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How centre leaders can be present and prioritise what matters most

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In the fast-moving rhythm of early learning services, centre leaders wear many hats including compliance officer, team coach, family liaison, admin manager, and crisis responder, often before 10am. But among the daily demands, one leadership truth remains constant, being visible.

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Time, tension, and transformation: reclaiming time in early learning settings

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Time in early childhood education is precious and paradoxical. We speak of “being present” with children, yet the day-to-day often feels like a race against the clock.

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Dr Fenech teaches the 'Leading and Managing Quality ECE Services' unit and tells her early childhood education students that no matter how good a teacher they are, the governance and leadership of the service will impact them and their practice.

"Effective governance and leadership will strengthen their practice, while ineffective governance and leadership can weaken it," Dr Fenech said.

"Good governance and strong leadership are essential to delivering quality outcomes for children in ECEC, and these quality contributors are recognised in the National Quality Framework (NQF), Quality Area 7.

"Both effective governance and leadership support quality early childhood education. And we also know that effective leadership within a service requires the backing of a governing body that is committed to providing quality ECEC," Dr Fenech said.

Dr Fenech shared that a recent study by Harrison and colleagues , which investigated services' quality improvement, found that governing bodies - whether this be a parent management committee, a not-for-profit community organisation, a sole trader, or a corporate chain - need to support its service leaders if the quality is to improve.

This support can include having clear policies and procedures and systems that manage risk, to providing leaders and educators with the programming time they need, opportunities for professional development, and recognising and remunerating leaders and educators for the work they do.

"When we think about managing risk in ECEC, we usually think about making sure that the children attending our services are kept safe."

"The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has really extended this focus to the safety and wellbeing of staff," Dr Fenech said.
Leadership and management responses to support staff
Recent COVID related ECEC research found that having to work throughout this health crisis has impacted the physical health and emotional wellbeing of many educators.

These studies also identified a number of leadership and management systems responses that supported both staff wellbeing and retention during the crisis.

These responses included:

implementing critical incident plans and infectious disease policies specific to Covid;

having clear communication processes that involved information dissemination and consultation;

introducing practical strategies aimed to minimise physical risk;

establishing wellbeing programs and resources;

enabling and supporting staff through change management processes, for example, when using technology in new ways with children and families; and

acknowledging the efforts and achievements of staff, and advocating publicly for recognition of the work they were doing.

Services are well equipped to respond to crises in these ways, allowing them to sustain quality ECEC on an ongoing basis, if they are meeting Standard 7.2, Dr Fenech shared.

"This Standard speaks to two key and interrelated aspects of effective leadership: a positive organisational culture, and the building of a professional learning community."
Service culture and philosophy
According to the Australian Institute of Indigenous Governance, culture is "a whole system of knowledge, beliefs, ideas, values, powers, laws, rules and meanings that are shared by the members of a society, and together form the foundation for the way they live.

"Critical to a service's culture is their philosophy. We know that sometimes a philosophy statement is something that is developed by one person, or that is done to tick off the meeting of Element 7.1.1."

"When leaders work with all stakeholders in the service - children, families, staff, management - to develop the philosophy, it works like glue that holds everyone together and provides the foundation for practice: what educators do how they are they doing it," Dr Fenech said.
Professional learning community for ongoing improvement
As noted in recent COVID release ECEC research, services whose quality rating improved to Exceeding demonstrated a commitment to developing and working with their philosophy in these ways.

"Building a professional learning community that is committed to ongoing improvement - irrespective of whether your service is rated as Working Towards or Excellent - should be embedded into a service's culture and philosophy," Dr Fenech said.

"Two things that we see effective governing bodies and leaders doing are firstly, approaching professional development as being much more than one off mandatory training sessions, and secondly, bringing educators together, so that professional development is undertaken in teams, not in isolation by individual educators.

"These approaches are collaborative and inquiry based, where the learning is shared, practiced, discussed, and supported in an ongoing way."

Dr Fenech referenced the work of Chris Woodrow and Linda Newman who talk about how in this approach, new knowledge and approaches to practice are developed within the service context, "rather than transported in from 'outside'" (p. 5).

"This is not to say that educators shouldn't be engaging in, for example, professional development conferences or forums. What it does mean is thinking about how 'outside knowledge' might translate into practice within the context in which the service is operating," Dr Fenech said. "The educational leader is well placed to lead this work, working with teams of educators, but of course needs to be resourced to do this important work," Dr Fenech said.

In addition to the references Dr Fenech has shared, she encourage all readers to access ACECQA's extensive range of resources on government and leadership, to support their work in meeting the requirements of Quality Area 7.

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Dr Marianne Fenech: The impact of quality governance and leadership

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Dr Marianne Fenech is an Associate Professor and program director of the Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood) at the University of Sydney. With her research and teaching focused on governance and leadership, we sat down with Dr Fenech to delve into why it's so important to focus on Quality Area 7.

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Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) are completed so that services can self-assess their performance in order to provide children with quality education and care, and to plan for future improvement. Therefore, it makes sense to ask the children themselves about the changes they would like to see at their centre.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child identifies the need for children to have and express their own views on issues that affect them. Adults should listen and respond respectfully.

The QIP process is the perfect opportunity for educators to give children a voice, and empower them with a sense of agency. This week we explore how this can be done in authentic and positive ways.

Listen continuously

Including children in QIP has the potential to be tokenistic, especially if their views are hurriedly documented at the last minute. While services are required to update their QIP at least once a year, meaningful consultation occurs throughout the year.

Services should listen to children's thoughts and feelings as a daily practice. Not only does this make the QIP process easier, but the children will learn it is okay to share their views with others. They will feel listened to and have a clear process for achieving change in their lives.

Allow children to communicate in different ways

Talking is not the only method of communication. Group discussions are an incredible way for children to share ideas and learn collaboratively, but they have their limitations. Discussions can prioritise the ideas of children who are able to participate and exclude children with language, developmental and social barriers.

When involving children in the QIP process, consider how different children at your service communicate.

How do your babies express their needs and interests?

How do children with disabilities and or developmental delays prefer to communicate?

Educators need to adapt to the ways their children communicate. Instead of talking, children may prefer to share their thoughts through body language, music, visual arts or role play.

Listen deeply

Educators can find greater meaning in children's ideas by taking the time to listen deeply.

Avoid settling at the first idea a child presents you - involving children in a QIP is not about quickly ticking a box. Children may say what they think adults want to hear, or what they feel is socially acceptable amongst their peers.

Be patient. Authentic communication takes time. Build trusting relationships, ask children questions, clarify assumptions, and keep searching for understanding.

Create learning experiences

Involving children in QIP does not need to be a stand-alone activity. Consider the greater learning experiences on offer, and take advantage of these:

writing ideas down on paper teaches children about the purpose and function of language systems

displaying children's ideas on a classroom wall creates a language-rich environment

self-expression through music, movement and drama supports social-emotional development

planning for positive changes teaches children about problem-solving.

Take action

Listening to children and documenting their ideas is meaningful when action is taken. Educators can avoid tokenism by having a clear plan for following up on children's ideas.

Before consulting with children, ensure all team members at your service are on board and committed to the process. Find solutions for implementing children's ideas in a proactive and timely manner.

And remember to tell children what they have achieved. Show them what has changed in their lives!

7 ways to collect children's ideas

1. Establish a space for spontaneous storytelling. This could be a special mat or a circle marked on the ground with tape. Introduce props like puppets and silk scarfs.

2. Create a wishing well or a wishing wall. Children draw or write the things they wish for on paper. They drop the paper into the well or pin it to the wall.

3. Give children cameras. Ask children to take photos of things they like and don't like at their centre.

4. Invite a performer. Arrange for a musician or actor to help the children express their ideas through a group performance.

5. Document children's stories in their own words. Use audio or video to record children's ideas. Write captions for children's artwork when they explain what it is about.

6. Question games. Ask questions during transitions and group times. Where do you like to play? What do you want more of at preschool?

7. Recreate your centre in small world play. Help children build the perfect centre using blocks, boxes, small dolls and loose parts. Role-play scenarios and explore possibilities.

Further reading

Have you seen our new live webinar training calendar?

Many sessions to choose from including new sessions specifically related to the current pandemic environment, and many of our most popular training topics redesigned for webinar format.

Topics are delivered in a variety of 2- 3 hour sessions or 2 part series. Every course provides a practical, hands-on approach to professional development.

CELA has been supporting the professional needs of the early and middle childhood sector for over 40 years. We trained over 4,500 sector professionals in 2019.

About CELA

Community Early Learning Australia is a not for profit organisation with a focus on amplifying the value of early learning for every child across Australia - representing our members and uniting our sector as a force for quality education and care.

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Involving children in Quality Improvement Planning

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Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) are completed so that services can self-assess their performance in order to provide children with quality education and care, and to plan for future improvement. Therefore, it makes sense to ask the children themselves about the changes they would like to see at their centre.

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The practices of an effective quality improvement coach | Centre for Community Child Health

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This blog is part of the Learning and changing with quality improvement blog series.

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Using reflective practice to drive improvement in your service

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Reflective practice is an important tool for services supporting engagement in continuous improvement and promoting a healthy work environment.

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Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) are completed so that services can self-assess their performance in order to provide children with quality education and care, and to plan for future improvement. Therefore, it makes sense to ask the children themselves about the changes they would like to see at their centre.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child identifies the need for children to have and express their own views on issues that affect them. Adults should listen and respond respectfully.

The QIP process is the perfect opportunity for educators to give children a voice, and empower them with a sense of agency. This week we explore how this can be done in authentic and positive ways.

Listen continuously

Including children in QIP has the potential to be tokenistic, especially if their views are hurriedly documented at the last minute. While services are required to update their QIP at least once a year, meaningful consultation occurs throughout the year.

Services should listen to children's thoughts and feelings as a daily practice. Not only does this make the QIP process easier, but the children will learn it is okay to share their views with others. They will feel listened to and have a clear process for achieving change in their lives.

Allow children to communicate in different ways

Talking is not the only method of communication. Group discussions are an incredible way for children to share ideas and learn collaboratively, but they have their limitations. Discussions can prioritise the ideas of children who are able to participate and exclude children with language, developmental and social barriers.

When involving children in the QIP process, consider how different children at your service communicate.

How do your babies express their needs and interests?

How do children with disabilities and or developmental delays prefer to communicate?

Educators need to adapt to the ways their children communicate. Instead of talking, children may prefer to share their thoughts through body language, music, visual arts or role play.

Listen deeply

Educators can find greater meaning in children's ideas by taking the time to listen deeply.

Avoid settling at the first idea a child presents you - involving children in a QIP is not about quickly ticking a box. Children may say what they think adults want to hear, or what they feel is socially acceptable amongst their peers.

Be patient. Authentic communication takes time. Build trusting relationships, ask children questions, clarify assumptions, and keep searching for understanding.

Create learning experiences

Involving children in QIP does not need to be a stand-alone activity. Consider the greater learning experiences on offer, and take advantage of these:

writing ideas down on paper teaches children about the purpose and function of language systems

displaying children's ideas on a classroom wall creates a language-rich environment

self-expression through music, movement and drama supports social-emotional development

planning for positive changes teaches children about problem-solving.

Take action

Listening to children and documenting their ideas is meaningful when action is taken. Educators can avoid tokenism by having a clear plan for following up on children's ideas.

Before consulting with children, ensure all team members at your service are on board and committed to the process. Find solutions for implementing children's ideas in a proactive and timely manner.

And remember to tell children what they have achieved. Show them what has changed in their lives!

7 ways to collect children's ideas

1. Establish a space for spontaneous storytelling. This could be a special mat or a circle marked on the ground with tape. Introduce props like puppets and silk scarfs.

2. Create a wishing well or a wishing wall. Children draw or write the things they wish for on paper. They drop the paper into the well or pin it to the wall.

3. Give children cameras. Ask children to take photos of things they like and don't like at their centre.

4. Invite a performer. Arrange for a musician or actor to help the children express their ideas through a group performance.

5. Document children's stories in their own words. Use audio or video to record children's ideas. Write captions for children's artwork when they explain what it is about.

6. Question games. Ask questions during transitions and group times. Where do you like to play? What do you want more of at preschool?

7. Recreate your centre in small world play. Help children build the perfect centre using blocks, boxes, small dolls and loose parts. Role-play scenarios and explore possibilities.

Further reading

Have you seen our new live webinar training calendar?

Many sessions to choose from including new sessions specifically related to the current pandemic environment, and many of our most popular training topics redesigned for webinar format.

Topics are delivered in a variety of 2- 3 hour sessions or 2 part series. Every course provides a practical, hands-on approach to professional development.

CELA has been supporting the professional needs of the early and middle childhood sector for over 40 years. We trained over 4,500 sector professionals in 2019.

About CELA

Community Early Learning Australia is a not for profit organisation with a focus on amplifying the value of early learning for every child across Australia - representing our members and uniting our sector as a force for quality education and care.

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Involving children in Quality Improvement Planning

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Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) are completed so that services can self-assess their performance in order to provide children with quality education and care, and to plan for future improvement. Therefore, it makes sense to ask the children themselves about the changes they would like to see at their centre.

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ACECQA's Quality Support Program Team outlines the importance of articulating practice and provides practical tips to assist educators articulate the achievements and strengths of their service and team members during assessment and rating visits.
As an educator, your contribution to your service's assessment and rating visit can really make a difference. The visit is your opportunity to highlight what your service and educators do well, celebrate your strengths and achievements, open conversations about the quality of your programs and practices, and gain valuable feedback.

Many will be thinking that this is easier said than done. After all, one of the things that many educators find difficult is communicating to the authorised officer all that your service does well, and how practices provide quality outcomes for children and families. This is the skill of articulating practice. In fact, educators articulate practice on a daily basis. They talk with and about children and their knowledge, strengths, ideas, culture, abilities and interests. They also discuss children's learning, their social and emotional development, wellbeing, and friendships.

Articulation is generally understood to mean the act of expressing something in a coherent, understood way. Articulation in education and care is essential to building relationships with children (Element 5.1.1) and collaborative partnerships with families and communities (QA 6). It is through these conversations and relationships that educators gain an understanding of, and build on, the strengths, aspirations and priorities of children and families.

This in turn makes your education and care programs, practices and policies meaningful, inclusive and child-centred. Authorised officers are trained to follow an 'observe-discuss-sight' method at the visit to gather evidence to support a rating against the NQS, including compliance with the National Law and National Regulations.

While authorised officers may ask questions to gain more information and examples, it is important to think about what you would like to discuss and which examples highlight how the educators, service leaders and team are meeting or exceeding the NQS.

The term 'discuss' is used in the Guide to the National Quality Framework to provide opportunities for respectful two-way conversations between authorised officers and the educators or service leaders to identify examples of quality practice that align with the NQS.

Here are four practical tips to assist you in articulating practice during your service's Assessment and Rating visit:
Tip 1 - Build knowledge
Support your educators to build on and become confident in their knowledge of the NQS, the relevant Approved Learning Framework/s and your Quality Improvement Plan. Hold regular meetings, reflective sessions and, if relevant, professional development workshops to discuss these topics. A good working knowledge of these fundamentals is a basis for providing quality outcomes for the children in the service and their families. This knowledge will, in turn, provide educators with the ability to look at practices in the service and articulate them in the context of these documents.
Tip 2 - Practice articulating practice!
Start talking about the service philosophy and how it informs decisions, along with discussing the 'what', 'how' and especially the 'why' of practices. Talk to your families, children, each other, management and the community. Team meetings are a good opportunity to have these discussions with other educators and it can be useful to add 'quality practice' and 'reflective practice' as regular agenda items. The reflective questions in the Guide to the NQF can be used to provoke discussions in these meetings. You can use techniques such as brainstorming or mind mapping to document what quality at your service looks like in a Standard or Element and to discuss how your service is performing.
Tip 3 - Ongoing self-assessment/walk in the Authorised Officer's shoes
Ongoing self-assessment against the NQS and related regulatory requirements drives continuous improvement and is essential to providing quality outcomes for children (Guide to the NQF, p.316). As part of your self-assessment, identify what an authorised officer might observe, discuss or sight about the quality of your service practices and programs. To do this, "step into the authorised officer's shoes" and take a walk around your service or in your family day care (FDC) office and educators' homes. As an example, let's look at what some of the 'discuss' items for QA 3 could include: Element 3.1.1 Fit for purpose

How the environment is planned and organised, taking into consideration the need for safe, yet challenging spaces.

How FDC educators balance their family members' need for privacy with providing sufficient space for the children who are educated and cared for.

Element 3.1.2 Upkeep

What regular safety checks are in place, as well as maintenance monitoring of the building and equipment.
Element 3.2.1 Inclusive environment

How natural environments are valued at the service and plans for outdoor and indoor environments are given equal consideration.
Element 3.2.2 Resources support play-based learning

How resources, materials and equipment are provided and arranged to support children's play, exploration and investigations

The way in which children are invited to choose resources.

Element 3.2.3 Environmentally responsible

How children and educators are supported to engage with and respect the natural environment on a regular basis.

Many more examples of what authorised officers may observe, discuss and sight for each of the quality areas are in the Guide to the NQF.
Tip 4 - Language
It is important to ensure that the language you and your educators use during a visit is both authentic and makes reference to the language of the NQS. This helps demonstrate familiarity with the NQS and will show the authorised officer your service's commitment to quality outcomes. It can also be helpful to practice discussing your approach with words that emphasise the importance of children and families at your service and show collaboration, for example, using phrases such as:

"Together with the children we discussed...."

"Families were able to share their thoughts through..."

"After the team reflected on this feedback we changed the way we..."

"The children share their ideas by..."

"The children and educators reflected on.....and together decided..."

"Children and families are able to have input into decisions about...through..."

Confident and effective articulation of practice at your service's assessment and rating visit is an attainable goal. An investment of time and the ongoing commitment of the entire team is certain to reap benefits.

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Tips for discussing practice at an Assessment and Rating visit

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ACECQA's Quality Support Program Team outlines the importance of articulating practice and provides practical tips to assist educators articulate the achievements and strengths of their service and team members during...

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Educational leaders supporting the cycle of planning

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Mentors for Beginning Early Childhood Teachers

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Build a Strong Learning Culture on Your Team

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With the nature of work changing so rapidly, it’s no longer enough just to offer employees opportunities for upskilling and reskilling. Companies also need to help workers become “expert learners” — and a key way of doing that, the learning-and-development expert James McKenna writes, is to follow t…

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Lessons in Leadership Spotlight: Cecilia Scott-Croff - The Institute Blog

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The Leadership Initiative invited its members to reflect on different aspects of leadership, bringing to light unique pathways, approaches, challenges and lessons learned. TLC hopes that through this series you get to know these diverse individuals and take away an appreciation for their journeys and leadership skills and its impact on the lives of children,

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This package of resources, guidance and support is tailored for outside of school hours care (OSHC) services, educators and staff, with a focus on supervision in an OSHC setting. This is toolbox 1 of 2 delivered by Gowrie NSW, which aims to drive quality practices that are in line with the National Quality Standard and Approved Learning Frameworks. Enhancing outcomes for school aged children through improved knowledge of best practice supervision principles within an OSHC setting. The second toolbox in this package focuses on medical management in an OSHC environment.

Visit the Safety and Quality Practice Program webpage for more information.

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This guidance, support and resources are tailored for OSHC services, educators and staff focusing on supervision.

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In NSW, the display of a service’s overall National Quality Standard rating has been redesigned to help families better understand and engage with your quality improvement journey.

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This page describes why self-assessment is important and how it can be included in the Assessment and Rating (A&R) process.

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OSHC Medical Management Tool

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This guidance, support and resources are tailored for OSHC services, educators and staff focusing on medical management in an OSHC environment.

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In NSW, the display of a service’s overall National Quality Standard rating has been redesigned to help families better understand and engage with your quality improvement journey.

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Locating Yourself - A Key to Conscious Leadership

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Educational Leaders play an important role in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. Since the formal introduction of the role in 2012, the position has grown and evolved to one which supports and develops teams to deliver the most desirable outcomes for children.

When Educational Leaders are effective in their roles, a culture of reflective practice and robust discussion follows, supporting continuous improvement not only of the service as a whole, but also of the individuals within it.

to the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) the role of the Educational Leader is to guide educators in maximising learning, development and wellbeing outcomes for children.

Embedding the role in the National Quality Framework reflects what is already well understood in other educational sectors-paying particular attention to pedagogy and assigning the responsibility of educational practice to a position of leadership ensures the learning and wellbeing of children is upheld as the key purpose at all times.
More than just legislation
Far more than simply ticking a legislative box, having an effective Educational Leader at the forefront of service operations drives continuous improvement and change by motivating others.

Quality Educational Leaders set strategic directions, foster professional values and promote a positive workplace culture that encourages collaboration and reflective learning.
A day in the life...
While every Educational Leader's role will look a little different, to account for differences in service size, philosophy, organisational structure and other individualities, there are some things all Educational Leader roles will have in common, such as:

Supporting lead educators to run their rooms

Supporting the service leadership team to meet strategic objectives

Mentoring and supporting educators

Connecting the service with research and contemporary thinking

Observing practice

Providing programming support

Guiding in the implementation of the approved learning frameworks

Establishing systems at a service level to promote continuous learning

Networking within and beyond the service to inform the development of the program

What do Educational Leaders need to know?
ACECQA has simplified the knowledge that Educational Leaders need into three main categories:

Within these categories are three different types of knowledge:

Depending on the state or territory where the Educational Leader is working, additional knowledge of any local frameworks - such as the Queensland Kindergarten Learning Guidelines (QKLG) or the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF) would also be required.
Personal qualities which support Educational Leaders
Educational Leaders need to be strong role models for others, who are able to reflect on their own practice and career journey, explore new ideas, receive feedback graciously and are who are able to give and receive constructive criticism.

Some of the other qualities of an effective Educational Leader include:

Empathy: showing respect and being aware of the needs and rights of others.

Commitment: to the role, to learning and the team.

Patience: to lead and instigate change.

Courage: to address difficult situations.

Passion: showing enthusiasm for new ideas.

Approachable: being receptive to collaboration.

Organised: being excellent time managers.

Open-minded: to new ideas and approaches.

Creative: having the ability to think of new ideas and solutions.

ACECQA has prepared a comprehensive resource for Educational Leaders to guide and support them in their role.
Access the resource here.

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The role of Educational Leaders in building reflective practice

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Educational Leaders play an important role in early childhood education and care services in building reflective practice.

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What word comes to mind when you think of an unhealthy workplace culture?

Often, the immediate responses are "toxic," "aggressive," or "dysfunctional." These terms are the go-to descriptors for environments detrimental to employee well-being and organizational success.

Our 2023 culture study points in that direction. The worst company cultures are characterized by a fearful environment (86%), lack of alignment (71%), and distrust and blame (65%), among other factors.

But what if I told you that one of the most insidious traits of an unhealthy culture is actually disguised as something positive?

Yes, you read that right.

An excessively friendly or "too nice" culture can be just as harmful to a team's fabric as overt hostility.

The idea may seem counterintuitive, maybe even heretical, in a corporate narrative that constantly praises the benefits of camaraderie, empathy, and friendship.

However, a culture of excessive niceness can lead to a false sense of harmony that conc...

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Why a Culture of Being Too Nice Is Holding Your Team Back

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The problem of pushing a friendly culture to the extreme

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Documenting quality improvement

Regulation 55 requires services to develop a document that includes an assessmentconducted by the provider of their practices against the National Regulations and National Quality Standard (NQS). The document should identify services key practices, areas for improvement and include the service philosophy.

Services only need to have one continuous improvement document, such as the ACECQA Quality Improvement Plan (QIP) or the NSW Self-Assessment Working Document (PDF 2.9 MB). Services will soon be able to maintain their self-assessment information using the new Self-Assessment and Quality Improvement Planning Portal.

Currently being rolled out in a phased approach, the online portal enables services to maintain a live self-assessment and quality improvement plan, which can be shared with the NSW Regulatory Authority prior to a scheduled assessment and rating (A&R) visit. Like the Self-Assessment Working Document, which it is based on, the web-based system allows services to record their compliance, articulate key practices against each element within the NQS and identify key improvements to increase quality.

Whichever method you opt to use, we encourage you to recognise the important role your self-assessment record plays in identifying key areas for improvement, rather than being a document that's simply prepared for the purposes of A&R.

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Continuous improvement - the real meaning behind self-assessment

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Our Continuous Improvement Team shares how self-assessment supports quality uplift, tips on articulating key practice, details on the new online portal and more.

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Not all bosses are leaders, and not all leaders are bosses, author Liz Elting has shared, revealing some of the ways that professionals of all kinds, including those in early childhood education and care (ECEC) can demonstrate leadership, regardless of their role.

Her ideas come from her new book Dream Big and Win: Translating Passion Into Purpose and Creating a Billion-Dollar Business and discuss the five factors of 'true' leadership.

Ms Elting, founder and CEO of the Elizabeth Elting Foundation and the co-founder of TransPerfect, shared her insights with Fast Company, which have been edited and adapted below for an ECEC context.

While the words 'leader' and 'boss' are used interchangeably, she begins, they are not the same thing, and entail different qualities.

True leaders, she continues, exemplify integrity, and shut down undesirable behaviours like discrimination, harassment or bullying when they see them in others, speaking up and making efforts to shut them down, risking whatever repercussions may occur.

This mark of true leadership is at the heart of what she describes as her 'Five Ps' of leadership:
Passion
Leaders, Ms Elting says, are those who are passionate about what they do. Regardless of work ethic, education or experience, it's passion which ensures people feel like they are working towards something meaningful, building something worthwhile, and making a difference.

Passion, without direction, she continued, "is just an inspirational saying that looks cute on a coffee mug."

To really use passion to become a leader, it needs to sit with the second P - prioritisation.
Prioritisation
Prioritisation, she continued, is the second P because "dreams and enthusiasm are not enough" you need solid goals and deadlines. For Ms Elting, the ability to prioritise is "the alchemy that turns those dreams into gold".

Prioritisation looks different for everyone, and requires effort to understand when, where and how you are at your most productive.

Being able to prioritise inspires others to do the same, "because you can't expect your team to be efficient if you aren't."

Once you're in a position to prioritise, she continued, you're also in a position to delegate, and at this point, everything is open for change, which leads to the third P - being able to pivot.
Pivoting
The strongest leaders, Ms Elting says, are those who are able to be agile, and respond to rapid change - whether that's in response to a serious incident, a change in legislation, a parent complaint, or the introduction of competition for enrolments.

Leaders can who can pivot can also strongly embrace the fourth P - being proactive, and growing a culture of innovation.
Proactivity
Proactive leaders make magic, Ms Elting argues, "because when you inspire your people to unleash their creativity, you not only increase employee satisfaction but you can also have a significant impact on your bottom line."

Proactively innovating means not only encouraging employees to come to management with ideas but to reward them for doing so.

Everyone needs to feel comfortable making suggestions and offering new solutions. "Out of the box" ideas are welcomed, and ideas are shaped to get them over the line.

"What differentiates a good employee from a great one is proactivity, so as a leader, you must encourage this trait," Ms Elting says.
People
Getting the "people" piece right, she continued, is both the easiest and most difficult aspect of leadership.

In essence, leadership is about getting other people engaged with the mission, and working towards a goal.

"Having people who believe in you and your vision is the most important part of being a leader. The caveat is, you must be a person of principle or your vision is just propaganda," Ms Elting continues.

"I agree with Google's thinking that once you have the right people, you must get out of their way, but that starts with finding the right people."

Published by Wiley, Dream Big and Win: Translating Passion Into Purpose and Creating a Billion-Dollar Business by Liz Elting is available wherever books and e-books are sold.

Read the original coverage of this story here .

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Five ways to show up as a leader - even when you're not in charge

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While the words 'leader' and 'boss' are used interchangeably, she begins, they are not the same thing, and entail different qualities.

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Knowing that there is a group of people working in harmony in the pursuit of a common goal not only helps to bring that goal one step closer, but also to bring out the best in each team member.

In sectors like early childhood education and care, where children need a safe and nurturing environment, having a thriving team of professionals to deliver on that promise is paramount.

Quality Area Seven of the National Quality Standard outlines the roles that effective leadership and teamwork play in ensuring educators provide high-quality ECEC, outlining the importance of respecting the pedagogical perspectives of each team member, and embracing new ideas.

Educational leaders play an important role in supporting teams to have access to transparent and actionable teaching, learning, and care practices.

Establishing a strong and effective team may seem complex, however there are a number of resources available to support, along with some commonalities that successful teams share, which will be explored in detail below.
Direction and trust
To be a success, any team must have two things - a common goal, and the trust that each person on the team is working towards that goal.

High functioning teams are great at creating shared goals, and at having a clear vision of how they want to get there.

Educational leaders can help this happen by having productive conversations with their teams, which challenge existing practice in a respectful way, and which promote reflective thinking, realigning practices to agreed goals.
Clear communication
Every team member needs to have a voice, and to feel as though their voice is being heard and respected. Thriving teams have open and honest communication, and there is space for meaningful discussion.

Educational leaders can support this by keeping the team 'in the loop' about any change in expectations, legislation, direction or standards.

When conflict arises, strong teams will be able to hold space for differing points of view, and to ensure that each team member feels respected while this is resolved.

Acknowledging the values, beliefs, feelings and opinions of others can be supportive here, along with engaging in collaborative problem solving, practicing active listening, and seeking knowledge from one another when working together.
Practice positivity
Practicing positivity does not mean displaying only positive emotions, or suppressing anything negative, or not reacting to experiences which are challenging.

Rather, having a positive culture means striving to create a workplace which prioritises the wellbeing of team members, offers support at all levels, and has policies and practices in place which encourage respect, trust, empathy and support.

In positive workplaces change is viewed as a good thing, and as a chance to move closer to a goal. The voices of all are heard, values are upheld, and there is a spirit of unity and cooperation.

Educational leaders can support this by having regular team building exercises, supporting relationships and connections between team members, and offering ongoing opportunities for connection.
Focus on improvement
Strong teams know there is always more which could be done to foster improvement and to refine practice.

Educational leaders can be role models for reflection, and can also support by providing tools and resources to assist their teams to reflect.

Regular team meetings, goal setting at service, room and individual level, and generally "checking in" can support the focus on being a reflective team to grow.
Sharing the load
The smartest person in the room is the room. Each team member brings something different to their work, and leveraging this collective knowledge is one of the most powerful tools a strong team has.

Teams who acknowledge and respect each other's capabilities are teams that succeed, and having this respect as an embedded part of team culture is a recipe for success.

Sharing the load of leadership with the educational leader by contributing to discussions, offering new ideas and resources and sharing knowledge with others is a hallmark of a thriving team.

For more insights into educational leadership, access this ACECQA resource .

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Teamwork is foundational in ECEC - here's how to grow it

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Being part of a team is a foundational aspect of many parts of personal and professional life.

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Unfortunately, I would say we've all been there. You might be there right now - which is probably why you are reading this post! Perhaps you are on your lunch break, dreading returning to the room because your colleague doesn't seem to really give a damn about the work that they are doing. Or maybe you've just come home, frustrated that other educators in your service don't seem to want to be there or to pull their weight.

(note - if this is not you... celebrate that! Go and show some love and gratitude to your awesome colleagues and enjoy the fact that your service has found "its people")

But, if this is you - you are not alone.

I visit a lot of services and deliver a lot of training sessions. I encounter educators who simply don't appear to care about what they do, or seem bored/distracted/disinterested in their work. When this happens, I have several thoughts:

1. I wonder if they are okay today.Look - we all have bad days, days where going to work is a struggle or the thought of reading Wombat Stew one more time is going to tip us over the edge.

2. I wonder if this is their every day.Are they always this unmotivated?

3. Is this service the right fit for them?I strongly believe that we all have our place - the place where we feel at home and like we belong and yet sadly, many educators are not in their place. Belonging isn't just for the children.

4. I wonder what motivates them.What makes them get up in the morning and come to work? Why did they even choose this work in the first place?

The fact is - it can be hard to motivate others unless you know more about them. When I was a director and the educational leader role became a part of our service, Tash (co-founder of Inspired EC) jumped at the opportunity. She was busting to take that role. One of the single most beneficial things that I saw her do in that role (and you can read more about it in our book Inspire, Communicate, Motivate was to build a picture of each educator - to understand who they really were. She asked questions about why they chose to work in early childhood and what they loved about the role. She also asked what motivates them. Do extrinsic rewards play a part (benefits, accolades, monetary rewards, or compliments), or are they more intrinsically motivated?

Now, you don't have to be the educational leader or nominated supervisor to do that, you could have this type of conversation with the educators you work with in your room. This is about better understanding the people that you work with - rather than simply writing them off as unmotivated or disinterested or lazy.

Once you better understand your colleague, there are some really simple ways you can motivate them.

Most of the time, things can be improved using some of these simple strategies. But, there will, unfortunately, be times where that is not the case. As a colleague, who has tried all of these things and still sees no improvement, it is important that you talk to your nominated supervisor. This isn't about "dobbing" or "tattling", this is about ensuring that the standard of practice in your service is of high quality for the children and families. As a nominated supervisor, it is not unkind to ask "is this really where you want to be or what you want to be doing?" I have asked this question many times. Often the question alone is enough to spark something within an educator and their motivation levels rise, and sometimes it raises thoughts that they may have been harbouring for a little while and they decide to seek out a new position, or a new path altogether.

Let's be honest - it can be challenging sometimes to stay motivated in a job where the pay isn't what it should be, and you've been vomited on or had to duck to the chemist after work for headlice shampoo. But, if you have a really strong why, it makes it that much easier to see past those things.

Know your why, and support your co-workers to know theirs.

If you would like to know even more about Motivation, check out our mini course

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Perhaps you are on your lunch break, dreading returning to the room because your colleague doesn't seem to really give a damn about the work that they are doing. Or maybe you've just come home, frustrated that other educators in your service don't seem to want to be there or to pull their weight.

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This episode of our Patreon-exclusive podcast series Exploring the NQS discusses Element 7.1.1 of the National Quality Standard, "Service philosophy and purpose".
Element description: A statement of philosophy guides all aspects of the service's operations.

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element 7.1.1 service philosophy and purpose (exploring the nqs)

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‎The Early Education Show: Element 7.1.1 Service philosophy and purpose (Exploring the NQS) on Apple Podcasts

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This episode of our Patreon-exclusive podcast series Exploring the NQS discusses Element 7.1.1 of the National Quality Standard, "Service philosophy and purpose". Element description: A statement of philosophy guides all aspects of the service's operations.

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‎The Early Education Show: Element 7.2.3 Development of professionals (Exploring the NQS) on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show The Early Education Show, Ep Element 7.2.3 Development of professionals (Exploring the NQS) - 17 Nov 2022

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Bernice MathieMorris, Director of Early Learning at Bomaderry Community Preschool (BCPS), shared that effective governance and leadership, Quality Area 7, have a significant impact on quality learning and development for children.

"Well established and constructive leadership and governance underpins all six of the other Quality Areas," she said.

"If Quality Area 7 is deeply embedded in service operations, informed by critical reflection, and developed with collaboration across the whole preschool community, then all other quality areas should be equally effective."

The leadership team at BCPS have a solid and well-understood statement of philosophy which forms the basis of their effective leadership and governance.

"Time must be spent as a team developing a deep understanding of the service philosophy, whilst ensuring the voices of the children and parents are also included," Bernice shared.

"Our service's statement of philosophy is clearly articulated and underpins all of our decisions, practices and policies, expressing a strong commitment to continuous improvement."

This commitment to continuous improvement means the BCPS leadership team encourages a variety of self-assessment processes, in line with Element 7.2.1.

"Self-assessment at BCPS takes many forms and includes children, families, the wider community and educators, through many different self-assessment processes such as surveys, discussions, casual feedback, and collaborative discussions," Bernice said.

"The educator team engages in a formal self-assessment process annually, and informally on a spontaneous basis."

"The formal aspect involves a written reflective process, with educators critically reflecting on their knowledge, skills and engagement in all areas of service provision. Educators are then actively involved in developing learning goals."

"An important part of this reflective process is to also identify and share areas of strength."

Collaboration and whole team involvement are vital elements of the self-assessment process, with all team members developing a sense of ownership and understanding of what contributes to a high-quality education and care service.

After the completion of self-assessment, BCPS's Quality Improvement Plan (QIP) is updated and used as a working document to drive quality improvement, a document that outlines and supports the embedding of continuous improvement across all 7 Quality Areas.

"The building of knowledge, skills, confidence, innovation, artistry and striving for continuous improvement is central to the professional development of all educators at BCPS," Bernice said.

"My role as an educational leader involves empowering the team to aspire towards a space where each member inspires, challenges and supports each other towards practices that deliver high quality outcomes.

"Although we are at different stages, we are all on the same journey of continuous improvement."

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Strong leadership and governance are central for delivering quality education and care says Bomaderry Community Preschool

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Effective governance and leadership provide a strong foundation for Bomaderry Community Preschool, on Dharawal country, to achieve Exceeding ratings across all National Quality Standards.

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Tips to meet Quality Area 7: Governance and Leadership

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Effective leadership builds and promotes a positive organisational culture and professional learning community.

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Build relationships, not transactions

"Often expectation fails." - William Shakespeare

Trust is the intersection of hope and fear - we want the best but think the worst can happen.
What comes first, to trust or to be trusted?
Most of us are uncertain about who to trust. It's not always clear when trust is appropriate. Or how much risk we should take. But, mistrust is harmful - we cannot enjoy life if we are suspicious.

Trust is the glue that holds people together - from chance encounters, work relationships, friendships or intimate ones. It's the foundation of human connections. Trust gives us permission to act freely.

As Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."

Trust is a risky game. But, approaching it with a transactional mentality won't increase your odds. Focus on building relationships rather than on what others give you. You can't expect others to be trustworthy if you don't trust them first.

Trusting people is the most logical thing to do.

The Price of Empathy

Trust facilitates our emotional connection with people - it makes us feel we are in sync.

Oxytocin turns mothers into moms. It strengthens mothers' reactions to infant faces and gestures. Mutual trust within happy couples is reinforced by the presence of the same hormone. Loving, affectionate, and sexual exchanges between partners also release oxytocin.

Our body is designed to trust others. However, our experiences seed mistrust. Parents' failure to deliver on their promises creates insecurity in their children. Relationship infidelity can relive childhood experiences - they make the aftermath even more painful.

Sometimes mistrust can play a dominant role in our life. Past disappointment, lies, or betrayal can cause this issue. Distrust is a valid response, but it shouldn't drive our relationships. A total lack of mistrust could cause anxiety, fear, and low self-esteem - by trying to protect ourselves, we create more harm.
Why is it so difficult to overcome trust issues?
We are biased. Our past experiences tint our perception - we pre-judge people. As Joshua Coleman writes, surviving betrayal makes us hyper-vigilant. While this reaction is evolutionarily intended to prevent suffering again, it has a downside too. Hyper-vigilance can keep us isolated from others.
Trust is the glue that holds relationships together, yet we are afraid to trust people.
The remedy for this paradox is empathy - to trust others we must see their vulnerability first.

Understanding others doesn't mean condoning what they did to you. Forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting. It's not justifying or overlooking an event. It's choosing to let go of resentment - you eliminate the suffering, not the wrongdoing.

Forgiving is hard, but not forgiving hurts more, as I wrote here. The person who hurt you might not deserve your pardon, but you deserve to be at peace.

The pain that someone caused you is real and valid. Legitimate mistrust is a natural self-protective mechanism. It helps you avoid being hurt again. But, constant trust issues - fear, doubt, and suspicion - can quickly turn into self-sabotaging.

Empathy is not as hard or costly as most people think. A study revealed that we don't want to make the mental effort to connect with others. By trying to protect ourselves from potential harm, we stay away from people.

In the experiment, participants reviewed images from two sets of cards. For one deck, they had to describe the physical characteristics of the person. For the other, participants had to feel empathy for the person in the photo - and also to guess their feelings

Participants were told to choose freely between decks. Almost everyone picked the decks that didn't require feeling empathy, even for the photos of happy people. They consistently avoided connecting emotionally with strangers.

However, after people were told they were good at feeling empathy, their ability to see others dramatically increased. They started selecting more cards from the empathy deck. And they also reported that empathy required less mental effort than those who were told they weren't empathetic.

Mistrust Builds Transactional Relationships

Without trust, there's no collaboration. As a culture designer, I spend a lot of time helping teams build or recover trust. The biggest challenge is that no one wants to give the initial step - they expect others to show their trust first.

Trust is personal. But, collective trust requires everyone to contribute to building psychological safety. People must adopt a positive and generous mindset, rather than a transactional one.

There are three types of relationships according to Aristotle - two of them are shallow.

The first one is functional. People are in it for mutual benefit. It's a zero-sum game relationship - both parties want to balance their gains and losses. The second kind of relationship is driven by pleasure. It's built on the foundation of how others make us feel.

Think of a work relationship, for example. You may enjoy the time you spend together or benefit from that interaction. But, if something changes, you easily move on.

Those two types of relationships are transactional. The moment the other part stops giving us what we want, we feel betrayed. Or, if we think we are putting more into it than the other side, we feel disappointed.

The third type of relationship cannot exist without trust. It is based on a mutual appreciation of the virtues each person brings to the table. It's the people and their qualities what define this kind of relationship - not the functional benefits.

As H. L Menken said, "It is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together."

Without empathy, it's hard to build deep relationships. We must see and accept others for who they are. Their uniqueness makes our life more enjoyable. Relationships of virtue take more time to build than functional ones. They depend on developing mutual trust.

When you respect and accept a person for who they are, you are willing to take risks. Rather than worry about being hurt, you are free to enjoy spending time with them. Trust is a two-way street. What you bring to a relationship is what you get.

Trust requires time and purpose. Life is not a smooth journey. The ones you love will hurt you - and you'll hurt them too. When we accept our own betrayals and mistakes, we are more willing to forgive others'. It's the price to pay for the good moments that bring magic to our lives.

A mutual trust relationship succeeds by integrating both negative and positive experiences - we adopt a " yes, and" approach.

Trust Is a Virtue

Trusting strangers can be the rational thing to do, according to Paul Faulkner co-editor of the book The Philosophy of Trust.

We act on the basis of trust. It's central to our social lives. Trust drives cooperation by exercising both explicit promises and implicit commitments. We must continually cooperate with people we don't know-life is not a war of all against all.

Similarly to Aristotle, Faulkner explores the difference between seeing trust as transactional or as a virtue.

The philosopher illustrates the trust problem with the trust game. In this experiment, there are two parties: a trusting party or 'investor' and a trusted party or 'trustee.' The investor must trust that the trustee will return a part of the gains. If he does share, both parties win.
So, what prevents the trustee from keeping all the money?
On the functional side, if the game repeats, the trustee will lose by keeping the money - the investor won't give him more in the subsequent rounds. Acknowledging long-term benefits and risks builds mutual trust.

However, there's a more remarkable truth about the nature of trust.

When we don't know someone, reliance becomes more problematic. First, there's a chance they could betray us. Second, it might be a one-off interaction, so the long-term benefits don't matter. Third, we don't know the other person's motivation.

These three conditions can make cooperation seem unreasonable.

Surprisingly, the data shows a different picture: people by and large trust one another when playing the trust game.

The problem of trust arises when we see it only as a means to an end. When we think that trusting someone depends on the other person - if they are trusting or trustworthy. Or when we see trust as something transactional - we value the good things that might come from trusting someone.

However, trust is a virtue - it's about who we are, not about others.

Think of generosity as a proxy. Being generous is giving something without expecting anything in return. Generous people are optimistic. They don't play a zero-sum game - doing good makes them feel happy.

‍
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.""― Ernest Hemingway

Valuing trust itself requires an optimistic attitude of goodwill, as Faulkner explains. Trust is a virtue that starts within ourselves. Being suspicious makes others doubt us. When we take the first step, we can make our trust contagious.

In having an attitude of trust, we think well of others. Our presumption of optimism encourages the other to act well too.

Value trust in its own right.

Have Faith in People

Trust is not an assessment of people but a virtue that expresses how we approach relationships. Having faith in people gives us a reason to rely on the people we trust to do the right thing.

Trust is an attitude - it inspires others to trust us too.

I usually trust and trusted people. Did people betray me, lie to me or disappoint me? Sure. But, in many other cases, they didn't. If I hadn't trust people, I wouldn't have achieved half of what I did. I wouldn't have built any deep relationship either.

One of the hardest things in life is realizing we cannot control others. People are autonomous just like you. That realization frees us from disappointment - we stop expecting and start accepting.

In the end scene of , Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) can't accept that Tracy is leaving. She is about to catch a plane to Europe. Though Isaac always encouraged her to explore the world, now he is hesitant about Tracy having that experience.

Isaac worries that, in six months, she will be a completely different person. That means that she will want to be with someone else, not him.

Tracy, the wise 18-year old played by Mariel Hemingway gives everyone - not just Isaac - a remarkable lesson in trust:

"Not everybody gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people."

Trust is not easy, but it's worth the risk.

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The Remarkable Truth about Trust | By Gustavo Razzetti

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"Often expectation fails." - William Shakespeare Trust is the intersection of hope and fear - we want the best but think the worst can happen. What comes first, to trust or to be trusted? Most of us are uncertain about who to trust. It's not always clear when trust is appropriate.

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Understanding the Drama Triangle vs. Presence

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Locating Yourself - A Key to Conscious Leadership

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Build relationships, not transactions

"Often expectation fails." - William Shakespeare

Trust is the intersection of hope and fear - we want the best but think the worst can happen.
What comes first, to trust or to be trusted?
Most of us are uncertain about who to trust. It's not always clear when trust is appropriate. Or how much risk we should take. But, mistrust is harmful - we cannot enjoy life if we are suspicious.

Trust is the glue that holds people together - from chance encounters, work relationships, friendships or intimate ones. It's the foundation of human connections. Trust gives us permission to act freely.

As Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."

Trust is a risky game. But, approaching it with a transactional mentality won't increase your odds. Focus on building relationships rather than on what others give you. You can't expect others to be trustworthy if you don't trust them first.

Trusting people is the most logical thing to do.

The Price of Empathy

Trust facilitates our emotional connection with people - it makes us feel we are in sync.

Oxytocin turns mothers into moms. It strengthens mothers' reactions to infant faces and gestures. Mutual trust within happy couples is reinforced by the presence of the same hormone. Loving, affectionate, and sexual exchanges between partners also release oxytocin.

Our body is designed to trust others. However, our experiences seed mistrust. Parents' failure to deliver on their promises creates insecurity in their children. Relationship infidelity can relive childhood experiences - they make the aftermath even more painful.

Sometimes mistrust can play a dominant role in our life. Past disappointment, lies, or betrayal can cause this issue. Distrust is a valid response, but it shouldn't drive our relationships. A total lack of mistrust could cause anxiety, fear, and low self-esteem - by trying to protect ourselves, we create more harm.
Why is it so difficult to overcome trust issues?
We are biased. Our past experiences tint our perception - we pre-judge people. As Joshua Coleman writes, surviving betrayal makes us hyper-vigilant. While this reaction is evolutionarily intended to prevent suffering again, it has a downside too. Hyper-vigilance can keep us isolated from others.
Trust is the glue that holds relationships together, yet we are afraid to trust people.
The remedy for this paradox is empathy - to trust others we must see their vulnerability first.

Understanding others doesn't mean condoning what they did to you. Forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting. It's not justifying or overlooking an event. It's choosing to let go of resentment - you eliminate the suffering, not the wrongdoing.

Forgiving is hard, but not forgiving hurts more, as I wrote here. The person who hurt you might not deserve your pardon, but you deserve to be at peace.

The pain that someone caused you is real and valid. Legitimate mistrust is a natural self-protective mechanism. It helps you avoid being hurt again. But, constant trust issues - fear, doubt, and suspicion - can quickly turn into self-sabotaging.

Empathy is not as hard or costly as most people think. A study revealed that we don't want to make the mental effort to connect with others. By trying to protect ourselves from potential harm, we stay away from people.

In the experiment, participants reviewed images from two sets of cards. For one deck, they had to describe the physical characteristics of the person. For the other, participants had to feel empathy for the person in the photo - and also to guess their feelings

Participants were told to choose freely between decks. Almost everyone picked the decks that didn't require feeling empathy, even for the photos of happy people. They consistently avoided connecting emotionally with strangers.

However, after people were told they were good at feeling empathy, their ability to see others dramatically increased. They started selecting more cards from the empathy deck. And they also reported that empathy required less mental effort than those who were told they weren't empathetic.

Mistrust Builds Transactional Relationships

Without trust, there's no collaboration. As a culture designer, I spend a lot of time helping teams build or recover trust. The biggest challenge is that no one wants to give the initial step - they expect others to show their trust first.

Trust is personal. But, collective trust requires everyone to contribute to building psychological safety. People must adopt a positive and generous mindset, rather than a transactional one.

There are three types of relationships according to Aristotle - two of them are shallow.

The first one is functional. People are in it for mutual benefit. It's a zero-sum game relationship - both parties want to balance their gains and losses. The second kind of relationship is driven by pleasure. It's built on the foundation of how others make us feel.

Think of a work relationship, for example. You may enjoy the time you spend together or benefit from that interaction. But, if something changes, you easily move on.

Those two types of relationships are transactional. The moment the other part stops giving us what we want, we feel betrayed. Or, if we think we are putting more into it than the other side, we feel disappointed.

The third type of relationship cannot exist without trust. It is based on a mutual appreciation of the virtues each person brings to the table. It's the people and their qualities what define this kind of relationship - not the functional benefits.

As H. L Menken said, "It is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together."

Without empathy, it's hard to build deep relationships. We must see and accept others for who they are. Their uniqueness makes our life more enjoyable. Relationships of virtue take more time to build than functional ones. They depend on developing mutual trust.

When you respect and accept a person for who they are, you are willing to take risks. Rather than worry about being hurt, you are free to enjoy spending time with them. Trust is a two-way street. What you bring to a relationship is what you get.

Trust requires time and purpose. Life is not a smooth journey. The ones you love will hurt you - and you'll hurt them too. When we accept our own betrayals and mistakes, we are more willing to forgive others'. It's the price to pay for the good moments that bring magic to our lives.

A mutual trust relationship succeeds by integrating both negative and positive experiences - we adopt a " yes, and" approach.

Trust Is a Virtue

Trusting strangers can be the rational thing to do, according to Paul Faulkner co-editor of the book The Philosophy of Trust.

We act on the basis of trust. It's central to our social lives. Trust drives cooperation by exercising both explicit promises and implicit commitments. We must continually cooperate with people we don't know-life is not a war of all against all.

Similarly to Aristotle, Faulkner explores the difference between seeing trust as transactional or as a virtue.

The philosopher illustrates the trust problem with the trust game. In this experiment, there are two parties: a trusting party or 'investor' and a trusted party or 'trustee.' The investor must trust that the trustee will return a part of the gains. If he does share, both parties win.
So, what prevents the trustee from keeping all the money?
On the functional side, if the game repeats, the trustee will lose by keeping the money - the investor won't give him more in the subsequent rounds. Acknowledging long-term benefits and risks builds mutual trust.

However, there's a more remarkable truth about the nature of trust.

When we don't know someone, reliance becomes more problematic. First, there's a chance they could betray us. Second, it might be a one-off interaction, so the long-term benefits don't matter. Third, we don't know the other person's motivation.

These three conditions can make cooperation seem unreasonable.

Surprisingly, the data shows a different picture: people by and large trust one another when playing the trust game.

The problem of trust arises when we see it only as a means to an end. When we think that trusting someone depends on the other person - if they are trusting or trustworthy. Or when we see trust as something transactional - we value the good things that might come from trusting someone.

However, trust is a virtue - it's about who we are, not about others.

Think of generosity as a proxy. Being generous is giving something without expecting anything in return. Generous people are optimistic. They don't play a zero-sum game - doing good makes them feel happy.

‍
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.""― Ernest Hemingway

Valuing trust itself requires an optimistic attitude of goodwill, as Faulkner explains. Trust is a virtue that starts within ourselves. Being suspicious makes others doubt us. When we take the first step, we can make our trust contagious.

In having an attitude of trust, we think well of others. Our presumption of optimism encourages the other to act well too.

Value trust in its own right.

Have Faith in People

Trust is not an assessment of people but a virtue that expresses how we approach relationships. Having faith in people gives us a reason to rely on the people we trust to do the right thing.

Trust is an attitude - it inspires others to trust us too.

I usually trust and trusted people. Did people betray me, lie to me or disappoint me? Sure. But, in many other cases, they didn't. If I hadn't trust people, I wouldn't have achieved half of what I did. I wouldn't have built any deep relationship either.

One of the hardest things in life is realizing we cannot control others. People are autonomous just like you. That realization frees us from disappointment - we stop expecting and start accepting.

In the end scene of , Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) can't accept that Tracy is leaving. She is about to catch a plane to Europe. Though Isaac always encouraged her to explore the world, now he is hesitant about Tracy having that experience.

Isaac worries that, in six months, she will be a completely different person. That means that she will want to be with someone else, not him.

Tracy, the wise 18-year old played by Mariel Hemingway gives everyone - not just Isaac - a remarkable lesson in trust:

"Not everybody gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people."

Trust is not easy, but it's worth the risk.

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The Remarkable Truth about Trust | By Gustavo Razzetti

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"Often expectation fails." - William Shakespeare Trust is the intersection of hope and fear - we want the best but think the worst can happen. What comes first, to trust or to be trusted? Most of us are uncertain about who to trust. It's not always clear when trust is appropriate.

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In the fast-paced world of workplace culture, trust once stood as the towering pillar holding teams together. It was the focal point for leaders who understood the importance of building trusting relationships between team members. But as a new concept emerged on the horizon, it cast a shadow over the once-dominant theme of trust.

As the idea of psychological safety went mainstream, trust lost its status.

But the reality is far more complex. The question is not a binary one of trust vs. psychological safety. We must weave them together to create a robust and resilient team structure. Just like a suspension bridge requires solid columns and flexible steel cables, high-performing teams need both interpersonal and collective trust.

That's why I think it's helpful to first clarify the differences between the two constructs. Trust happens between two people, while psychological safety is something that happens within a group.

Trust is the opposite. It happens between two people at an individual level: it's the expectation that others' future actions will be favorable to your interest. You trust that a team member has the skills needed for the job, will keep their word, and will act professionally, ethically, and truthfully.

Trust and psychological safety feed off of each other - high-performing teams need both.

Because suspension bridges are relatively light and flexible, they are susceptible to external forces like wind. They vibrate and move, both up and down, as well as sideways. The challenge for engineers is to keep this motion within safe limits.

"Can I trust you?"

Every human interaction is based on trust, whether consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes, trust is built over time through shared experiences and open communication. In other cases, it is an unspoken assumption that underpins our daily interactions.

For example, when you hand over your car keys to a valet parking attendant - a stranger - you trust that they will take good care of your vehicle and return it safely.

Trust is a strong pillar that supports well-functioning organizations - and societies. It's the ultimate currency in relationships, directly impacting collaboration and performance.

"Companies across geographies and industries have been, for years, experiencing an erosion of trust," Christina Janzer, SVP of Research and Analytics at Slack, wrote. "Feeling trusted breeds hard work, which leads to more trust. This is a virtuous cycle all leaders can take advantage of to boost employee performance and well-being."

In an age where remote and hybrid work models are the norm, fostering trust has become even more essential. The pandemic has hit our ability to trust others. People don't feel safe going back to the office - and the damaging impact of the mandated return is worse than we thought.

Competence trust is intellectual; it's given on a professional basis. Caring trust, on the other hand, is a result of empathy, warmth, and integrity - it's about trusting your colleague as a human being.

Both Competence and Caring are necessary to build strong interpersonal relationships.

Competence: The confidence you feel in another person's accomplishments, expertise, and professional experience. It's about trusting your colleagues as professionals. It means assuming they have the right knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform their job well.

Caring: This involves believing in the good intent of others and feeling that your teammates have your back. It's thinking that a colleague has your back and is on your side, especially when you're not present. Much like the bedrock foundation of a bridge, without caring, trust becomes fragile and difficult to rebuild.

Consistency amplifies the other two dimensions: Trust requires people to act in a reliable manner, not just once but most of the time. Reliability and predictability in actions and behavior build confidence within the team. However, trust is not rigid but flexible. Trusting relationships can take some tension.

Competence trust comes from the head. Caring trust, on the other hand, arises from feelings of emotional closeness, empathy, or friendship. This type of trust comes from the hear t.

Competence trust is important, but not as much as we think we do.

Of course, you want your colleagues to be proficient at what they do. But, even if they make a mistake, the relationship can recover. However, affective trust can be a deal breaker.

When someone feels unsupported or perceives malicious intent, the bond of trust is quickly shattered and may never fully recover. When you feel that someone doesn't have your best interests at heart, you will not only not trust them, but you'll actually distrust them.

Caring trust can make or break relationships with your colleagues.

Trust is a multifaceted concept, deeply ingrained in the dynamics of high-performing teams. While occasional failures in consistency or competence can be weathered, like a bridge standing strong amidst a storm, the loss of caring or affective trust is a significant blow which is often irreparable.

Trust is necessary to build strong interpersonal relationships. A team is as strong as its weakest link. However, trust is not enough; high-performing teams need psychological safety, too.

Psychological safety, the steel cables in our suspension bridge analogy, goes beyond individual connections to include the whole team's environment. It's not about creating a safety bubble, as I wrote here, but promoting open debate, experimentation, and risk-taking.

Research shows that even people who may be naturally more inclined to raise ideas and offer suggestions may not do so if they fear being put down or punished. On the flip side, encouraging and rewarding speaking up can increase participation, even among risk-averse people.

Psychological safety provides the flexibility and resilience that teams need to navigate the challenges and tensions on the path to innovation and growth.

Much like trust, psychological safety has essential components that must be cultivated and maintained. These elements are Dependability, Directness, and Daring.

Directness: A team's ability to engage in open and respectful discourse is crucial for creativity and problem-solving. Being straightforward and candid promotes a transparent environment that encourages people to be themselves and provide their perspectives.

Daring: Encouraging team members to be bold enough to take risks, express unconventional ideas, or question the status quo is pivotal for creativity and innovation. Just as the cables of a bridge support its structure while allowing for some movement, a culture of daring make exploration and growth possible. Team members should feel comfortable expressing differing opinions without fear of ridicule or judgment.

Dependability: This is the cornerstone of psychological safety. Dependability means knowing that the team is reliable and that you can count on it. Psychological safety crumbles when a team member feels unsupported or distrustful of the team's intentions.

Unlike other elements, a lack of dependability is hard to recover from. It's like a critical failure in the bridge's support system - once lost, the whole structure is compromised.

Psychological safety brings the team together, just like the wire cables of a suspension bridge.

Understanding and cultivating Directness, Dependability, and Daring within a team creates an environment where individuals feel empowered to take risks, share ideas, and contribute to the team's shared goals.

Just like a suspension bridge remains strong yet flexible, able to absorb the forces of nature, a psychologically safe team can not only weather storms but also envision the future with confidence.

"Compression" and "tension" are the two main forces affecting a suspension bridge. Experiencing them firsthand can help you understand how trust and psychological safety work. Grab a colleague and try these two exercises.

First, face your partner and join hands. Slowly and carefully lean backward without letting go. Do you feel a tug? This force associated with pulling is the tension suspension bridge cables experience.

Second, place your palms against your partner's. Slowly, carefully lean toward each other. What kind of pressure do you feel? That is compression - the pressure that bridge towers have to stand.

Reflect with your partner: What does this say about team dynamics?

Establishing trusting, meaningful relationships is essential to your team's success.

List all key relationships that are critical for your success. Link them all to you, assessing which are Unbreakable, Strong, Weak, or Broken.

Reflect on the different types of relationships considering how they've evolved over time. Find common themes and characteristics of your best and worst relationships.

Finally, strategize. Which relationships do you want to protect, improve, or leave as is? Define concrete action steps for each.
Download the exercise template and step-by-step guide here.
Invite your team members to map their trust battery. Discuss their approach: Is trust earned, given, or a combination of both?

Also, reflect on how fast their battery fills or empties. The starting point is just one part of the equation; what builds or erodes trust is equally important.

Remember, trust is a personal thing. You can't force people to change their approach. However, you can become more aware of each member's battery and what drives or sucks their energy.

Just cultures see mistakes as an indicator that something in the system is broken or encourages people to take the wrong path. The goal is to shift the conversation from "Who will be fired?" to "What went wrong?" and make systemic improvements.

Conducting a blameless postmortem requires a deliberate mindset: Assuming good intentions, focusing on facts rather than perceptions, identifying causes instead of culprits, and maintaining a consistent, blameless approach across the discussion.

By focusing on improving performance rather than judging people (and addressing the system), a blameless postmortem helps to create a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Download the template and facilitation guide.

Unsolicited feedback is not only ineffective but also harms trust. One of the best ways to turn feedback into a gift is to promote a culture where people not only request feedback but also the type of feedback they want

Being proactive and requesting feedback creates a virtuous cycle. Little by little, everyone will join the movement promoting a culture of frequent, peer-to-peer feedback. Also, giving it in smaller chunks will ensure that this feedback is easier to digest. Thus, promoting a safer team environment.

The more intentional, customized, and helpful the feedback, the better. It increases trust between the giver and the receiver.

Learn more about The 5 R's of Feedback framework.

A suspension bridge is a marvel of engineering, with towering columns and sweeping curves of steel cables that provide both strength and flexibility. Like a high-performing team, it is a system designed to absorb and adapt to various forces, tensions, and movements.

Trust and psychological safety aren't just static concepts; they're alive and dynamic. Trust ensures that individual relationships within the team are strong and resilient, while psychological safety ensures that the entire system functions in harmony, absorbing tensions and fostering creativity.

To build an unbreakable team, you need both.

If you're wondering how I can help your team build trust and promote psychological safety, schedule a free consultation with me.

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Building Unbreakable Teams: Why Both Trust and Psychological Safety Matter

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The differences between trust and psychological safety - and why high-performing teams need both

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While many leaders in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector have the best intentions and do their best to motivate and inspire their teams, there are some common mistakes which leaders make that can actually sabotage their team's happiness.

No one person is completely responsible for the happiness of others, however leaders can create the conditions which allow happiness at work to flourish by empowering others.

In the piece below, author and sociologist Tracy Brower's work has been recontextualised to the ECEC sector to learn more about the impact of leaders on ECEC workplace happiness.
The difference leaders make
For many people their direct manager has more of an impact on their mental health and wellbeing than their doctor or mental health professional , with leaders and managers having an impact which is on par with the impact of a romantic partner.

Leadership is not only a big responsibility, it's also a big opportunity to make a real difference in the lives of others. Through obvious actions, such as being flexible to meet the needs of individual employees - through to more subtle actions, such as responding to challenge with grace and decorum - leaders are truly 'leading by example'.

Because of this, Ms Brower argues, it's smart for leaders to be aware of their influence, and to understand that intent does not translate into impact.

In ECEC, a service leader may have the best of intentions when they make a rule which says the children of educators cannot be enrolled in the same service their parents work in, however the message and actuality of that rule may land badly.

A director who wants to give their team autonomy over programming styles may find themselves accused of having a service that lacks structure, or may find it hard to show continuity of learning.

There's no doubt that leadership is a challenging and complex space, however there are some common things leaders in all sectors and industries do which (often unintentionally) create barriers to satisfaction and fulfilment in their teams.

Lack of transparency and responsiveness

The day-to-day of an ECEC service leader is complex, with competing demands for attention from children, families, educators and other stakeholders. Despite this intense competition, team members thrive when they feel connected to their leader, and that they are both seen and heard.

Recent from Oracle found that one of the best ways for leaders to build trust and encourage strong performance is through being visible and accessible.

Responsiveness is another core factor in building strong relationships as a leader, with another study finding that seemingly simple aspects of daily leadership life, like getting back to people promptly, closing loops and answering requests helped workers to give stronger effort to their work and in return to have stronger performance.

"The best leaders are present, accessible, and demonstrate empathy," Ms Brower said.

"They notice when team members seem down. They ask questions about how people are doing, listen, and pay attention when they respond. Leaders don't have to be social workers, but they do need to express compassion and support - and offer resources available through organisational programs."

Forgetting to emphasise purpose, or to show gratitude

In their working lives, professionals need to feel a sense of purpose, and that they are connected to something beyond themselves - that they are contributing to a bigger picture. When these conditions are present, employees feel a strong sense of importance and fulfilment.

"Sometimes leaders can assume that if they tell someone once how their work has a sense of purpose, it was enough. But great leaders repeatedly reinforce how their team's work matters, how much they appreciate someone's contribution, and how an employee's value is unique," Ms Brower explained.

There are a number of ways in which leaders can express gratitude and remind their employees of how much they are appreciated, and how much value their work has to others.

With Early Childhood Educators Day (6 September) on the horizon, the opportunities to appreciate are high.

While some leaders may believe they are supporting their teams by keeping them away from challenges, when they do so they are missing an opportunity to help their team to stretch out of their comfort zone, and to learn and grow.

Truly great leaders set clear expectations for performance, but then 'get out of the way' and allow their team to meet those expectations, which sometimes involves solving problems in novel ways.

Creating a culture where it's safe to fail, and when 'failure' is met with curiosity rather than critique is also important.

This does not mean that there is no accountability - holding people to account is also something strong leaders do - however it does mean that there is space for team members to be autonomous and creative.

Leaders need to not only nurture their relationships with the individuals in their teams, but also pay attention to the relationships team members have with each other. This is especially true in feminised sectors such as ECEC where interpersonal relationships can be complex.

Typically, people are happier at work when they have opportunities to build strong relationships and bonds with one another.

When the team is strong as a unit, and where people have the opportunity to get to know one another, they typically have better opportunities to understand where each other are coming from.

Leaders can give people a chance to get to know each other so they feel more connected to and responsible for the work they rely on each other to accomplish.

When leaders fail to share enough information to keep their team feeling connected and comfortable the team can feel psychological stress.

To avoid this, leaders should share what they know and what they don't know yet, but are working toward. While it's not always possible for leaders to operate in an environment of absolutes, they can often offer clarity about what may happen, what questions are being asked, and how they might be answered.

Being open and honest, where possible, about their own concerns. Authenticity and professionalism can be a difficult balance to strike, however when it is possible can support strong relationships and happiness at work.

To read Ms Brower's original work, on which this piece is based, please see here .

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While many early childhood leaders have the best intentions and do their best to motivate and inspire their teams, there are some common mistakes.

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At Community Connections Solution Australia (CCSA), one of the key points we have noted over the years is that strong leadership facilitates the processes that are involved in managing ongoing change. Dealing with all services types in both rural and remote as well as metropolitan locations, services can find that change can be proactive or reactive depending on the circumstances.

There has been a significant amount of reactive change during the past few years. These changes have required effective leadership to support team cohesion and quality outcomes. Services have had to navigate their way through the management and response to droughts, bushfires, COVID and floods, all of which have brought about changes to way services operate and function.

Leadership has been brought into sharp focus as we navigate changes to the way we do business. It has also drawn attention to the foundations that we base our leadership on. Good foundations (including policies and procedures) provide the solid base for leadership to function and indeed flourish when managing change.

Building blocks

CCSA believes the five building blocks for good governance in early childhood education and care services are:

Each of the building blocks represents an area that the leadership requires knowledge of to assist in their role of managing an early childhood education and care service, especially when managing with ongoing change. All of the building blocks require specific planning and management, in fact, need to operate effectively and efficiently to enable each area to be complaint, viable and sustainable into the future. The ability to govern effectively will ultimately improve outcomes for children and enable all stakeholders in the service to thrive even when dealing with change.

So how do we lead through change?

Leaders need to be prepared to change, accept, and adapt. In other words, they need to be resilient. Resilience is not a reactive concept - we need to integrate change into our daily life so that it is not disruptive. This requires individuals and teams to demonstrate listening and learning and this is an interactive process.

Listening is an active skill. We must not only hear the thoughts of those around us - we need to listen - to ensure that the team understand the message and can transform the message into action. This requires communication skills and an understanding of the audience and their receptivity to the message and creating the space and conditions for others to speak and be heard.

Leaders must be open minded and actively engage with diverse viewpoints and specifically those that differ from our own reference points, culturally, politically, religiously, gender or sexuality. The way we learn comes from many different aspects of our life - not just study and reading, but experience and our daily challenges and how we face them. The more broadly we question, consult, and engage the more likely we are to understand and investigate solutions to problems.

Roles and responsibilities

Services need to consider if everyone's roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and if appropriate delegations are in place.

Our educators are responsible for the important job of leading children on their early learning discovery. We need to ensure that we continue to listen, learn and adapt our practices to consider diversity and the needs of our educators to manage during times of uncertainty and change. It is important for services to continue implement and improve the support for educational leaders, both formal and informal.

Managers of services need to consider how best to adapt their practice to the changing needs of the business, the families and educator teams. This could include more efficient use of technology to allow for better communication or ensuring that teams have access to the appropriate resources and expertise to allow them to deliver on their own goals.

Read more on planning for change and learning from challenges in Part 2 of our Leading through change feature from CCSA in the next Quality and Compliance in Practice newsletter.

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Community Connections Solution Australia: Leading through change - Part 1

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Good governance, resilience and communication is key to managing change effectively, shares CCSA's CEO, Meg Mendham.

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What makes a great leader? Management theorist Simon Sinek suggests, it’s someone who makes their employees feel secure, who draws staffers into a circle of trust. But creating trust and safety -- especially in an uneven economy -- means taking on big responsibility.

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Find more videos on our YouTube channel

Mentors for Beginning Early Childhood Teachers

Rhonda Livingstone, ACECQA's National Education Leader, and Georgia Irvine Casey a beginning ECT, share their insights about mentoring in this Queensland University of Technology (QUT) resource. They discuss the importance of having a good mentor, while studying and throughout your career. They also consider the benefits gained from being a mentor.

Become a children's education and care professional

Have you ever considered becoming an educator or teacher? Rhonda Livingstone, ACECQA's National Education Leader, shares her insight into choosing a career in children's education and care. Educators and teachers make a significant and lasting contribution to the lives of children, their wellbeing, development, education and lifelong learning.

Related resource

ACECQA - Educational leadership

NQF Series - Educational leadership

Rhonda Livingstone, ACECQA's National Education Leader, shares her insight into educational leadership in children's education and care services. Rhonda discusses the importance of the role, selecting and supporting the educational leader, and how educational leaders are an integral part of the service and the National Quality Framework.

Being the education leaders of tomorrow

Rhonda Livingstone, ACECQA's National Education Leader, challenges those studying to enter the children's education and care sector to think of themselves as future educational leaders, how they see the role and how they might see themselves in the role in the future.

Leadership in education and care

Laurie Kelly from Mindworks shares some interesting insights into the role of the educational leader.

Role of educational leader

Kym Groth and the late Peta McNellie and from Family Day Care Association Queensland, Evelyn Callaghan and Sarah White from Deakin School for Early Learning and Kylie Brannelly from the Queensland Children's Activity Network, talk about the role within their services.
Note: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers should exercise caution when watching this video as it contains images and sounds of a deceased person.

Critical reflection in practice

Service leaders explore the meaning of critical reflection and share examples of practice and advice on how critical reflection can be embedded in service practice.

Related resource

ACECQA - Information sheet - Developing a culture of learning through reflective practice

Continuous improvement in practice

Insights from service leaders who have successfully included continuous quality improvement as part of their daily practice, including advice on effective team collaboration, and how to develop a Quality Improvement Plan (QIP).

Related resource

ACECQA - Quality Improvement Plan

The role and exciting future of educational leaders

Rhonda Livingstone, ACECQA's National Education Leader, presented to the Educational Leaders Western Australia Forum on the role and exciting future of educational leaders.

Use the menu options to pause, stop and rewind the presentation.

Presentation resources

ACECQA - Infographic - ACECQA's Top Ten Online Resources

ACECQA - Worksheet - Provocations

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Find more videos on our YouTube channel Mentors for Beginning Early Childhood Teachers Rhonda Livingstone, ACECQA's National Education Leader, and Georgia Irvine Casey a beginning ECT, share their insights about...

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Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action | TED Talk

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Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership -- starting with a golden circle and the question: “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Wright brothers…

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Many early childhood education and care (ECEC) professionals have found themselves struggling to "get back into work mode" following an unexpected or traumatic event.

Given the collective trauma of a global pandemic, against the backdrop of some significant natural disasters, and a workforce shortage which is having an increasingly stronger impact on the ECEC sector, it's no surprise that leaders are being called on, more than ever before, to practice trauma informed leadership.
What is trauma-informed leadership?
Essentially trauma informed leadership recognises and honours the emotional scars that people may struggle with, regardless of their origin.

When practiced thoughtfully, trauma informed leadership can help the leader have empathy and compassion for their employees, both powerful emotions themselves for a leader to have.

Trauma-informed leadership enables those in positions of power to lead in a compassionate inclusive manner, that ultimately empowers those being led to grow through a traumatic event. It emphasises nurturing leadership that builds trust and empowers the resilience of a team, and the organisation more broadly, Women and Leadership Australia have .

When leaders adopt a trauma informed approach and leadership strategies, staff retention is likely to be improved, along with health and wellbeing outcomes.
Five key principles of trauma informed leadership
There are five key principles of trauma-informed leadership, which help to create environments of psychological safety for employees:

At heart, when leaders are trauma informed, employees have three core beliefs:

Acknowledgement (" I will be heard ") An important aspect of a trauma-informed approach, author Katharine Manning says, is the willingness to listen to and acknowledge the pain of those experiencing trauma.

"Sharing a story of trauma can be healing, and even physically . It isn't enough merely to allow people to share their experiences, though; they need to feel genuinely heard as well.

"An acknowledgement can be as simple as a manager saying to an employee whose spouse is dying, 'Thanks for letting me know. I'm sorry for all you're going through,' or an office-wide communication that addresses a community trauma. The key is that an acknowledgment neither denies the experience of those suffering ('It will all work out for the best') nor distracts from it ('Let me tell you how I persevered through something similar'). When we fail to acknowledge the pain that someone is experiencing, we can veer into toxic positivity or even gaslighting ."

Support (" I can get the help I need ") There are often tangible forms of support that people need in times of trauma and distress, like mental health resources, referrals to medical information, and assistance with funeral and other expenses, Ms Manning continued.

Such support can make an incredible difference in a person's healing and demonstrate that the organisation is there for its employees when they need it.

It's also important when working with those in crisis that leaders can communicate frequently and clearly. Therefore, another type of support that the organisation can provide is frequent and reliable communication. This communication can take any form, from a text alert system to a Slack channel dedicated to informing employees about the crisis at hand to a daily email from the CEO. Whatever you use, it's important that the communication be consistent and dependable.

Trust (" I will be treated fairly ") People typically feel more confident and comfortable when they understand the rules and parameters of their environments. If the policies and values an organisation has in place are in name only, it creates a sense of unease at best and moral injury at worst.

As such, Ms Manning says, trauma informed organisations should have policies and procedures that are genuinely supportive of employees in need, and ensure that those policies are widely known and followed.

It is particularly important that leaders are vocal in their commitment to the organisation's values and unwavering in upholding them. When bad behavior is not addressed, it can become contagious ; very quickly, the organisation's values erode and toxicity takes over. For people to feel safe raising issues, they must understand the rules and trust that those rules will be applied fairly and transparently.
What does trauma-informed leadership look like?
In times of disruption, leaders need to switch from 'business as usual' leadership and adopt a more collaborative and encouraging style of leadership, to foster positive connections and culture. Using trauma-informed leadership principles will enable the organisation to heal, learn, adapt and excel, even in the face of adversity.

To be a trauma-informed leader, a leader should:

Practice the five trauma-informed leadership principles above.

Foster a supportive environment for the team. This can include actively listening, taking action on people's concerns and actively including individuals in work and social activities.

Ensure psychological and physical safety. Enable this by fostering a 'no bullying' culture, not just among the team and the organisation, but also in suppliers, agencies and contractors that you choose to work with. Listening to and believing employees when they come to you to report incidents or express their concerns is also important.

Use adaptive leadership skills. This can be achieved by thinking outside the box when presented with an issue, being flexible and helping members of your team to embrace uncertainty.

Try to understand individuals in your organisation holistically. This is an easy one; making an effort to gently enquire about the weekends, evenings and any hobbies and activities of individuals in your organisation will give you a holistic view of them, both as they are in the work, and beyond. Not only will this increase your rapport and social capital, but it will also allow you to better understand their actions and response to different situations.

Offer support. Having an 'open door' policy will encourage your team to come to you if they ever need support. Make sure you have an in-depth understanding of the support that the organisation itself can offer, and also other community groups or services that might be able to help.

For more information on trauma informed leadership, please see here . The two main reference sources for this piece are How to be a Trauma Informed Leader and We need Trauma Informed workplaces.

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The need for ECEC leaders to be trauma informed professionals is paramount. This piece outlines how it's done.

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In early childhood education and care (ECEC) services, as part of meeting Element 7.2.3, the approved provider is responsible for ensuring that each team member's roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, performance is regularly evaluated, and that individualised learning and development plans are in place.

As ACECQA , an open and respectful performance review process can achieve many outcomes including:

creating meaningful connections between an individual's daily work and the larger goals and vision of the service

showing team members they are valued and their contributions are appreciated

strengthening bonds and building better communication between staff and management

helping team members maintain motivation and see the impact their work has on the lives of children and families

being collaborative and allowing team members to take ownership of their professional development

refocusing the team on their key priorities

providing managers with insight into how the team member views their work.

Despite understanding the importance of such reviews, not only to meet the obligations of Quality Area 7, but also to support and sustain the growth and retention of teams, some leaders in the ECEC sector are fearful or uncomfortable with evaluating performance.

In the piece below we look at three common methodologies for evaluating performance, with the aim of building confidence, understanding and capacity in these areas for leaders and managers in the ECEC sector.
Self assessment
Typically, a self assessment involves a leader or manager providing an employee with some notes or observations about their performance and daily practice. The employee is then invited to reflect on these observations and provide their own feedback, essentially assessing their own performance.

On the positive side, for the employee, these types of assessments open up opportunities for reflection, can help to scaffold goals and directions for personal development, and can help to improve self confidence and articulation.

For leaders, this type of performance assessment can help them to "see around corners" and learn a little more about their employees, as well as increasing their engagement and performance.

Some questions leaders or managers may ask in a self assessment include:
Do you think you fulfilled your job description to its fullest this year? What have been some of the key challenges you've overcome? How can your team better support you? 360 degree feedback
During the 360 Degree Feedback process, employees give and receive confidential, anonymous evaluations from the people who work around them.

Typically a mixture of about eight to twelve people fill out an anonymous form that asks questions covering a broad range of workplace competencies. The 360 questionnaire includes questions that are measured on a rating scale.

This questionnaire also asks raters to provide written comments. The person receiving the evaluations also fills out a self-rating questionnaire that includes the same survey questions that others receive in their forms.

In an ECEC context, this questionnaire can also be used by families, children and even the broader community.

An advantage of this approach is that different stakeholders are likely to notice and value different skills than management.
Management by objective
In this popular style of performance review SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals are set.

One of the main benefits of this approach is that it gives employees a clear direction and purpose for their work. They understand what is expected of them, how they will be evaluated, and how what they do contributes to the overall success of the service.

For leaders and managers, this approach is helpful because it allows them to communicate their expectations and priorities clearly, delegate tasks and responsibilities appropriately, and monitor and measure progress and results objectively.

To learn more about performance management and review approaches please see the following resources:

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As part of meeting Element 7.2.3, approved providers are responsible for ensuring that performance is regularly evaluated.

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Unpacking the Educational Leader Resource

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The revision of the approved learning frameworks, along with the advent of a new financial year, has given many approved providers the opportunity to take a deeper look at their professional learning provisions.

Alongside these external factors, the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector finds itself in an increasingly tight and competitive environment when it comes to recruitment, with many inexperienced and unqualified educators entering the profession.

At all levels of role, ECEC professionals are considering more deeply the value propositions put forward by their employers, and targeted and meaningful professional development is an increasingly strong drawcard.

We spoke recently with Andrea Isitt, Founder and Director of First Door Early Childhood Professional Learning to understand more about this shifting landscape, and to discuss the importance of ECEC providers taking an authentic, long-term approach to professional learning.
Reactive, instead of holistic and goal-orientated
Many in the ECEC sector take a reactive or unplanned approach to professional development, providing or completing training based on issues, centre policy or regulatory requirements. In many instances, professional development is also something which happens in response to an incident, or pattern of behaviour amongst a staff team.

A service may, for example, bring in a professional development provider to run a two hour session on 'effective supervision' after noticing a spike in behavioural incidents and accident reports. They might also ask a staff team to complete an online course to demonstrate that each team member has an understanding of their reporting obligations.

These types of professional development sessions, Andrea said, are "reactive, and can miss the big-picture issue. Perhaps an issue was that some new team members do not practice active supervision or understand risk assessment. However, the real issue could be that the environment lacks challenge, agency and play-based learning for children."

"How effective is this reactive approach when it comes to implementing true change, deep learning, improving outcomes for children and changing practice for quality improvement?" she continued.

When professional learning is instead holistic and goal-orientated it will involve deeper reflection, with shared learning and agreement, for change in practice to occur. As a collective, the team is able to engage in reflection, set goals and challenges and can change established practice.

Another example of the 'short-term fix' approach is when the selection of a Registered Training Organisation (RTO) for educators' career qualifications is ad hoc within a service team. Selection can then be based on how quickly and easily educators will achieve their career qualification.

"Outcomes of these quick-fix qualifications are detrimental to our profession, resulting in the burden of having educators with shallow purpose and a lack of required skills and knowledge."

For this reason, First Door has designed Team eLearning packages that are collaborative, with tools to support teams toward shared understanding, reflection and goals over a two year period.
Evidence-informed and project based learning
ECEC teams and professionals are dynamic, and no two services are the same. The individual needs of children, the dynamic mix of families, the movements of staff teams, and the occurrences in the broader community are just some of the factors which can influence the make up of a centre.

Against this background, the importance of professional development partnership - when the same professional development provider is working in a dynamic and responsive way with a whole staff team - becomes clear.

Working in such a way, Andrea explained, allows the provider to align their professional learning and resources to the educators and team's current interests, knowledge and abilities, allowing for flexibility and responsiveness as the individual, group and team needs change. This professional learning is more relevant and project-based, known to have better outcomes for both adults and children.

"The alternative," she continued, "is the all too familiar 'training' model which can be viewed as tokenistic, resulting in short term inspiration and low impact."

Likewise, when there are one or two educators who are sent to a professional development opportunity with the view to "feeding back to the team" there is a danger that they will be the sole team members "swimming against the tide" of established practice, or that core elements of the training will be missed or misinterpreted in their feedback to the team.

"It is far more rewarding to have a long-term partnership with service teams with 'project based learning' to develop their shared pedagogy, philosophy and practice."

A number of the services First Door partners with have achieved an Excellent rating with ACECQA or Exceeding the NQS, and First Door's professional learning shares opportunities and possibilities showcasing their partner services.
Short-term fix qualifications, instead of a long-term partnership for capability and career development
As Andrea mentioned earlier, another example of the 'short-term fix' approach is when the selection of a Registered Training Organisation (RTO) for educators' career qualifications is ad hoc within a service team. Selection can then be based on how quickly and easily educators will achieve their career qualification, something which is ultimately to the detriment of the profession as a whole.

"First Door partners with many early childhood employers that instead have a long-term and goal-orientated approach to career qualifications, where they value quality training and a Preferred RTO partnership," Andrea explained. This investment results in consistent competency-based training and assessment required for skilled, inspiring educators and quality practice.

"The evidence of this long-term approach is with our graduated students that have moved through their early childhood career to become service leaders and establish a Preferred RTO partnership with First Door within their own team."

Both the revised version of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) and the National Quality Standard (NQS) refer to the importance of forming partnerships in the professional learning space, and of continuing to grow and develop as a professional.

NQS 6.2 reminds ECEC professionals that collaborative partnerships enhance children's inclusion, learning and wellbeing, and in NQS 4.2.1 that when educators engage in critical reflection and ongoing professional learning, it leads to pedagogical decisions and actions that are transformative.

"At the end of the day," Andrea said, "the value of holistic and goal-orientated approach to professional learning is demonstrated with high performing teams delivering quality outcomes for children."

"When service teams work together in long-term partnership with a professional learning provider towards goals for quality practice then powerful growth is transmitted in ECEC, not only to their staff, but for the children in their care."

To learn more about the work First Door does please see here . For more information about the value of professional learning in an ECEC context please see here .

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The game changing power of authentic professional learning

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We spoke with Andrea Isitt to understand more about the importance of ECEC providers taking an authentic, long-term approach to professional learning.

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ACECQA's National Education Leader, Rhonda Livingstone provides insight into National Quality Framework topics of interest.
William Shakespeare said 'we know what we are but not what we may be'. One of the many roles of leaders is to assist team members to realise, and reach their full potential.

Assessment and rating data shows that element 7.2.2 of the National Quality Standard (NQS) is among the top five most challenging to meet, requiring that 'the performance of educators, coordinators and staff members is evaluated and individual development plans are in place to support performance improvement'.

Professional development supports educators in their work to provide quality outcomes for children and families. We know when education and care services establish and maintain a culture of ongoing reflection and self-review, team members are more likely to feel challenged and motivated, and experience job satisfaction ( Early Years Learning Framework, p.13; Framework for School Age Care, p. 12).

The National Quality Standard refers to a cyclical process for performance review and improvement, but doesn't set specific guidelines around timing or how the process should work in practice. Services should establish a process that works best for their staff and management structure. The process should be one that identifies staff members' strengths and assesses and enhances staff performance.

Strategies

When implementing a performance review system, (including Professional Development Plans for each team member) a Self-assessment Tool developed by ACECQA is a useful resource. The tool can be used to establish goals and identify areas for professional development.

When education and care professionals engage in self-assessment with managers, they're able to build on strengths, identify areas they would like to develop and celebrate the successes and contributions of all team members. Whatever system is used, it's important the purpose is communicated clearly to staff and they feel empowered and supported in the process.

Another approach to self-assessment might be regular one-on-one catch ups to discuss current achievements and challenges. Meeting regularly ensures the team is supported on an ongoing basis and through periods of change. This is especially helpful when teams consist of casual or short term members. It can also reduce the sometimes onerous task of undertaking the process annually.

Additional strategies to self-assessment can be found in our previous article on professional development planning, as well as the OECD Working Paper - Leadership for Quality Early Childhood Education and Care.

Quality Improvement Plan

Reviewing your current process for planning, supporting and improving team performance is important and can form part of your Quality Improvement Plan. How does the team feel about the process? Are there opportunities to share achievements? How do other services approach professional development? These are some questions you might like consider when reviewing your service's plan.

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Practical strategies for reviewing, planning and improving team performance

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ACECQA's National Education Leader , Rhonda Livingstone provides insight into National Quality Framework topics of interest. William Shakespeare said 'we know what we are but not what we may be'...

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Gitte Frederiksen: Great leadership is a network, not a hierarchy

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What if leadership at work wasn't for a select few, but rather shared among many? Management consultant Gitte Frederiksen gives us the recipe for "distributed leadership" -- dynamic, multidimensional networks of leaders that tap into everyone's knowledge and creativity -- and shows how it allows teams to do more and do it better.

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In the lead-up to an assessment and rating process, early childhood services often find themselves navigating a complex and sometimes stressful journey. The prospect of meeting regulatory standards, addressing quality improvements, and ensuring a cohesive team effort can be overwhelming. It's a time when stress levels can soar, and the pressure to perform is palpable. However, amidst these challenges lies a powerful tool for alleviating stress and fostering a sense of direction: the in-service roadmap.

An in-service roadmap, when collaboratively created with your team, serves as a powerful communication and planning tool through this tumultuous period.

It acts as a visual, goal-oriented plan that outlines the steps, milestones, and responsibilities involved in the assessment and rating process. By providing a clear path forward, the roadmap helps your team navigate uncertainties with confidence and certainty. It becomes a collective source of motivation and direction, instilling a shared purpose and a sense of unity among team members.

Roadmaps activate and guide the networking between the 'emotional hippocampus,' the neocortex, and the prefrontal cortex - enabling healthy engagement, and storing of healthy patterns that can be retrieved for healthy use when partnering and co-creation.

Without roadmaps, our brain picks and chooses from memories and can be disjointed, seeing, and experiencing reality through threats and fears, which can lead to us shutting down, revealing less, expecting more and assuming the worst.
When we map out roadmaps with staff - conflict dissolves!
Roadmaps provide a visual representation of where we have come from, where we are now and where we are heading. Therefore, creating more certainty. Helping us to move from individual thinking to group think. Bringing the 'I' into the 'we' and creating joint experiences. We can process complex issues much faster when it comes to visual communication.

This helps to reduce cortisol (stress hormone), helps staff to feel better, taking uncertainty out of the air, and helping teams see how they fit in now and into the future, what is expected of them, and how they can contribute.

Roadmaps offer a structured approach that goes beyond mere planning. They help set clear goals, outline actionable steps, can be used as a communication tool and provide a visual representation of progress.
9 steps to creating your in-service roadmap Step 1: Clarifying goals and objectives
Begin by clearly defining your purpose and objectives for the assessment and rating process. What empowering language and narrative do you want to create and communicate to your team? Remember your certainty, clarity, and vision fuels their confidence. Words create worlds, so choose your words carefully!
Step 2: Identifying key stakeholders
Engage key team members and stakeholders early, using partnering language . Open communication sets the tone for collaboration and builds trust.
Step 3: Assessing current practices
Evaluate current practices collaboratively, seeking input from your team. Let your team lead these conversations, as you are wanting to gain their perspective and reality. This engagement is crucial to understanding your teams narrative, beliefs and support needs.
Step 4: Defining milestones and timelines
As a team, break the assessment and rating preparation into a journey with key milestones and defined realistic timelines, e.g. months, weeks, terms. Creating a shared understanding of the process and tasks is a trust-building strategy.
Step 5: Engaging your team
Involve your team in the roadmap creation, every step of the way! So they can see themselves as part of the important journey, and can feel that their insights and contribution are valued and appreciated. This creates a sense of ownership and buy-in.
Step 6: Developing action plans
Craft actionable plans as a team, assigning roles and resources. Co-creation ensures shared responsibility and commitment. Remember to identify what could get in the way of achieving these action steps and the strategies you will put in place as a response.
Step 7: Establishing communication channels
Set up effective channels for ongoing communication. Transparency is key to nurturing trust through consistent updates. Remember that consistency is key here, repeating the same message in different ways builds confidence and understanding. Create a working FAQ document that the team create and has ongoing access to.
Step 8: Monitoring progress and adaptation
Regularly track progress against milestones. If unexpected changes arise, transparently adapt the roadmap together. Remember the importance of celebrating the team's success, resilience and adaptability along the way. Celebrations help your team feel valued and appreciated and help to strengthen feelings of connection and bonding. e.g. we are all in this together!
Step 9: Addressing challenges and concerns
Create safe spaces for conversations around practical and emotional challenges, whilst acknowledging we all respond to uncertainty in different ways. When we have open and honest conversations together we normalise and validate our team's concerns or anxiety around the assessment and rating process.
Conclusion
Roadmaps are living documents, adaptable as things shift and change. They're working documents owned by the entire team, embedding roles and responsibilities.

They help to make the invisible, visible.

Regular review and adaptation are vital. Place the roadmap in a central location for daily reference, ensuring everyone is aligned and engaged.

Bring your creativity and a playful approach to the creation of your roadmap designing it in a way that reflects your service philosophy and unique perspective.

Remember there is no right or wrong way of creating your in-service roadmap.

Most importantly have fun!

For tailored support leading up to the assessment and rating process get in touch or join in the upcoming courses at the link below.

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In the lead-up to an assessment and rating process, early childhood services often find themselves navigating a complex and sometimes stressful journey.

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This episode of our Patreon-exclusive podcast series Exploring the NQS discusses Element 7.2.2 of the National Quality Standard, "Educational leadership".
Element description: The educational leader is supported and leads the development and implementation of the educational program and assessment and planning cycle.

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element 7.2.2 educational leadership (exploring the nqs)

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‎The Early Education Show: Element 7.2.2 Educational leadership (Exploring the NQS) on Apple Podcasts

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This episode of our Patreon-exclusive podcast series Exploring the NQS discusses Element 7.2.2 of the National Quality Standard, "Educational leadership". Element description: The educational leader is supported and leads the development and implementation of the educational program and assessment a...

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This week's episode of our Patreon-exclusive podcast series Exploring the NQS provides an overview of Quality Area 7: Leadership and service management.
From the Guide to the National Quality Standard: Quality Area 7 focuses on effective leadership and governance of the service to establish and maintain quality environments for children's learning and development. Effective leaders establish shared values for the service that reflect the service context and professionalism and set clear direction for the service's continuous improvement. Governance refers to the systems in place to support effective management and operation of the service, consistent with the service's statement of philosophy.

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quality area 7: leadership and service management (exploring the nqs)

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‎The Early Education Show: Quality Area 7: Leadership and service management (Exploring the NQS) on Apple Podcasts

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This week's episode of our Patreon-exclusive podcast series Exploring the NQS provides an overview of Quality Area 7: Leadership and service management. From the Guide to the National Quality Standard: Quality Area 7 focuses on effective leadership and governance of the service to establish and main...

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Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) are completed so that services can self-assess their performance in order to provide children with quality education and care, and to plan for future improvement. Therefore, it makes sense to ask the children themselves about the changes they would like to see at their centre.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child identifies the need for children to have and express their own views on issues that affect them. Adults should listen and respond respectfully.

The QIP process is the perfect opportunity for educators to give children a voice, and empower them with a sense of agency. This week we explore how this can be done in authentic and positive ways.

Listen continuously

Including children in QIP has the potential to be tokenistic, especially if their views are hurriedly documented at the last minute. While services are required to update their QIP at least once a year, meaningful consultation occurs throughout the year.

Services should listen to children's thoughts and feelings as a daily practice. Not only does this make the QIP process easier, but the children will learn it is okay to share their views with others. They will feel listened to and have a clear process for achieving change in their lives.

Allow children to communicate in different ways

Talking is not the only method of communication. Group discussions are an incredible way for children to share ideas and learn collaboratively, but they have their limitations. Discussions can prioritise the ideas of children who are able to participate and exclude children with language, developmental and social barriers.

When involving children in the QIP process, consider how different children at your service communicate.

How do your babies express their needs and interests?

How do children with disabilities and or developmental delays prefer to communicate?

Educators need to adapt to the ways their children communicate. Instead of talking, children may prefer to share their thoughts through body language, music, visual arts or role play.

Listen deeply

Educators can find greater meaning in children's ideas by taking the time to listen deeply.

Avoid settling at the first idea a child presents you - involving children in a QIP is not about quickly ticking a box. Children may say what they think adults want to hear, or what they feel is socially acceptable amongst their peers.

Be patient. Authentic communication takes time. Build trusting relationships, ask children questions, clarify assumptions, and keep searching for understanding.

Create learning experiences

Involving children in QIP does not need to be a stand-alone activity. Consider the greater learning experiences on offer, and take advantage of these:

writing ideas down on paper teaches children about the purpose and function of language systems

displaying children's ideas on a classroom wall creates a language-rich environment

self-expression through music, movement and drama supports social-emotional development

planning for positive changes teaches children about problem-solving.

Take action

Listening to children and documenting their ideas is meaningful when action is taken. Educators can avoid tokenism by having a clear plan for following up on children's ideas.

Before consulting with children, ensure all team members at your service are on board and committed to the process. Find solutions for implementing children's ideas in a proactive and timely manner.

And remember to tell children what they have achieved. Show them what has changed in their lives!

7 ways to collect children's ideas

1. Establish a space for spontaneous storytelling. This could be a special mat or a circle marked on the ground with tape. Introduce props like puppets and silk scarfs.

2. Create a wishing well or a wishing wall. Children draw or write the things they wish for on paper. They drop the paper into the well or pin it to the wall.

3. Give children cameras. Ask children to take photos of things they like and don't like at their centre.

4. Invite a performer. Arrange for a musician or actor to help the children express their ideas through a group performance.

5. Document children's stories in their own words. Use audio or video to record children's ideas. Write captions for children's artwork when they explain what it is about.

6. Question games. Ask questions during transitions and group times. Where do you like to play? What do you want more of at preschool?

7. Recreate your centre in small world play. Help children build the perfect centre using blocks, boxes, small dolls and loose parts. Role-play scenarios and explore possibilities.

Further reading

Have you seen our new live webinar training calendar?

Many sessions to choose from including new sessions specifically related to the current pandemic environment, and many of our most popular training topics redesigned for webinar format.

Topics are delivered in a variety of 2- 3 hour sessions or 2 part series. Every course provides a practical, hands-on approach to professional development.

CELA has been supporting the professional needs of the early and middle childhood sector for over 40 years. We trained over 4,500 sector professionals in 2019.

About CELA

Community Early Learning Australia is a not for profit organisation with a focus on amplifying the value of early learning for every child across Australia - representing our members and uniting our sector as a force for quality education and care.

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Involving children in Quality Improvement Planning

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Quality Improvement Plans (QIPs) are completed so that services can self-assess their performance in order to provide children with quality education and care, and to plan for future improvement. Therefore, it makes sense to ask the children themselves about the changes they would like to see at their centre.

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Idea in Brief

The Challenge

Systematic cognitive barriers can blind us to our own unethical behaviors and decisions, hampering our ability to maximize the value we create in the world.

The Solution

We have both an intuitive system for ethical decision-making and a more deliberative one; relying on the former leads to less-ethical choices. We need to consciously engage the latter.

In Practice

To make more-ethical decisions, compare options rather than evaluate them singly; disregard how decisions would affect you personally; make trade-offs that create more value for all parties in negotiations; and allocate time wisely.

Autonomous vehicles will soon take over the road. This new technology will save lives by reducing driver error, yet accidents will still happen. The cars' computers will have to make difficult decisions: When a crash is unavoidable, should the car save its single occupant or five pedestrians? Should the car prioritize saving older people or younger people? What about a pregnant woman-should she count as two people? Automobile manufacturers need to reckon with such difficult questions in advance and program their cars to respond accordingly.

In my view, leaders answering ethical questions like these should be guided by the goal of creating the most value for society. Moving beyond a set of simple ethical rules ("Don't lie," "Don't cheat"), this perspective-rooted in the work of the philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Peter Singer-provides the clarity needed to make a wide variety of important managerial decisions.

For centuries philosophers have argued over what constitutes moral action, theorizing about what people should do. More recently behavioral ethicists in the social sciences have offered research-based accounts of what people actually do when confronted with ethical dilemmas. These scientists have shown that environment and psychological processes can lead us to engage in ethically questionable behavior even if it violates our own values. If we behave unethically out of self-interest, we're often unaware that we're doing so-a phenomenon known as motivated blindness. For instance, we may claim that we contribute more to group tasks than we actually do. And my colleagues and I have shown that executives will unconsciously overlook serious wrongdoing in their company if it benefits them or the organization.

Maximizing Value

My approach to improving ethical decision-making blends philosophical thought with business-school pragmatism. I generally subscribe to the tenets of utilitarianism, a philosophy initially offered by Bentham, which argues that ethical behavior is behavior that maximizes "utility" in the world-what I'll call value here. This includes maximizing aggregate well-being and minimizing aggregate pain, goals that are helped by pursuing efficiency in decision-making, reaching moral decisions without regard for self-interest, and avoiding tribal behavior (such as nationalism or in-group favoritism). I'm guessing that you largely agree with these goals, even if you hew to philosophies that focus on individual rights, freedom, liberty, and autonomy. Even if you are committed to another philosophical perspective, try to appreciate the goal of creating as much value as possible within the limits of that perspective.

Ted + Chelsea Cavanaugh

In general, the decisions endorsed by utilitarianism align with most other philosophies most of the time and so provide a useful gauge for examining leadership ethics. But like other philosophies, strict utilitarianism doesn't always serve up easy answers. Its logic and limits can be seen, for example, in the choices facing manufacturers of those self-driving cars. If the goal is simply to maximize value, the automobiles should be programmed to limit collective suffering and loss, and the people in the car shouldn't be accorded special status. By that calculus, if the car must choose between sparing the life of its single occupant and sparing the lives of five people in its path, it should sacrifice the passenger.

Clearly this presents a host of issues-What if the passenger is pregnant? What if she's younger than the pedestrians?-and no simple utilitarian answer for how best to program the car exists.

Furthermore, manufacturers could reasonably argue that people would be less likely to buy a car that doesn't prioritize their lives. So car companies that didn't prioritize the passenger would be in a weaker competitive position than those that did-and car buyers might well opt for less-safe cars that are driven by humans. Nevertheless, utilitarian values can be usefully applied in considering what sort of regulation could help create the greatest benefit for all.

Although the autonomous-vehicle case represents a tougher ethical decision than most managers will ever face, it highlights the importance of thinking through how your decisions, large and small, and the decisions of those you manage, can create the most value for society. Often people think of ethical leaders as those who adhere to the simple rules I've mentioned. But when leaders make fair personnel decisions, devise trade-offs that benefit both sides in a negotiation, or allocate their own and others' time wisely, they are maximizing "utility"-creating value in the world and thereby acting ethically and making their organizations more ethical as a whole.

Overcoming Barriers

Consider two questions posed by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and colleagues:

1. How much would you pay to save 2,000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds?

2. How much would you pay to save 200,000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds?

Their research shows that people who are asked the first question offer about the same amount as do people who are asked the second question. Of course, if our goal is to create as much value as possible, a difference in the number of birds should affect how much we choose to pay. This illustrates the limitations of our ethical thinking and suggests that improving ethical decision-making requires deliberately making rational decisions that maximize value rather than going with one's gut.

The concept of bounded rationality, which is core to the field of behavioral economics, sees managers as wanting to be rational but influenced by biases and other cognitive limitations that get in the way. Scholars of decision-making don't expect people to be fully rational, but they argue that we should aspire to be so in order to better align our behavior with our goals. In the ethics domain we struggle with bounded ethicality-systematic cognitive barriers that prevent us from being as ethical as we wish to be. By adjusting our personal goals from maximizing benefit for ourselves (and our organizations) to behaving as ethically as possible, we can establish a sort of North Star to guide us. We'll never reach it, but it can inspire us to create more good, increasing well-being for everyone. Aiming in that direction can move us toward increasing what I call maximum sustainable goodness: the level of value creation that we can realistically achieve.

Trying to create more value requires that we confront our cognitive limitations. As readers of Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow know, we have two very different modes of decision-making. System 1 is our intuitive system, which is fast, automatic, effortless, and emotional. We make most decisions using System 1. System 2 is our more deliberative thinking, which is slower, conscious, effortful, and logical. We come much closer to rationality when we use System 2. The philosopher and psychologist Joshua Greene has developed a parallel two-system view of ethical decision-making: an intuitive system and a more deliberative one. The deliberative system leads to more-ethical behaviors. Here are two examples of strategies for engaging it:

First, make more of your decisions by comparing options rather than assessing each individually. One reason that intuition and emotions tend to dominate decision-making is that we typically think about our options one at a time. When evaluating one option (such as a single job offer or a single potential charitable contribution), we lean on System 1 processing. But when we compare multiple options, our decisions are more carefully considered and less biased, and they create more value. We donate on the basis of emotional tugs when we consider charities in isolation; but when we make comparisons across charities, we tend to think more about where our contribution will do the most good. Similarly, in research with the economists Iris Bohnet and Alexandra van Geen, I found that when people evaluate job candidates one at a time, System 1 thinking kicks in, and they tend to fall back on gender stereotypes. For example, they are more likely to hire men for mathematical tasks. But when they compare two or more applicants at a time, they focus more on job-relevant criteria, are more ethical (less sexist), hire better candidates, and obtain better results for the organization.

The second strategy involves adapting what the philosopher John Rawls called the veil of ignorance. Rawls argued that if you thought about how society should be structured without knowing your status in it (rich or poor, man or woman, Black or white)-that is, behind a veil of ignorance-you would make fairer, more-ethical decisions. Indeed, my recent empirical research with Karen Huang and Joshua Greene shows that those who make ethical decisions behind a veil of ignorance do create more value. They are more likely, for instance, to save more lives with scarce resources (say, medical supplies), because they allocate them in less self-interested ways. Participants in our study were asked whether it was morally acceptable for oxygen to be taken away from a single hospital patient to enable surgeries on nine incoming earthquake victims. They were more likely to agree that it was when the "veil" obscured which of the 10 people they might be. Not knowing how we would benefit (or be harmed) by a decision keeps us from being biased by our position in the world.

A related strategy involves obscuring the social identity of those we judge. Today more and more companies eliminate names and pictures from applications in an initial hiring review to reduce biased decision-making and increase the odds of hiring the most-qualified candidates.

Creating Value Through Trade-offs

Which is more important to you: your salary or the nature of your work? The wine or the food at dinner? The location of your home or its size? Strangely, people are willing to answer these questions even without knowing how much salary they'd need to forgo to have more-interesting work, or how much more space they could have if they lived five miles farther from work or school, and so forth. The field of decision analysis argues that we need to know how much of one attribute will be traded for how much of the other to make wise decisions. Selecting the right job, house, vacation, or company policy requires thinking clearly about the trade-offs.

Ted + Chelsea Cavanaugh

The easiest trade-offs to analyze involve our own decisions. Once two or more people are engaged in a decision and their preferences differ, it's a negotiation. Typically, negotiation analysis focuses on what is best for a specific negotiator. But to the extent that you care about others and society at large, your decisions in negotiation should tilt toward trying to create value for all parties.

This is easy to see in a common family negotiation-one in which I've been involved hundreds of times. Imagine that you and your partner decide one evening to go out to dinner and then watch a movie. Your partner suggests dinner at an upscale Northern Italian restaurant that has recently reopened. You counterpropose your favorite pizza joint. The two of you compromise on a third establishment, which has good Italian food and pizza that's a bit fancier than what your preferred pizza place offers. During dinner your partner proposes that you watch a documentary; you counterpropose a comedy; and you compromise on a drama. After a good (but not great) evening, you both realize that because your partner cared more about dinner and you cared more about the movie, choosing the upscale Northern Italian restaurant and the comedy would have made for a better evening.

This comparatively trivial example illustrates how to create value by looking for trade-offs. Negotiation scholars have offered very specific advice on ways to find more sources of value. These strategies include building trust, sharing information, asking questions, giving away value-creating information, negotiating multiple issues simultaneously, and making multiple offers simultaneously.

If you're familiar with negotiation strategy, you appreciate that most important negotiations involve a tension between claiming value for yourself (or your organization) and creating value for both parties-enlarging the pie. Even when they know that the size of the pie isn't fixed, many negotiators worry that if they share the information needed to create value for all, the other party may be able to claim more of the value created-and they don't want to be suckers. All the leading books on managerial negotiations highlight the need to create value while managing the risk of losing out.

Whereas many experts would define negotiation ethics in terms of not cheating or lying, I define it as putting the focus on creating the most value (which is of course helped by being honest). You don't ignore value claiming but, rather, consciously prevent it from getting in the way of making the biggest pie possible. Even if your counterpart claims a bit of extra value as a result, a focus on value creation is still likely to work for you in the long run. Your losses to the occasional opportunistic opponent will be more than compensated for by all the excellent relationships you develop as an ethical negotiator who is making the world a bit better.

Using Time to Create Value

People tend not to think of allocating time as an ethical choice, but they should. Time is a scarce resource, and squandering it-your own or others'-only compromises value creation. Conversely, using it wisely to increase collective value or utility is the very definition of ethical action.

Consider the experience of my friend Linda Babcock, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who noticed that her email was overflowing with requests for her to perform tasks that would help others but provide her with little direct benefit. She was happy to be a good citizen and do some of them, but she didn't have time to take on all of them. Suspecting that women were being asked more often than men to perform tasks like these, Linda asked four of her female colleagues to meet with her to discuss her theory. At that gathering the I Just Can't Say No club was born. These female professors met socially, published research, and helped one another think more carefully about where their time would create the most value.

Their concept has implications for all of us who claim we're short on time: You can consider a request for your time as a request for a limited resource. Rather than making intuitive decisions out of a desire to be nice, you can analyze how your time, and that of others, will create the most value in the world. That may free you to say no, not out of laziness but out of a belief that you can create more value by agreeing to different requests.

Allocating tasks among employees offers managers other opportunities to create value. One helpful concept is the notion of comparative advantage, introduced by the British political economist David Ricardo in 1817. Many view it as an economic idea; I think of it as a guide to ethical behavior. Assessing comparative advantage involves determining how to allow each person or organization to use time where it can create the most value. Organizations have a comparative advantage when they can produce and sell goods and services at a lower cost than competitors do. Individuals have a comparative advantage when they can perform a task at a lower opportunity cost than others can. Everyone has a source of comparative advantage; allocating time accordingly creates the most value.

Ricardo's concept can be seen in many organizations where one individual is truly amazing at lots of things. Picture a tech start-up where the founder has the greatest technical ability but it's only a bit greater than that of the next-most-talented technical person. Yet the founder is dramatically more effective than all other employees at pitching the company to investors. She has an absolute advantage on technical issues, but her comparative advantage is in dealing with external constituencies, and more value will be created when she focuses her attention there. Many managers instinctively leverage their and their employees' absolute advantage rather than favoring their comparative advantage. The result can be a suboptimal allocation of resources and less value creation.

Integrating Your Ethical Self

Whatever your organization, I'm guessing it's quite socially responsible in some ways but less so in others, and you may be uncomfortable with the latter. Most organizations get higher ethical marks on some dimensions than on others. I know companies whose products make the world worse, but they have good diversity and inclusion policies. I know others whose products make the world better, but they engage in unfair competition that destroys value in their business ecosystem. Most of us are ethically inconsistent as well. Otherwise honest people may view deception in negotiation with a client or a colleague as completely acceptable. If we care about the value or harm we create, remembering that we're likely to be ethical in some domains and unethical in others can help us identify where change might be most useful.

Andrew Carnegie gave away 90% of his wealth-about $350 million-to endow an array of institutions, including Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Foundation, and more than 2,500 libraries. But he also engaged in miserly, ineffective, and probably criminal behavior as a business leader, such as destroying the union at his steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania. More recently, this divide between good and bad is evident in the behavior of the Sackler family. The Sacklers have made large donations to art galleries, research institutes, and universities, including Harvard, with money earned through the family business, Purdue Pharma, which made billions by marketing-and, most experts argue, overmarketing-the prescription painkiller OxyContin. By 2018 OxyContin and other opioids were responsible for the deaths of more than 100 Americans a day.

All of us should think about the multiple dimensions where we might create or destroy value, taking credit when we do well but also noticing opportunities for improvement. We tend to spend too little time on the latter task. When I evaluate various aspects of my life, I can identify many ways in which I have created value for the world. Yet I can also see where I might have done far better. My plan is to do better next year than last year. I hope you will find similar opportunities in your own life.

Increasing Your Impact as a Leader

Leaders can do far more than just make their own behavior more ethical. Because they are responsible for the decisions of others as well as their own, they can dramatically multiply the amount of good they do by encouraging others to be better. As a leader, think about how you can influence your colleagues with the norms you set and the decision-making environment you create.

People follow the behavior of others, particularly those in positions of power and prestige. Employees in organizations with ethical leaders can be expected to behave more ethically themselves. One of my clients, a corporation that gets rave reviews for its social-responsibility efforts, created an internal video featuring four high-level executives, each telling a story about going above the boss's head at a time when the boss wasn't observing the ethical standards espoused by the corporation. The video suggested that questioning authority is the right thing to do when that authority is destroying societal value. By establishing norms for ethical behavior-and clearly empowering employees to help enforce it-leaders can affect hundreds or even thousands of other people, motivating and enabling them to act more ethically themselves.

Leaders can also create more value by shaping the environment in which others make decisions. In their book Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe how we can design the "architecture" surrounding choices to prompt people to make value-creating decisions. Perhaps the most common type of nudge involves changing the default choice that decision-makers face. A famous nudge encourages organ donation in some European nations by enrolling citizens in the system automatically, letting them opt out if they wish. The program increased the proportion of people agreeing to be donors from less than 30% to more than 80%.

Leaders can develop new, profitable products and make the world a better place through effective nudging. After publishing a paper on ethical behavior, for example, I received an email from a start-up insurance executive named Stuart Baserman. His company, Slice, sells short-term insurance to people who run home-based businesses. He was looking for ways to get policyholders to be more honest in the claims process, and we worked together to develop some nudges.

We created a process whereby claimants use a short video taken with a phone to describe a claim. This nudge works because most people are far less likely to lie in a video than in writing. Claimants are also asked verifiable questions about a loss, such as "What did you pay for the object?" or "What would it cost to replace it on Amazon.com?"-not "What was it worth?" Specific questions nudge people to greater honesty than ambiguous questions do. And claimants are asked who else knows about the loss, because people are less likely to be deceptive when others might learn about their corruption. These nudges not only reduce fraud and make the insurance business more efficient but also allow Slice to benefit by helping people to be ethical.

CONCLUSION

New ethical challenges confront us daily, from what algorithm to create for self-driving cars to how to allocate scarce medical supplies during a pandemic. As technology creates amazing ways to improve our lives, our environmental footprint becomes a bigger concern. Many countries struggle with how to act when their leaders reject System 2 thinking and even truth itself. And in too many countries, finding collective value is no longer a national goal. Yet we all crave direction from our leaders. I hope that the North Star I've described influences you as a leader. Together we can do our best to be better.

A version of this article appeared in the September-October 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Rather than try to follow a set of simple rules ("Don't lie." "Don't cheat."), leaders and managers seeking to be more ethical should focus on creating the most value for society. This utilitarian view, Bazerman argues, blends philosophical thought with business school pragmatism and can inform a wide variety of managerial decisions in areas including hiring, negotiations, and even time management.

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After several years as a preschool teacher, I became tired of saying no: “No, you can’t put the blocks in the sandbox,” “No, you can’t have another snack now,” “No, you can’t use your elbow as a paintbrush.” I started to wonder: why not? Why not learn about constructing on sand? Why not have another snack—isn’t that better than trying to learn while hungry? Why not add big elbow dots to a painting? So I decided to create a “Yes!” environment.

A yes environment does not mean never saying no; no can be necessary for health and safety reasons. What’s important about a yes environment is setting up your classroom to promote exploration and asking yourself why you’re stopping a particular behavior. Saying yes as often as possible empowers children to make positive choices and have more control in their daily lives. It builds high-quality teacher–child relationships, limits teacher intrusion, increases authentic learning experiences, and promotes independence and self-esteem.

Any behavior demonstrates a desire to meet a need: for example, a child who runs in the classroom may have excess energy and need a way to use it. As educators, we can step back and evaluate what need is being met by a behavior that we want to stop. Instead of saying no, can we say yes? If not, let’s off er alternatives. It’s our job to be investigators, discovering the needs behind behaviors, and to be guides, creating activities and environments that safely meet those needs.

This list can help guide you in creating your own yes environment.

1. Take a “child tour” around your classroom. Crouch low or walk on your knees (if possible) to get a sense of the room from a child’s perspective. What catches your eye? What is accessible and what is out of reach? What draws you in? Where are children’s paintings hanging? Materials located? Books placed? Anything within view should be accessible to children (within reasonable limits). If you do not want children using something, move it!

2. Examine your comfort zone. Identifying the behaviors that make you uncomfortable can help you understand why you say no. Maybe loud noises rattle you—does the early morning band in your preschool room make your hair stand on end? Maybe you’re a neatnik—does the sight of children rifling through the book basket make you cringe? Talk with your colleagues about the behaviors and activities that make you want to say no. Do they agree that those behaviors need to be addressed? If so, do they see ways you can redirect the children?

3. Keep in mind the two Ds. When it comes to limiting and redirecting a behavior, first determine if the behavior is dangerous or destructive. If an activity is unsafe (for the child or others) or destructive to the classroom environment, it calls for action. Stop and think about the need driving a child’s behavior, and try to come up with an alternative action instead of just saying no.

4. Watch and wonder. After determining that a behavior is not dangerous or destructive, take a step back. Watch what is happening before you intervene. Wonder with children, asking questions as an observer—not as an intruder. Asking a child why she is doing something or why she needs a particular item can reveal her thought process. Watching and wondering also give children opportunities to find their own alternative behaviors.

5. Be active and engaged, but not intrusive. Being an active observer means you are watching what is happening as it occurs but not intervening unless necessary. This helps you see bothersome behaviors as they arise and gently guide children toward more positive interactions. Being engaged helps you understand a behavior as it occurs. Maybe that banging in the block corner stems from the need to scare away a shark. If you’re working across the room, you may consider the banging disruptive rather than imaginative—and be unprepared to inspire the children to find new ways to scare away sharks. Being active and engaged makes you a partner in play and exploration with children, rather than a disciplinarian.

6. Be an investigator. Keep notes on your observations of children’s play and conversations. These can be extremely helpful in determining why a child is using a certain behavior and in identifying a pattern you may need to address.

7. Have fun! In a yes environment, both the teacher and the children freely explore and play. Take pleasure in your time each day with the children and relish the wonder and excitement that come from learning together.

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Creating a Yes! Environment: Supporting Creativity and Exploration

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This article can help guide you in creating your own yes environment in the classroom.

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True leadership is about making the world a better place