Establishing and maintaining relationships with staff

Stop:
To establish and maintain relationships with the staff in my centre from day one I made sure I went out of my way to say "Good Morning" to the manager and ask her "How she was?". From doing this the first time it has made me and the manager feel more comfortable with each other, that comfortable that as soon as I walk in the doors in the morning it's an automatic greeting from me to her or vice versa. It took me while to establish relationships with the teachers in the room I work in because they all seemed so busy. At first it was just introducing ourselves and a greeting from each other this kept happening until I opened up and started asking questions about Early Childhood and how things work in the centre. As I started asking more questions the staff seemed happy to respond, I felt doing this made us feel more at ease with each other. Also the one to one conversations with the staff have grown and are growing every week into more in depth conversations that are kept on professional and personal level. I chose to ask questions to help establish relationships because I know I enjoy it when people ask questions about an interest of mine so I wanted to show that I appreciate their career by asking questions.

Think:
With establishing and maintaining relationships with the staff in my centre I feel I have been quite successful because I can see and feel the change between the relationships since the first week I started up to now, how much they have grown is amazing. I also feel the relationships are successful because the staff and I are learning something new each week about one another. I think what made it successful was that all the relationships established were built by two people myself and a staff member we both greeted, acknowledged and ask questions from the start and this now continues weekly. The relationships I have with the staff in my centre make me feel like I now belong in their team and I'm apart of their team, it's great to feel welcomed and comfortable at work it makes being their a lot more fun. The biggest thing I learnt about establishing these relationships was that at first I felt uncomfortable coming into a new place and it could be possible that the staff were also feeling uncomfortable because I was a new person that had come into their room.

Change:
There is not a great deal of change to how I would establish and maintain relationships in the future but I would possibly have more confidence in myself establishing the relationships because as I said before it's a new place and new people for me but I'm also a new person to them so the relationship goes both ways . Also I would not be as afraid to talk because that's how relationship's are established and maintained.