Strengths and weaknesses

Are you a school leader concerned about teacher morale? If so, please listen to this 30 minute podcast by Jennifer Gonzalez at Cult of Pedagogy! I guarantee it will cause you to reflect and to improve life for your teachers. The apple podcast link is here, Spotify here, and the link to her webpage is here.

​Colleagues,

This week we continue digging into ways for you to grow yourself as a leader. Today’s strategy builds on strategy 2, blocking reflection time.


Strategy 3: Assess your strengths and weaknesses


As a leader, the demands on you are varied and complex. Although you can’t improve on everything at once, it is very important to keep in mind both your strengths and weaknesses. By leveraging our strengths, we can be more effective. By either improving or compensating for our weaknesses, we can also be more effective.


Think about the most important aspects of your work and the most important projects or responsibilities you have and list them out. For each one, identify what went well and what didn’t and then link the outcomes to specific leadership skills or knowledge.


Here’s an example:

The Assistant Principal Podcast

​Went well

• Launched it!
• Easy to do when I have guests
• Having fun
• Good listening rates for a new podcast

​

What didn’t

• Inconsistency and too few episodes
• Not directly asking people to be on the show
• Solo episodes are very time-consuming

​Knowledge, skills, and dispositions that impact the work:

​Positives

• Not afraid to try new things
• Good at building systems and procedures
• Okay at spreading the word through multiple sources but could be better

​

Negatives

• Hesitancy in asking for help caused by self-doubt and negative thinking (people are too busy, this isn’t valuable, I should be able to do it myself)
• Seeing a need and jumping on it without having the time necessary to follow through

Doing just one of these is helpful, but analyzing a couple other areas will start to show patterns and provide us with deeper understanding of both our strengths and weaknesses.

Cheers!

Frederick