This week I am thinking about being new in a role. As of the time of this writing, I have temporarily moved from a Principal role to a Director of Schools (for us in our jurisdiction, it’s basically the next level up from Principal). This has gotten me thinking more about being in a new role, which has been a while for me. 

When you start something new, it has been said that you are immediately de-skilled since you are learning new things. With this newness, there is often a loss of familiarity and confidence that accompanies it. But the more that I think about it, de-skilled is the wrong way to think of it in many situations  (such as switching professional roles) since it implies a loss of the skills that you do actually have and the need to acquire all new ones. Instead, you need to re-calibrate those skills to the new situation as you acquire supplemental ones (because there will be brand new skills to develop as well).

Contextual adaptability is a concept that describes this idea better which is the ability to adapt your current skill set to a new situation, environment or role. If your contextual adaptability is high, then you can leverage your previous skills to make them work in a new way. If it’s low, then you might as well be de-skilled since you cannot transfer these over. This concept is closely linked to the idea of transferable skills which are critical to teach to our students in a changing world. It is why few business ask if you know how to use a specific application (eg. Microsoft Word) but instead ask if you can use a word processor (which covers a range of applications). It is why if you have solid people skills, you can continue to have strong people skills. The nature of your interactions and relationships may shift a little, but things like being empathetic, an active listener, etc are all still accessible. 

When you move into a new role, you may certainly have a loss of confidence and certainty in yourself, but you still can leverage what you have learned thus far. It is important to recognize that many of the skills you have leverage are indeed still applicable to your current situation, so you likely do have the capacity to continue to perform well, it is a matter of working on being comfortable while doing it. Striking a balance between being confident in your abilities but recognizing you still have much to learn is the way to adjust to any new role or learning. 

For any new situation the thing that often separates those who seem proficient and those who are new is a sense of experience and familiarity. When having a difficult conversation or navigating a situation you are writing your scripts and your maps as you go when you encounter it the first time. As you encounter more and more, you realize that new situations look very similar to previous situations and strategies that were successful then, might be successful now. As you keep doing this, you keep refining what works and what doesn’t work so by the time you have gone through it a few times, you are essentially reading from a script in many ways. Being new means you simply haven’t written your scripts yet. Collaborating with others who have gone through similar things helps you to steal a few lines from theirs to add to yours. This is where being open to learning and growth is so important since you can learn from the successes and failures of others.

Generally speaking, you have gotten this far, you have the ability to continue to grow and adapt so as you continue to acquire and adapt your skills, the confidence will return. It’s using an old toolbox in a new workshop and adding the new tools as needed. This is true whether you are moving from a student-teacher into a teaching role, a teacher to an administrative role, and I guess from a principal role to a director role. But, like anything, it’s only new until it’s not!