The Downside of Successful Educational Support Staff
School customers will assess everything from location, services, policies and procedures to decide if a school is remarkable, but mainly, customers assess staff performance.
The performance of the staff is not just about their knowledge or ability to get things done, it’s how they communicate and how they behave. And those two things done poorly can override all the other aspects and leave customers feeling that the school doesn’t deserve their time, their money, nor their respect.
Just For Schools provide the training and the support that develop Educational Support Staff (ESS) into confident and professional communicators who provide consistently excellent service. We specialise in human behaviours at work, and we have programs that make it easy for schools to plan for their ESS to gain remarkable reputations.
But, before you get too ‘giddy’ with your plan for success, I need to bring you back to earth for just a minute. Every plan for success has to have a plan to manage the impact of that success.
Every successful person knows that success does have a downside – for example:
• Successful entertainers will tell you that loss of privacy is the downside of success.
• Successful sports people find media commitments eat into their training time.
• Successful chefs have to keep coming up with new dishes.
• Successful writers will still have to accept bad reviews.
• Successful doctors will be busy and have to keep learning.
Successful ESS show up every day as positive team members, great communicators, and self-aware individuals…BUT, these wonderful attributes can bring challenges just like the list above.
The following list outlines some of these challenges, and I’ve provided tips to share with your Educational Support Staff so that they can handle success:
• Providing consistently excellent levels of face to face and telephone communication can be tiring: make and take time out to reflect, reward, relax and recharge.
• Customers will ask for staff with great service skills and some will even wait to talk to them: help everyone on the team become customer service professionals, so the weight of expectation doesn’t fall on you or only a few.
• Staff with excellent people skills are going to be busy listening to compliments: improve your time management skills.
• Staff with excellent people skills will also be considered an expert in….everything! You will need to know how to delegate or refer and you must keep your process, product/service knowledge up to date.
• New staff will need help: practise patience and remember you also had to train to be successful.
• You may be given new opportunities both in and out of work: be clear on your own career and personal goals.
• Other staff may take advantage of you: practise saying no professionally.
• Difficult customer and co-worker interactions will still exist: You will need a ‘toolbox’ of skills and knowledge to maintian empathy and develop excellent communication skills.
• You may be nominated for awards: Consider developing your public speaking and/or presentation skills.
• When you are a customer of any business, you will be disappointed when you are not served by a customer service professional: tell them about this book.
And above all else, remind your ESS to aim high, but remember – getting to the top is just the start, staying there is the art of success.
We help schools gain and maintain remarkable reputations through consistency, and it all starts in The Zone.
By Cate Schreck – Director of Just For Schools