Coaching for School Leaders
At Enlighten Coaching, we work with executives and other leaders across all industries, but our professional background prepares us to offer expanded services to school leaders and other educators. Although we're always happy to design a customized coaching engagement to support your unique goals, here are some of the ways in which we work with educators:
Transition Coaching: The First 90 Days of the Principalship
The first three months on the job for any principal are a make-or-break challenge. Building relationships, establishing rapport, navigating politics, developing a vision, managing a team... The to-do list is endless, and if any steps are neglected, it can be disastrous for the credibility of the new leader. Our program pairs personalized coaching with veteran expertise to ensure that the actions taken during the first 90 days set the principal up for long term impact.
Powerful Facilitation: Making Meetings Meaningful
Whether you're meeting with your leadership team, your faculty, a department or grade level team, a parent group, or a student group, the quality of your facilitation can make the experience inspiring and empowering or useless and demoralizing. Learn facilitation strategies specific to your unique context, participate in targeted practice with an expert facilitator, and receive customized feedback to hone your skills.
Team Coaching: Creating a High-Functioning Leadership Team
Your leadership team is an extraordinarily complex entity, comprised of individuals with unique identities, experiences, and skills. Team coaching honors these diverse parts while building the capacity of the team to function with synergy. We'll work with your team to empower every team in ways that also empower the team as a whole.
Career Coaching: Getting that Next Leadership Role
Are you ready to make the big leap into a new leadership role within a school, district, or CMO? We'll support you in shaping your resume and crafting a cover letter that goes far beyond listing what you've done. We'll help you show the value you bring and the impact you have. Then, we'll work with you to prepare for any type of selection process, including strategies for showing your best self in interviews and decoding what employers are really looking for in performance tasks.
Wellness & Self-Care: Taking Care of Yourself So That You Can Take Care of Others
The principalship is unlike any other job in education. From arrival first thing in the morning to locking up at the end of the day, every person on the campus relies on the principal for vision, leadership, and accountability. The incomparable pressure of this job can tax the principal's mental, emotional, and physical health. We'll support you in developing systems and routines to build resilience, set healthy boundaries, and show up as the best version of yourself every day.
Project Management & Prioritization: Getting Things Done When There's Too Much to Get Done
One of the most overwhelming challenges of the principalship is navigating the extraordinary breadth of the challenges that land on the principal's desk. What principal hasn't been torn apart by the polarities of instruction/operations, leadership/compliance, and doing/delegating? The mountain of seemingly conflicting priorities piles up, and the result is often paralysis. We'll help you to build systems that work for you and your school, so that you get things done without getting overwhelmed.
Thought Partnership: Year-Round, Unlimited Access to Your Coach
Even the most experienced principals rarely know what to expect from month to month and year to year. It could be an unexpected initiative from the district office, a crisis in the school community, or a global pandemic.... As a principal, you have to be ready for anything. We'll craft a coaching engagement that allows you to connect with your coach any time, in whatever way works best for you. Got a quick question? Shoot your coach a text. Need to talk through a tough decision? Give your coach a call. Need some help crafting talking points for tomorrow's faculty meeting? Connect with your coach on Zoom. Whatever you need, whenever you need it, your coach will be there for you.