used that trip to talk about the mission, which the mission was to reconnect with family and friends and to have memorable experiences in nature. That's what we were going out to do. Vision is about the outcome resulting from enacting or fulfilling your mission. So our goal was to reconnect with family that were, excuse me, our mission was to reconnect with family and have memorable experiences. The vision was that we would drive home renewed in multiple ways, with a new set of memories and a great appreciation for our country, its people, and its beauty. Now, goals are the achievements that will help you fulfill your mission. So for our trip, some of our goals were backpack in the Badlands Backpacking Glacier Park, visit my friend Nat and Klamath Falls, spend time with my mom in San Francisco, and visit other family on the way home. Now, as it turned out, we did not meet all those goals. Yet we still achieved the mission and we still fulfilled our vision. So remember, the goals were places we would visit and things we would do. The mission was to reconnect with family and have memorable experiences, and the vision was that those experiences would leave us renewed and connected when we got home. So how could we achieve the mission and the vision if we didn't achieve the goals? Well, what happened was the summer of 2021 there was a massive heat wave across the northwest. And so some of the things that we wanted to do we just, we got cooked out of and so we had to change our plans. So we wound up not backpacking in the Badlands and we didn't backpack in Glacier Park. But that's OK, because one of the things that we sometimes do is we get so focused on goals that we forget why we have the goals, right? The goals are just kind of measurement steps on the way to achieving the mission and the vision. And there are a lot of times when the goals stop making sense for whatever reason. So when you're thinking about your organization and the mission and the vision and goals, yes, you want to attend to the goals, but don't get too focused on the goals. Always check and make sure that you're actually making progress on the mission. Because that's the most important thing. The title of Thursday's email was are you a force multiplier? And this email was inspired by something my good friend and colleague Doctor Robert Maddox sent me about the human touch and the human touch as being a force multiplier. The idea here is that connecting with people builds community, and that community creates strength, resilience and hope. So I offered three things that people could do. Each one of those would take less than three minutes and challenged readers to execute on one of these things to create connectivity and build community and thereby be a force multiplier because leaders are force multipliers. So the first thing was to me, call or email someone that you worked with this week and express gratitude. The second thing was to get together with another leader and identify a strategic behavior that you can implement next week. For example, engaging in five minute coaching and commit to being each other's accountability partners in executing that strategy. And the third one was a little bit selfish. I encouraged people to email me with...