How to Make Kind Decisions: A Kind Leadership Guild Sneak Peek

When you get right down to it, Leadership is nothing more or less than the ability to make decisions. And anyone can do that, right?

Well, maybe. Because if that is true, then you are no better or worse a leader than the quality of your decisions. And that feels great when you’ve just managed to keep your head in a crisis. But what about the other day when you stood in front of the line at the coffee shop utterly unable to pick between a latte and a cold brew?

That’s why this month in the Kind Leadership Guild, I’ll be releasing my updated course on kind leadership decisionmaking—packed with tips and truths I’ve refined from teaching it live multiple times since 2020. And as always when I drop a new course in the guild, I’m giving all of my listeners and followers a sneak peek of lesson 1. 

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1

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild. Welcome to kind leadership decision-making! I’m so glad that you invested in yourself, and are committed to becoming a more effective, humane, and collaborative leader. My goal is that over the next 8 lessons, you will learn a simple but powerful process that will help you to make kind decisions that enable you and your team to impact the world for the better.

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Lesson Plan:

What IS kind leadership?

Exploring the kind leadership model

Determining Kind Decisions

Defining your Problem

Exercises

3. 

Before we dig into today’s lesson though, I want to tackle the concern I hear the most often about Kind Leadership.  People often confuse kindness with weakness, or even worse, niceness. Let me tell you right now, that’s nonsense, rooted in not defining your terms precisely. 

4.

Leadership is making decisions that you believe will improve your organization.

Kindness is the practice of healing ourselves and our communities so we can grow into the best versions of ourselves. 

Kind Leadership  is the skill of making decisions that you believe could heal yourself, your organization, and the world that you serve.

5.

So, what does it take to make a kind impact as an educational or library leader? The Kind Leadership Toolkit is what us overeducated types call a theoretical framework, but you should think of it more as a set of skills you can use to understand and address any leadership challenge from a perspective of kindness. 

Nurture Your Self:  Kind Leadership begins from within.

Unearth your Values: To know where you stand, you have to dig deep

Determine Kind Decisions: Decisions aren't decisions till they're implemented.

Refine Wisdom from Data: Defeat information overload with focus and analysis

Grow time and Money: Use abundance and scarcity to your advantage

Implement Sustainable Systems:  Systems and processes scale each decision

Empower your Team: When you let go, they will soar.

Ally with Advocates: It's all so much smoother when you have each others' backs.

 Achieve a Shared Vision: The smaller decisions determine the biggest one of them all.

6. 

That said, Once you’ve tuned into your emotions and your values, as discussed in the first two courses in the guild, The next skill you must master on the road to kind leadership is decision-making. You can have every other skill in the toolbox down to a science, but if you can’t make a decision, it’s all irrelevant.  On the other hand, master kind decision-making, and you will have a solid foundation that will serve you well in almost any situation in your work and in other aspects of your life as well. So, what is Kind Leadership Decision-making?

7.

The Kind Decision-making Model is at the core of Kind Leadership, and it’s the tool we’ll be learning over the next 7 lessons. You can use to understand and address any leadership challenge from a perspective of kindness. Some problems lend themselves more obviously to one or two partic-ular lenses, but it’s good practice to always consider your challenge through all 6. If nothing else, It’ll help you to look at a problem from a different angle, get out of your preconceived notions, and imple-ment a more effective and humane solution to your problem.

•       PRESENCE: Mindful awareness of the opportunities and threats found in yourself and the wider world.

•       FORESIGHT: Envisioning an organizational purpose, values, mission, and strategy for a better world.

•       EMPATHY: Coaching your team to use their unique strengths and challenges to create a more humane and effective culture.

•       STEWARDSHIP: developing systems to administer your organization’s resources to sustainably achieve your goals.

•       ADVOCACY: Promoting stakeholder decisions that will give your organization additional resources to serve its mission.

•       DETERMINATION: Making decisions and taking actions based on the other lenses with the goal of a better world for all involved.

8. 

Problem and Questions:

As mentioned, we’re going to dig deeper into each of these skills as we go along. However, be-fore we can start using the skills to address our leadership challenges, we need to start by defining those challenges in the form of a problem, including a potential solution. Once we come to a clear defi-nition of our problem, we will then figure out the key questions we need to answer about our problem (and potential solution) in the course of our decision-making process. Then, and only then, we will use the skills as a tool to test and refine our potential solution before we put it our there in the real world. 

During my PhD, I learned an excellent format to define a research problem. Yes, it was designed to help scholars refine the central issue they would explore in a research project, but with a few minor tweaks and simplifications, I realized it could bring enough clarity to start digging into any challenge. Here’s the Problem Statement format: 

• I/We need (A desired goal) because (the reason we need it) 

• However, (obstacle that is—or seems to be—standing between us and our goal) 

• I/we tentatively believe that if we decide to (take a certain action), we can overcome or avoid this obstacle. 

And because this is hard to understand without an example, here’s my problem for this course:

• I need a way to share what I’ve learned about the skills of kind leadership decisionmaking because I want to spare other leaders some of the fear, confusion, and drama I had to face on my learning curve.

• However, Live courses are hard for leaders, myself included, to juggle with the rest of our lives!

• I tentatively believe that if I provide this course on-demand for any guild member who needs to refine their decisionmaking skills, I can share this knowledge more sustainably, and build a strong program that will change educational leaders (and their organizations) for the better.

You’ll create, refine, and share your research problems as part of this lesson’s exercises. You’ll also work through the next step, of defining and refining questions that you will be asking about your problem statement as we journey through the six skills of kind leadership. These questions can vary from problem to problem, but some common ones are:

• Does my tentative decision resolve the problem?

• How can I increase the chance of success?

9.

Once you’ve determined your questions, you’ll want to go back and take a look at the six skills. Which ones are likely ones to focus on when thinking through your problem? As mentioned, you want to go through all 6, because surprising things will emerge. However, it’s handy to start with a game plan. Also, Is it most important that the decision be made quickly, well, or collaboratively? Many complex situations may require you to err on the side of growing humanely, managing effectively, or creating collaboratively. Finally, Are there criteria this decision must meet to be “good enough”? Before we wap up, I want to talk about this one in a little more depth. 

10.

At the end of the Kind Leadership decisionmaking process, you will have implemented a good-enough decision that addresses a challenge in your leadership practice. But what is a good-enough decision?

•       A “good enough” decision is not the “perfect” way to address your problem, and it may not even be the “best” way.

•       It accounts for the humanity of those who will implement it and are affected by it.

•       It is designed to effectively solve the problem as you currently understand it.

•       It can and likely will be revised based on changing circumstances or new data.

•       Sometimes good-enough solutions create new problems.

•       That’s not failure. That’s Life.

11.

At the end of each lesson, we’ll go over the exercises. You’ll find more information on the right side of the lesson page as well. Most lessons will have a discussion question or two you can answer in the groupchat, as well as a meatier challenge to work on over the next few days so you can really absorb each lesson before you move on. I really want you to slow down and take your time as you work through the lessons, which is the reason you can’t just rush through the course in one go. Take your time, focus, and apply each skill to your problem before tackling the next.

12.

Before you start on lesson 2, here’s some activities for you.

•       Go to the group chat, let us know you’re working on this course, and enter the following:

•       What did you learn or discover today?

•       What do you think your personal next step with your challenge is, now that you have a clearer understanding of the problem? 

•       Draft your Problem statement using the model described

13.

•       Get Feedback on your problem statement:

•       Ask a friend or colleague

•       Post in the group chat!

•       Consider waiting 3-5 days before starting Lesson 2:

•       Your problem may shift

•       New ideas may arise

•       YOU NEED REST!

14.

Congratulations! You made it through lesson one. Take a few days to absorb and apply what you learned, post in the group chat, and work on the exercises. If you’re watching this in the Guild, just proceed to Lesson 2, which focuses on the decision-making skill of Presence. Just like you can’t become a kind leader if you can’t make kind decisions, you can’t make kind decisions until you get present with the facts of the situation, both inside and out. I’ll see you there.