Developing a Leadership Credo
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I attended a course in ECE leadership a few years ago. The most valuable aspect of the course was the development of a leadership credo. In two pages, we needed to summarize our leadership approach's values and principles. Our professor shared the purpose of a leadership credo.
1. To clarify your beliefs and what you stand for as a leader
2. To help you communicate your leadership beliefs to others.
Our course consisted of many early childhood educators who worked in the field. At first, there was some debate as we tried to wrap our heads around the concept.
Could we be leaders working in early childhood classrooms?
Who were we leading? The children, ourselves, our community?
What we gradually came to discover is that educators lead every day. Leadership is having a vision for what you believe in and why it's essential.
The seven steps in developing your leadership credo.
Think about your values and principles. Reflect on what is most important to you and your work. It helps to write your ideas down. Take several days for this process, revisiting your thinking. Continue to layer ideas, values, beliefs, principles, and thoughts.
Reflect on your thinking and choose the most important values and principles. Pick only a few. These values will be the basis of your leadership credo.
Next, develop statements---in detail---for your colleagues, program, and community to understand what is most important to you. Your credo will be most useful if you choose a limited number of values and principles and describe them in depth.
As you write, use the first person (I statement and I believe), focusing on what you believe makes you a great leader. Take care not to write about what you think are leadership characteristics. Instead, write about how you see yourself as a leader.
Focus your energy on the type of leader you aspire to be and write from this point of view.
Your credo should be sophisticated, describing your beliefs precisely and showing restraint rather than trying to include every leadership belief you have (depth rather than breadth). Indeed, there are many values and principles you will feel are essential. In this instance, choose only the most important ideas.
Finally, revisit your credo three times. Revisit your credo two weeks apart, for six weeks. Each time you review your credo, take some time to reflect on how you live your credo. Did you discover that some of it does not work? Be sure to look each time for precision in writing. Revisit your credo every six months.
Through this process, we discovered in our course that we are all leaders. We all have values and principles that we enact in our professional practice. Our ability to clarify our beliefs made us so much stronger as educators. It became so much easier with my credo to make decisions about my practice aligned with my principles and values. More than anything, having a leadership credo helped me to be my best self at work.
What are your experiences with a leadership credo?