Mastering Effective Check-Ins: A Guide for School Leaders
Make Your Check-ins Count
If you’re a school leader striving to lead your team forward, mastering effective check-ins should be at the top of your priority list. CheckBox Pro believes this for three reasons. First, check-ins dominate school principals’ and superintendents’ schedules. To spend that much time being underproductive limits the output of your entire week. Second, poor check-ins easily sap your emotional energy. This leads you to dread spending time with your teammates who are looking up to you for guidance and stability. And third, we believe there’s no better way to continue progress on your leadership teams’ goals.
Leaning on our experience with incredible school leaders across the nation, we’ll cover how you can enhance your check-in processes, using resources like Asana, structured agendas, and a human-centered approach to make every meeting count.
What Does an Effective Check-in Look Like?
An effective check-in should foster open communication, meaningful accountability, and problem-solving toward goals. It's a time when both the leader and the direct report contribute equally to the agenda, ensuring the issues that matter most are not overlooked. The key elements of an effective check-in include:
Mutual Contribution: Both parties should have the opportunity to add items to the agenda, making the check-in a collaborative effort. This empowers direct reports and ensures that their concerns and achievements are addressed.
Progress Towards Goals: Both parties should be able to easily track the progress on their most important goals.
Recap of Action Items: Ending each check-in with a clear summary of discussed points and agreed-upon action items ensures accountability and keeps everyone on track.
Consistency: The frequency of check-ins should be consistent. Most school leaders meet with direct reports weekly or bi-weekly.
Personal Connection: Whenever possible, conducting check-ins in person or via video call adds a personal touch that can strengthen the leader-report relationship. This face-to-face interaction is invaluable for building trust and understanding.
How do your check-ins stack up to these criteria? Next, we’ll cover simple tools to make this easier.
Our Favorite Tools for Check-ins
To lead effective check-ins, having the right tools and resources at your disposal saves you time and energy. Among these, Asana stands out as a versatile (and free) task management platform that enables leaders and their teams to track progress, set deadlines, and organize work efficiently. Paired with Google Workspace, teams should have everything they need for simple collaboration.
Asana: Although Asana may typically be used as a “to-do list”, we think it’s fantastic for creating structured agendas. Asana allows for the creation of shared projects where both leaders and their direct reports can add agenda items. As a bonus, meeting action items can be easily transferred to specific projects. And did we mention it has a free version?
Google Docs: It’s vital to have a dedicated space for recording the outcomes of each check-in. This could be a shared Google Doc or a note-taking section within Asana itself. Keeping a log of discussions, decisions, and action items from each meeting ensures that there’s a record to refer back to, reducing misunderstandings and keeping everyone accountable.
Google Scheduling: Scheduling issues are unavoidable. Google Scheduling allows your teammates to easily reschedule check-ins without losing time. Create a “Check-in” schedule in your Google Calendar and share the booking link whenever a doctor’s visit or jury duty gets in the way.
By integrating these resources into the check-in process, school leaders can streamline communication, improve organization, and foster a collaborative environment that encourages mutual responsibility and accountability.
Build a Structured Agenda
A well-structured agenda is the backbone of an effective check-in. It ensures that the meeting is purposeful, time-efficient, and addresses all critical topics. Here are steps to create a structured agenda that facilitates meaningful discussions:
Set the Framework: Create a template that outlines the usual segments of your check-ins. This might include updates on ongoing projects, a review of action items from the last meeting, new concerns or achievements, and a segment for personal check-ins.
Encourage Mutual Contributions: Prior to the meeting, invite your direct reports to add items to the agenda. This ensures that the check-in addresses their needs and concerns, making the meeting more collaborative and balanced.
Include a 'Parking Lot': Sometimes, discussions may veer into complex topics that cannot be fully addressed within the allotted time. Adding a 'parking lot' section to your agenda allows you to note these points for future discussion, ensuring they are not forgotten.
Allocate Time Wisely: Assign a rough time estimate to each agenda item to keep the meeting on track. This helps in managing the check-in efficiently, ensuring that ample time is spent on each topic without allowing any single item to dominate the meeting.
Close with Action Items: End each check-in with a summary of action items, assigning clear responsibilities and deadlines. This recap helps reinforce accountability and ensures that both parties are clear on the next steps.
Need an agenda template? We’ve got you covered at the end of the resource.
You’re Not a Robot (and neither are your teammates)
When you’re jumping in and out of meetings, it’s easy to devolve into a taskmaster. Although you have many check-ins a week, this is the one time your team member has 1-on-1 with you, the most important person in the organization. Here's how you can make check-ins more personal and supportive:
Personal Well-being Check: Start each meeting by asking how the person is doing. This gesture shows that you care about them beyond their professional role, fostering a supportive and empathetic work environment.
Encourage Personal Agenda Items: Encourage team members to bring their own topics or concerns to the check-ins, including professional development interests or challenges they're facing. This empowers them and makes the meetings more relevant to their needs.
Balance Between Professional and Personal: While maintaining professional boundaries, sharing appropriate personal experiences or challenges can build trust and rapport. This two-way street of personal engagement helps deepen connections and understanding within the team.
Avoid Common Pitfalls
If you’re going to improve your check-ins, you need to watch out for these common mistakes. Here are the meeting pitfalls we’ve seen overtime and how to avoid them.
One-Sided Agenda Ownership: When only one person contributes to the agenda, check-ins can feel unbalanced and less engaging. To counter this, actively encourage direct reports to add their items before the meeting. This shared responsibility makes the check-ins more collaborative and valuable for both parties.
Unpreparedness: Arriving unprepared can derail the productivity of a check-in. Leaders can mitigate this by setting aside 15 minutes before each meeting to review the agenda, prepare updates on previous action items, and consider any support their direct report might need. Encouraging direct reports to do the same can significantly enhance the meeting's effectiveness.
Back-to-Back Check-ins: Having check-ins scheduled back-to-back can be exhausting and leave little room for preparation or follow-up. Implementing buffer times between meetings can help. Even a short break allows leaders to gather their thoughts, review notes for the next check-in, and mentally switch gears to be fully present for each conversation.
Fear of Speaking Honestly: Sometimes, team members may hesitate to share real concerns or challenges for fear of looking bad professionally or hurting your feelings. Clear progress toward goals (numbers) encourages honest conversation. Openly lead a culture of improvement rather than a culture of perfection if you want teammates to be more honest.
Become the Leader Your Team Deserves
Effective check-ins are a vital component of educational leadership, offering a structured framework for supporting and engaging with your team. By focusing on mutual contribution, personal connection, and addressing common challenges, school leaders can make these meetings more productive and meaningful. Remember, the goal of check-ins is not just to monitor progress but to build stronger relationships and a more cohesive team. If you need an agenda template to get started, we’ve got you covered. You can click here to download:
