As the school year winds to a close for almost all of us, it’s a great time to step back and evaluate your meeting structure for the next academic or fiscal year! Meetings are not intrinsically evil. But meetings that are not structured to…
This month I’ve been hanging out a lot in Together Leader 2 Land. . . What is this land, you ask? Why, I’ll tell you! It’s a land focused on Team Togetherness. Ashley, a school leader in Indianapolis, takes us there with her Meeting…
On my recent trip to Mississippi, Braxton S., a high school principal, showed off his Together System. Yowsa, look at that fancy Weekly Worksheet on the front page! More to come on this baby later. Braxton and his Together System! For now, I…
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools these days (see here, here, and here), and I keep learning more and more! So of course, when I spied this District Meeting Schedule on Talla R.’s workspace during a recent…
Meetings: the bane of a leader’s existence. Meetings are not intrinsically evil, but they are often poorly planned, lack alignment with goals and priorities, have no follow-through, and are a true time-waster. There are many tools out there to…
For some crazy reason, I’ve not written about Priority Planning yet on this blog – and it is basically my favorite Togetherness habit (see Chapter 4 of the new book!) A Priority Plan is a short, simple and shareable way to articulate your…
Missed the other posts in this series? Start here, here and here to get the most out of these quick tips! Together Leaders in mission-driven settings have a LOT to do. They are managing as well as making, in hyper-ambitious but resource-limited…
One of the most telling exercises in my Together Leader workshops is when we list “Priority Crushers”—the last-minute events, unpredictable emergencies and other sudden To-Do’s that crush our well-intentioned big goals and…
I’ve recently gotten to thinking about how leaders can be both generous with their time AND ruthless about using it well. Like most of you, I really enjoy helping people. I get ton of requests for time from people seeking career advice,…
Two of my favorite school leaders wrote me earlier this year about feeling completely overwhelmed toward the end of the school year. On the one hand, they face the immediacy of state and district testing, hiring new staff, report cards, parent…