Can You Manage a Kindergarten Class?

I was a kindergarten teacher for a year and it's NOT easy. Imagine more than a dozen kids screaming and running and wanting to do other things while you try to teach. In the midst of all this chaos, you have to establish discipline and some form of learning at the same time fighting the urge not to tie them down to their seats.

The good thing about children though is that you will always grow attached to them. They are cute. As you witness them grow and learn and start to develop the routine of your class, they just become family. If you do it just right, you become their friend and vice versa. A level of responsibility, care and trust is given to a teacher not only by parents but by kids as well and this is what teachers try to live up to.

That's not to say managing adults would be much easier. Although more mature individuals know that they are paid to work and some people will succumb to what needs to be done because that's what the job entails, a manager should take the same responsibility for these people. As a manager, you won't always have brilliant or disciplined staff members, it will then be up to you to teach your staff not only to be better at the job they do but also as individuals.

If we used the kindergarten scenario as an analogy, the parents are your bosses, the children your staff members and you being the manager will be the teacher. You are responsible to fulfilling the overall goals of the company and of the educational system. This is what the bosses or parents expect. However you are also responsible to the children, or your staff members. Although they have to reach the level of performance as adults, it is also imperative that you help them grow. That is after all your role as manager. Staff members are a reflection of your leadership and management skills.

According to "The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sensemaking is a Complex and Complicated World," from IBM Systems Journal, last 2003 by C.F. Kurtz and D. J. Snowden, one of my most admired knowledge management theorist David Snowden said that effective leaders manage chaos the way a kindergarten teacher manages her students...

"Experienced teachers allow a degree of freedom at the start of a session, then intervene to stabilize desirable patterns and destabilize undesirable ones, and when they are very clever, they seed the space so that the patterns they want are more likely to emerge."

And so my challenge to managers is just that. Can you manage a kindergarten class? Maybe you should start managing your department the way you would a kindergarten class.