Cups, spills, ears and ideas: How to provide the right support at the right time
You’re sitting in your office trying to do a roster, responding to emails, and updating whatever the latest regulatory change has been. An educator stands in front of your desk and says, “can we talk for a minute?” Stuck between internally screaming “I ONLY HAVE SO MANY MINUTES IN THE DAY” and wanting to be an empathetic leader, you simply say, “of course.”
You have no context of the meeting, so you’re trying to regulate yourself and prepare to be the bigger, stronger, wiser and kind leader. The educator sits down and starts unloading. Challenging conversations with families, frustrations with educators in their team, concerns about children’s behaviour. Their ‘emotional coping’ cup has reached the brim and they are overflowing in your office.
What do you do in this situation?
There are an endless number of ways you might respond. You might listen to everything they have to say, then go back over each thing one by one providing specific ideas. You might listen to everything they have to say, then say, “I hope letting it out help!” and send them on their way. You might also listen and provide ideas or suggestions as you go.
I’ve sat through so many of these meetings. Formal, informal, planned, unplanned. Sometimes in an office, sometimes in a laundry, or a kitchen, or any place you can be alone for more than a few moments in an early learning centre.
I’ve developed a three-step approach for these conversation that helps me feel a bit more control as the leader and not like I’m being swept away in the flood of the overflowing cup.
Phase 1: Contain the spill
The first phase of the meeting is about holding space for the feelings and emotions that are about to come. Sometimes it’s a small spill, other times it’s a raging river. Regardless, you want to:
keep yourself grounded through the meeting
hold space for feelings
validate feelings without validating actions
take mental or physical notes of points to revisit
You both sit down and you ask: “so, how can I help?” That question becomes the last pour of water into the cup and now it’s all overflowing. You listen for bit, make one comment, that comment has spilled the whole cup and now you’re trying to mop up the emotional spillage that’s flooding the office.
Strategies to use to ‘contain the spill’
Empathic acknowledgement:
“Yeah, that’s tough, I can see why it would have been a tricky situation.”
Minimal verb responses:
“Mmm” or “wow” or “gosh”
Reflecting back what you’re hearing:
“It sounds like this conversation with the parent has made you feel really frustrated.”
Summarising and paraphrasing:
“Sounds like a lot is going on. You’re working on supporting this family, an educator is refusing to clean up after lunch, and you’re trying to understand this child’s needs because they’re biting.”
Silence:
“Sounds like it was a pretty tricky Thursday afternoon” [ SPACE FOR SILENCE ]
Non-verbal communication:
Nodding, learning forward, orientating yourself toward the educator, consider the positioning of your arms and shoulders
The exact strategies you use at any point through the conversation will vary, so they’re all good to have in the repertoire.
Phase 2: Ears or ideas
Once the initial spill or flood is contained, the educator will start to calm down. Their full thinking brain will start to come back online, and you can start to take the conversation into a constructive place. The first thing I like to do here is ask: do you think you need my ear or my ideas?
My ears = they just needed to let everything out and being heard was enough for the moment
My ideas = they are looking for suggestions or strategies to address the problem
If they’re just looking for your ears, then you can offer to keep listening until they feel they’re ready.
If they’re looking for ideas, this is where you can start to use some more exploratory strategies. You might like to go back to some of the key points if you remember them, or reference any notes you’ve taken to prompt the conversation.
Strategies to use if they’re looking for ideas
Clarifying:
“You mention the educator doesn’t listen to you. Could you tell me more about that?”
Challenging:
“You’ve use a lot of absolute language when talking about your issues with this educator. For example, you said the educator never cleans up after lunch. Can you think of any times where they have cleaned up after lunch?”
Reflecting on experience:
“Where have you seen this before? What did you do then that was helpful?”
Suggesting:
“Sometime I’ve found works for me in the past is…do you think that could work here?”
A tip for suggestions: try get a pretty good understanding of what has already been tried. Sometimes it can make the conversations a bit clunky if you suggest 10 things which have already been tried.
Step 3: Make a plan
These conversations will always leave you with 15 more items on your to-do list if you let them. Where possible, try come up with 3 things the educator can take away and action from the meeting. This helps keep them accountable for being a part of their own solutions.
If the educator only needed your ears, the work doesn’t stop here. Make notes about major areas and revisit them with the educator in a few days. “I’ve had some time to think about our conversation, can you tell me more about…” You’re basically implementing the ‘ideas’ strategies at a different time.
If the educator needed your ideas, and you’ve made sure they have 3 things to take away and implement, you’ll need to meet with them again too. This time to discuss how the implementation is going, flagging which challenges will require additional intervention from leadership/management, and so on.
Closing thoughts
As someone who has worked in senior leadership in early childhood settings for over 5 years, I’ve had countless of these conversations. What I didn’t have was someone telling me what micro-skills I needed to effectively have those conversations. I found this article from Edith Cowan University really helpful for giving language to the little tools and strategies I was figuring out on my own.
I hope this guide helps you to approach your challenging conversations with a little more confidence!