What’s your dream job? Have you ever been asked?
As a principal and vice principal, nearing the end of every year, when when our leadership team would look at staffing, we would send out an email to all staff and ask them, “As we are currently undergoing staffing, we were wondering if you could describe your dream position next year, what would it be?” Obviously, there was only so much we could do if you said astronaut or reality tv personality, but in the context of the school, we wondered what opportunities could we create.
What was important in asking this question, was simply, asking the question. We could not guarantee that we could create the job that you wanted, but if we encouraged people to share what they had dreamed of doing, maybe we could? As an elementary principal, I remember one teacher saying that although they loved working with grade five students, they would really like to work with kindergarten or grade one students. The crazy thing was we had a grade one teacher, that wanted to work with our older students. A simple swap was made, and both did amazing at their jobs, and unbelievably grateful for the opportunity.
Another teacher shared how much he loved teaching one subject and wasn’t too passionate about the other. They loved working with students but really wanted to be passionate about the subjects they taught. A couple of adjustments and it was done!
I also remember our grade two teacher at the time saying, “My dream job is teaching grade two and I get to live it every single day, but I just want to tell you how much I appreciate you asking in the first place.”
Giving people the opportunities to try something new or pursue something they love is not something we should only value for our students, but also our staff. Sometimes people are afraid to share what they want because they didn’t even know it was a possibility in the first place. The way we saw it, was that if we can move people into positions where they feel most passionate about what they are doing, they are more likely to be successful as individuals, elevating the organization as a whole. What was surprising was how many times we could actually accommodate the requests.
I wouldn’t have known that in the first place, and that is why we asked.
