Active listening - As early years practitioners, we tend to be excellent at finding time to sit with the children and listen to them. We can be strong role models, providing relaxed, thoughtful conversation, sharing toys and resources, and supporting positive interactions with their peers. This helps children to be happy, confident and motivated to learn. However, in a busy setting it can be difficult to find time and space to really listen to the adults. Talking to Sian, a new manager, she said: “I’m just fire fighting, staff absence due to COVID is still high and this puts so much pressure on us all. My deputy is being obstructive, I think she doesn’t like me. And I’m new here, trying to find my way.

Sian has recently become the manager of a small nursery and was finding it hard going. The deputy manager and third in charge had been working in the setting for a long time and she found that everything she suggested had already been ‘done’ or had been ‘tried … and failed’. These established practitioners were influencing other staff with them and nursery meetings were becoming increasingly negative.

During her first review meeting, Sian’s supervisor asked her some coaching questions that gave her new insight into the problem. Firstly she asked: “If the problem was solved, what would it look like?” Sian had a moment of clarity and realised it was more important to be feeling they were a team working together rather than her ideas about organisational matters not being taken on board. The next coaching question was”‘What’s stopping that from happening now?” and Sian had to confess she didn’t really know. In her passion for the new job to prove she could be a manager she realised all her conversations had centred around what her own plans were and she did not know what the experienced practitioners were thinking. All she got was a negative response to any suggestion. She came out of the meeting with a plan to spend time talking with, and more importantly, listening to the established team of practitioners to find out more about their interests, strengths and worries.

Sian set aside half an hour the next week to spend with each of the senior staff. She explained it was not a performance meeting but an opportunity to talk to them properly about their work and get to know them a bit better. She made fresh coffee and bought fruit and scones and sat down to listen. She learned about each person’s career history, their family commitments and their holiday plans. She also learned that there had been a previous manager who had changed everything really quickly and all the staff (and children) got confused. Parents complained and the atmosphere had become really unpleasant.

From this, Sian unpicked that it was change that the senior practitioners were anxious about rather than the fact that they didn’t like her. She went back to her line manager in the nursery chain and they thought up a strategy to build up the confidence of practitioners and introduce any change slowly, with plenty of consultation and preparation time.
Taking time and listening to your team is really important, so you understand what is going on for them. Recognising and appreciating their fears and concerns is crucial to getting the best from each and every practitioner you work with.

Listening For Meaning

The next time you need to have a conversation with someone about something important, try listening at these three different levels:

1. What are the facts? Facts are important. Is everyone in the nursery unhappy about your work or is it just two people?
2. What are the feelings? The deputy manager may tell you how they are feeling directly, but look closely. Is the anger they present covering an anxiety? Look at the body language – as well as the tone of voice and the words used. If someone says she is ‘infuriated’ by something you have done, unpick it, ask her what infuriated means to her.
3. Listen to the values; what matters to the practitioner? For example, if the third in charge kept talking about no time to supervise the staff in her room, it might be that she was worried about a safeguarding issue being missed, rather than the new form you had introduced (which actually was about safeguarding, but you had not explored this with her sufficiently).

Try This Checklist to Find Your Strengths

This article has been adapted from:

Cook, J (2013) Leadership and Management in the Early Years, Practical Preschool Books

References:

Coaching question examples at https://www.the-coaching-academy.com/blog/2012/09 accessed on line 9.3.22

Did you find this blog on active listening useful? Take a look at some of our other leadership blogs here:

• What does leadership look like… when you have new staff?
• Creating a positive leadership culture in your nursery by resisting ‘executive subculture’

About the author:

Ruth Mercer is a coach and consultant, with a career background in early education. Ruth is committed to creating a positive learning environment for staff, children and families. She has a successful track record of 1:1 coaching for leaders and group coaching across the maintained and PVI sector. She supports leaders and managers in developing a coaching approach in their settings through bespoke consultancy and introductory training on coaching and mentoring for all staff.

Ruth is currently writing about coaching with a playful approach.

Ruth Mercer, Coach and Consultant in Early Years

Website: www.ruthmercercoaching.com