95% of Your Success is Dependent On Your Child Care Team

95% of Your Success is Dependent On Your Child Care Team

It's true that 95% of your child care program's success is dependent on the child care team you have in place. A dynamic, high-functioning, cohesive team provides higher quality and more value while a dysfunctional team drains your time, energy and saps the quality out of your program.

The unfortunate part is that too often the negative effects of a destructive team become part of the culture that you slowly tolerate. It's like the old story about the frog that's placed in cold water in a pan on the stove. As the temperature increases to boiling – he sits there not jumping out because he doesn't even know he's getting cooked. Do you remember that one? Do you ever feel like the frog?

What type of culture are you tolerating? Is it enhancing the quality of your child care program or depleting it? This is something to get really, really clear about. And if it's depleting it - your profits are also being depleted. As a matter of fact, my private clients who look at their profitability numbers with me are shocked when they see how the child care culture that they created is costing them millions.

I'm not going to go any further with that in this article but I do want to share with you another BIG secret to creating your dream team and facilitating effective team building activities. This is a game changer when it comes to cultivating the culture you desire - a positive and productive child care culture!!

One mistake that leaders make when facilitating team building is having an attitude of: “fix them.” So they perceive that the change that needs to happen is all within their staff. When in reality the change that you want to make with your staff absolutely has to come from the top of the organization down. That's the only way it works.

Then the ultimate secret when cultivating your “dream team” culture is having a vision in place that you're 100% on fire about and tying everything that you do in your child care program to that vision. Too many directors and owners are managing their programs by fear. They bring in a team building expert to deal with an issue that one staff member is having because they don't want to confront that person positively and directly. They send out general announcements to deal with destructive behaviors; they buy into people's stories and those stories end up sucking the positive mojo out of their visions.

Can you relate to any of these situations?

These are all areas where team building goes wrong.

The focus must be on the individual – not merely the group. And when you - the leader gets it right – your staff will start to follow suit.

There is an "I" in team.

 I'll share with you one example before I wrap this up.

When I first started teaching staff motivation in the child care industry (a good 20 years ago) one common question would surface.

That question was:

"How do I get my staff to feel more excited about coming into work in the morning?"

I would turn the question back around and ask the owner or director:

"Well, how excited do you feel coming into work in the morning?" Their response: "Ahhh…..I get it."

Do you get it?