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What is Your Professional Development Plan for 2020?

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At the beginning of each business year, I host a staff development meeting. The objective of the meeting is to inspire my staff to grow and think like professionals.

In my 21 years in this field, I have found that the more that I learn, the more that I would grow as a business owner.

Moreover, I found that as my team grew, it only helped the Business Succeed.

When I opened my home daycare, I had no college or childcare education. In fact, I only had a medical assistant certificate.

However, when I went back to school and majored in early childhood, I was inspired to grow my business. So as you can see, as you increase your knowledge, you expand your capacity for growth.

Today I want to share some ideas with you that will inspire you and your team to grow as early childhood professionals:

  1. Subscribe to the Child Care Exchange Magazine. Its a great way to gain access to leadership resources and child development articles. Visit http://www.childcareexchange.com to sign up for their amazing enewsletter.
  2.  Make over your lesson plans by subscribing to the Mailbox. The mailbox is loaded with a wealth of theme related activities and forms. Visit http://www.themailbox.com.
  3.  Become a member of Naeyc. Naeyc is a great place to stay up to date on early childhood news and they have great child care magazines as well along with their annual Naeyc Conference. Visit their site today http://www.naeyc.org.
  4.  Focus on growing as a business leader in 2020. My mentor John Maxwell said: Change the Leader, change the Business. Subscribe to John Maxwell leadership emails at http://www.johnmaxwell.com. (Be sure to check out his wonderful leadership books).
  5.  Meet with a Business Coach on a monthly basis. A Business coach will hold you accountable for attaining your business goals and inspire you to go to another level. Also, I believe that you should pick a coach that’s been on the journey where you want to go. For coaching options, visit my coaching page and I look forward to coaching you in 2020! click here

Its time to get busy on your professional development plan for 2020, because growth is waiting for you!!

Shiketa Morgan

Check out my new book, Build Your Business by Faith

Category:

Leadership, Marketing, Personal Development, Staffing

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No More Boring Meetings

According to Effective Meetings.com, “When the average employee is asked to attend another meeting during their busy day, the natural response is to run like the wind or at least fake a scheduling conflict. ingesting a little fun into your meetings might be just the right thing to encourage participation and creativity.”

Only Call Meetings When  Necessary

Meetings are necessary to bring the staff together, to discuss goals and to be sure that everyone is on one accord. However, if you just call a meeting just to talk about a long list of issues, that is simply a waste of  your time.

Establish a goal for your meeting and make it a teachable moment. Meetings are a great way to train staff, invite staff to share and laugh together.

Sample Meeting Agenda

Twice a month I create a 30-minute meeting agenda and I only focus on 3-5 topics. The main focus of my meetings is to discuss classroom practices, review quality care indicators and to get feedback from my staff. Here is an example of how I conduct my meetings:

Topics:

1. Share Positive News/Praise/Share funny stories

2. Review what we discussed at last meeting and progress

3. Quality Care Discussion: Promoting self-help skills, Art Activities, Issue handouts

4. Our next meeting, Upcoming events

5. Staff feedback

Having a meeting agenda helps you to stay on track and gives the meeting a focus. I really believe that my staff view our meetings as a time of fellowship, because we simply chat about the programs goals, their desires and we enjoy coming together in a fun and professional manner.

My meetings have not always been fun and interesting. Several years ago, I had a teacher that would bring her work to the meetings and I literally stopped the meeting to tell her, that she must be attentive to what is being said at the meeting. She was there in body and not there in spirit.

This encouraged me to develop my meeting management skills and to get to the point. Moreover, I  learned to never share  bad news at meetings and to keep it positive.

Save negative or sensitive information for private meetings, unless the news affects the entire team.

5 Ways to Liven up Meetings

  1. Hold meetings after Lunch breaks
  2. Always have something funny to share
  3. Praise staff members as a group, tell them how proud you are of them
  4. Be understanding
  5. Let them know the purpose of the meeting and what you need for them to do
  6. Maintain good eye contact of each employee
  7. Invite feedback
  8. Invite staff to share Professional Development Success
  9. Problem solve as a team
  10. Conduct meetings as a Huddle; call the plays and encourage them to carry them out!

Feel free to share your thoughts about this blog post.

Category:

Administration, Employee Management, Leadership

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