Monday Moanin Thoughts #119 Getting Ready For 2014-15

Happy end of July 2014 Monday Moanin to all of you. Later this week, I will be welcoming over 100 educators from the Tri-County area of Detroit to the 3rd Annual Hickey Leadership Group Planning Summit. Please enjoy this archived blog from July 2013. The content is still relevant and I continue to focus on Lencioni’s six questions. I encourage your team to spend some quality reflection time on them as you begin to plan your 2014-15 school year. Have a great week.

Later this week, Hickey Leadership Group will be hosting the second annual Planning Summit. In a nutshell, it is a low content, high application gathering in which the attendees bring the bulk of their own work. They will use the time to plan, network, focus on leadership, and accomplish some tasks as they prepare for the 2013-14 school year. Over 120 educators will be attending the Summit this year. It is exciting to be working with such focused and committed people. August 1st is a great day to begin doing the prep  work for the upcoming year.

During the summer , I have been reading The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni. His work has helped me as I prepare for future coaching sessions, as well as the Summit 2013. One of my takeaways that I urge you and your teams to explore is his 6 simple questions to help gain clarity for your organization.

They are:

1. Why do we exist?
2. How do we behave?
3. What do we do?
4. How will we succeed?
5. What is most important right now?
6. Who must do what?

The goal is to agree on clear answers to these questions. Whether you are attending the Hickey Leadership Group Planning Summit 2013 or not, Lencioni says working with your team to answer these questions is critical to becoming a healthy and productive organization.

Consider beginning with these 6 simple questions as you launch your work. Good luck and lets all get to work!

Quote of the week: Lencioni writes; “More than getting the right answer, it’s often more important to simply have an answer-one that is directionally correct and around which all team members can commit.”