Creating Leaders From An Existing Team

Today, let’s talk about how to create leaders from an existing team. Now this existing team could be from a newly acquired childcare program or purchasing the childcare program to scale your company into multiple locations. No matter if this childcare program was newly acquired or if you’re scaling your business to multiple locations, every program needs to have what we call Leadership Academy.

It’s your way and your formula for building leaders. Now if you never created a Leadership Academy, then you definitely want to sign up for our free webinar at www.learnnewsystems.com

This is what most childcare owners typically overlook because they never really thought about creating their own Leadership Academy. But let me tell you something, if you’re looking to change the way systems are being executed in your program, the quality of service that your staff provide, and you’re more interested in having your team members be there with you longer then the Leadership Academy is your key.

So today I have a few strategies that I’m going to share with you that I’ve learned the hard way and hopefully you don’t have to learn the hard way and you could just take my advice, and implement this in your business.

1. So in order for you to build leaders from an existing team, the first step that you have to do is you have to recognize that you need team building opportunities.

Now for me when I began to build my team, I began to think about ways to have team building happen in my program, but also where it wasn’t always facilitated through me.

So here are a few things that I did for team building:

I asked for an outside agency to come in and assist with an exercise program. So I think it was like every other Thursday, we would clear out the classroom and I did that for the most part with the agency and then we would set up like the exercise area in here so that we can have team building moments that was not about childcare, it improved their health and it was given back to them something that they literally said they wanted. And so we will have outside help come in.

And then on my operating calendar, I made sure that I included time for our every other week, team meeting. And then we had our schedule that we have for our training. And so this training was A+. And what I would do was I would bring each class to a private training with me. And of course, if you don’t have your own training center, and you’re thinking about it, it’s the best thing that you can do for your program.

So I’ve had my own teacher training center for a long time. And so I will bring my team from their classrooms into my Teacher Training Center. And those teams will come based on the class so I would have my subs and floaters go into the infant room and then I will bring my infant room main teachers into private training with me. This facilitated me building leaders one-on-one with the team.

2. Professional development opportunities. I really think that without your own leadership program, you have too many opinions and not enough strategy that will be offered to your team. If you have the training from this person and training from that person and training from this person. What you want to do is to have your own leadership program so that when they go online to your academy, they hear your voice, they get your expectations, they understand your objectives, it’s more streamlined and it’s more intentional. So it’s time out for just you know, saying, “Well, hey you need these credit hours, go get these credit hours.” You have to be very intentional when training your leadership team.

3. In my prior videos, I talked about how to successfully implement your systems into an existing culture and then I also talked about how to successfully create a culture among team members who are already a part of a program and just how to implement your culture into that new setting. And so in this video, I’m talking about how to build leaders from an existing team as the starting point, and it really brings all of those videos together, in which the start point is alignment. It is so critical that you understand your company hierarchy and that you understand the roles and skills that are comparable to the responsibilities that these individuals are acquainted with doing for that organization.

So alignment is key. Alignment with the current operational roles for the current ownership the way it’s always been done, making sure that they are in alignment with that, and then clarify what this role now looks like for this new system that you’re implementing. Clarifying that this is what this role will now look like in our organization moving forward. And when you start operating like that, what that will do is give them new organizational goals, to learn your new structure and that has to be a part of what you train them on in order to build leaders. They have to be willing to understand your new organizational structure and it has to become their goal to learn it and to accomplish it and to be a part of it.

4. Lastly, plan time to celebrate even the smallest win. When you’re moving an existing team forward, celebrating what you want is the key to thriving. So you want to start celebrating even if the littlest things such as they opened up on time, they’re answering your phone correctly, they’re closing out correctly, they’re utilizing the checklist correctly, they’re doing their rounds correctly, or you know, they just are a pleasant person to be around. That’s culture. So you want to celebrate everything that’s happening with this new and existing team by celebrating what you expect.

If you want to know more about how you can build and develop leaders in your childcare business, be sure to join our upcoming webinar www.learnnewsystems.com

Creating Leaders From An Existing Team

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