It’s been a busy six months. Just under six months ago I gave birth to my fourth child, Nina. As you can imagine, since she was born a lot of life has involved cuddling, feeding and trying to get enough sleep. But something amazing has happened alongside all of that, which is that I put pen to paper to try and write a booklet to accompany the ‘Introduction to Baby Room Leadership’ course and instead I ended up writing a whole book!
The book tracks some of the same ideas that we cover in ‘Introduction to Baby Room Leadership’ but there are other topics as well (ones that we don’t have time to cover in the course) and tons of examples, stories, tips and tools. I hope it can be useful to lots of aspiring and current baby room leaders.
It’s available now as a download from the website. Take a look and spread the word!
Here’s a bit of a chapter overview –
In the first chapter, we start with the foundations of leadership: ‘self-leadership’. This is all about recognising yourself as a leader who is truly deserving of leadership development. It is about the quality of the internal conversations that we have with ourselves and making sure that these internal dialogues are positive, supportive and lead you towards development and growth.
Chapter 2 focuses on the cornerstone of baby room leadership: having a clear vision for the baby room. Developing a vision for the baby room is a critical stepping stone for knowing what you want to achieve through your leadership and also the kind of leader you want to be. While it’s fine to skip some chapters, this is definitely a chapter I’d recommend reading because as you’ll keep hearing me say, vision is your leadership superpower!
In the third chapter, we focus on the values that you bring to your leadership of the baby room. As with having a clear vision, having a clear set of values works as a foundation for everything you do as a leader in the baby room. You can build values as an individual professional, but you can also work with your team in the baby room to develop a powerful set of values that you keep on returning to together.
Chapter 4 discusses reflective practice and how this can be such a great way to continuously develop as a leader in the baby room. We will think about how to build up your reflective practice habit so that it becomes something that you just do every day without thinking about it too much, and we will also think about how to build more of a reflective culture in the baby room.
In the fifth chapter, we turn all that reflection into action through a focus on action-planning. As a leader, it’s great to know how to make an effective action plan, both working alone and as a team. You will learn the ingredients of a good action plan and some related planning tools, including how to manage project budgets and how to make a Gantt chart.
In the sixth chapter, we shift our attention to how as a leader you can motivate members of your baby room team. Motivating others is such a vital part of leadership but unless we break it down and give ourselves a framework for motivating others, it can feel like an intimidating challenge to take on. So in this chapter, we look at different types of motivation that you might see among your team members and how you can respond to these types of motivation in practical ways in order to build a positive team culture.
In Chapter 7, we get even more practical when it comes to a positive team culture by looking at the basics of embedding coaching as part of your leadership. You will learn some basic models for coaching and feel empowered to actually start some coaching in the setting where you work.
In the final closing words to the book, I want to share some final take-home messages for you and a handy checklist that you can print out and use as the basis for your leadership development as a baby room leader. I hope that reading this book empowers you to embrace your leadership and see just how important what you are doing is.