This blog post is part of a series on your improvement engine—make sure you have a great improvement engine (purpose, perspective, process, plan, and practices) before you start working on your improvement goal! (See also School Improvement Reflection Protocol).
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Ensure your improvement process actually helps you improve! Why?
(1) Because a helpful process gets you and your colleagues flourishing.
(2) Because a helpful process gets you focused on your purpose for improving, assessing the situation so you can determine your improvement priorities, and developing next steps.
(3) Because an unhelpful process can result in fuzziness about the purpose for improvement, get you working on things you don’t actually need to prioritize, and make you think that improvement is a 1-off, not continuous. Not good.
(4) Because using a helpful improvement process is a best practice.
Let’s keep thinking about this by reflecting on 6 questions:
Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán
Question 1: How important is process? (aka: Can’t we just get at our goals?) For me, process is vital. Process flows from purpose and perspective, and it precedes planning, practice, and progress.
Note: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems” (James Clear).
Question 2: What’s your actual improvement process? My improvement process has 4 parts:
- Reviewing my purpose for and perspective of improvement.
- Assessing my current reality.
- Making and implementing a plan.
- Using helpful practices, for example: (A) assessing, reporting, and celebrating progress, and then determining next steps (possibly by using an after action review and the School Improvement Reflection Protocol); (B) having domain committees meet 2+ times a year to reflect on how students, staff, and leaders are holistically flourishing; and to assess your progress on your domain-related, schoolwide action plans.
Question 3: What makes a good improvement process good? Here are 5 criteria that come to mind for me:
(A) Ongoing: The process is continuous. I use it from day to day, week to week, month to month, and year to year.
(B) Documented: The process is written down and easily accessible.
(C) Collaborative: The process gets people working together.
(D) Includes key components: reviewing the purpose of school improvement; assessing the current situation; developing and implementing an action plan; assessing, celebrating, and reporting progress; and determining next steps.
(E) Gets participants experiencing the 5 elements of flourishing: passionate purpose, resilient well-being, healthy relationships, transformative learning, and helpful resources.
Question 4: How well does your actual improvement process meet your criteria for a good improvement process?
(A) Ongoing: I use my process daily, weekly, quarterly, and annually.
(B) Documented: My process is documented in my task management software. (In the school setting, document the process in a Google Doc so everyone can access it.)
(C) Collaborative: For schools, the process is collaborative, as domain committees talk together.
(D) Includes key components: It includes all key components.
(E) Gets participants experiencing the 5 elements of flourishing: My process does this. For example, reviewing my purpose helps me experience passionate purpose, making a plan helps me experience helpful resources, and working with others helps me experience healthy relationships.
Question 5: To what extent does your improvement process actually help you improve? I think my improvement process actually helps me improve. It keeps me going day to day, week to week, and year to year. It helps me stay focused on my purpose, seeing how I’m doing, and determining next steps.
Question 6: What can you do to make your improvement process even more helpful? At the personal level, action steps that come to mind include documenting your process, making sure your process meets your criteria for a good improvement process, and consistently using your process.
At the school level, action steps that come to mind include:
(A) Documenting your process.
(B) Assessing your process to see the extent to which it meets the criteria for a good improvement process. Then, using assessment results to enhance the improvement process.
(C) Consistently using the improvement process.
(D) Having domain committees meet 2+ times a year to reflect on how students, staff, and leaders are holistically flourishing; and to assess your progress on your domain-related, schoolwide action plans.
(E) Regularly celebrating during staff meetings and in school publications the progress you’re making on your action plans and the progress of students, staff, and leaders on flourishing. Reporting progress to parents and other stakeholders through your annual report.
(F) Completing an annual after action review that includes determining next steps.
Photo by Anna Tarazevich
If your international Christian school doesn’t yet have a documented improvement process or wants to enhance its improvement process, feel free to contact me. I’d be glad to talk with you!
Here are some related resources:
- What process does your team use to do something new?
- How can enhancing processes help your team improve its GRIP?
- How can you use the process of doing your ACSI Inspire self-study to help people actually flourish?
- When you want to more effectively improve, what do you need to do?
- School Improvement Reflection Protocol
Bottom line: Ensure your improvement process actually helps you improve!
Get flourishing!
Michael
P.S. Bonus: Here are 10 quotations from books I’ve read that include a form of the word process:
(1) “Enjoy the Process” (Feel-Good Productivity, loc 404).
(2) “Elevating your culture to the flourishing level and having it last is often a three- to five-year process if your organization is starting from a toxic level” (Road to Flourishing, loc 2983).
(3) “Understanding the…process in general reduces anxiety, fear, frustration, and impatience, just as having a map or navigation system eases worries on an unfamiliar trip” (Smart Growth, loc 475).
(4) “You can manage resources. You can manage systems. You can manage processes and procedures. But you cannot effectively manage people” (Trust and Inspire, loc 624).
(5) “The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them” (Atomic Habits, loc 898).
(6) “No action, activity, or process is more central to a healthy organization than the meeting. As dreaded as the ‘m’ word is, as maligned as it has become, there is no better way to have a fundamental impact on an organization than by changing the way it does meetings” (The Advantage, p. 173).
(7) “Multicultural teams need low-context processes” (The Culture Map, p. 55).
(8) “How can you better leverage the asking of questions in the development process of your leaders?” (The Leader’s Greatest Return Workbook, loc 1436)
(9) “…failure is just simply part of the learning process” (On Leadership—Build Your Career: Anne Chow).
(10) “A manager’s job is to build a team that works well together, support members in reaching their career goals, and create processes to get work done smoothly and efficiently” (The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You, p. 16).
Get Flourishing 