Teachers as leaders
Our research shows clearly that leadership skills are learnable, this has very important ramifications.
The most recent definitions of leadership describe leaders as people who create the conditions for others to succeed. The example par excellence of this ought to be teachers – as parents we want their whole focus to be on creating the conditions in which our children can succeed and to succeed our children need to learn to be leaders.
Like many types of leaders this is not where teachers originated in the modern era, rather teachers were employees of the state charged with creating conforming and well-schooled children who would fit into the industrial (and military) needs of the state. It was the prohibition on corporal punishment (in the 1980’s in Australia, for example) that signalled society’s desire to radically change the purpose of schooling. This change in purpose demanded, and still demands, a different type of leader, a different type of teacher.
Organisations that take leadership seriously know that there are a number of basic rules to developing a strong leadership culture. The first is to recruit people who have developed leadership capacity to a minimum level. This does not necessarily correlate with high academic (i.e. cognitive) ability so should be evaluated separately, the leader needs both. Second is to give these new leaders the right experiences, increasing in challenge, at the right time, to allow the gradual development of capacity – leadership requires practice and experience. Third, young leaders need good role models and mentors so that they know the attitudes and behaviours that distinguish the leader from the follower and receive the assistance they need as they develop.
If we look at education systems around the world then none come to mind that follow the first basic rule, they mostly select on (sometimes minimal!) academic ability. This shows itself when young teachers enter the classroom. Those who have achieved the minimum level of leadership ability find that they can engage the class (i.e. lead!) and teaching and learning readily take place. The teacher continues on this track and, with engaged students, can take risks with their practice and develop strongly, often into outstanding teachers. Those young teachers who have not reached a minimum level of leadership find that they cannot engage their students and turn to using methods of control (which is what most other teachers are doing). Less teaching and learning can take place – some students are simply disengaged – but with persistence the teacher develops into a competent teacher, good classroom control and sound, if unexciting, instructional practices. But this teacher is not a leader yet today is in the vast majority.
Without breaking this cycle, giving people the right experiences at the right time has little effect, once teachers are developing as managers rather than leaders this is hard to shift. Similarly, if most of the teachers are not developing as leaders it is hard to have appropriate role models for the less experienced teachers so the cycle continues.
This cycle can be broken by senior leaders providing role models for other staff. It is well established that an outstanding principal can transform a school and this is how, by modelling the behaviours and attitudes of a leader.
If we want to transform our education systems then we need to (1) develop the senior leaders who are in place to be leaders (our work has shown this can be done) and (2) recruit new teachers who have reached the necessary minimum levels of leadership. Both of these changes are achievable – if we want to have education systems that help all our children succeed.
Decision-making and organisation
Jonah Lehrer’s book the Decisive Moment gives strong insight into how we make decisions. Insight that helps to explain why we are at a turning point in human and societal development.
The instinctive decisions related to survival come out of our reptilian brain and are reasonably obvious. If we are about to be hit by a bus the decision to move out of the way is taken rapidly and instinctively. This part of our brain has had hundreds of millions of years of evolution and is very, very fast and efficient. From a conscious perspective these decisions just happen.
Our mammalian brain has had 65 million years to evolve an effective means of learning from experience. Many of our decisions come from this part of our brain and appear as feelings – something feels like the right thing to do (we also call this intuition). This covers a surprisingly large range of decisions. In effect, this part of our brain has a feel for anything we have experienced before and can synthesise a wide range of inputs into a single decision. It takes about 10,000 hours to become expert at something – typically taking ten years to accumulate so many hours – and once expert we “know” what the best course of action is. In a stable environment experts will provide the best decisions and we have relied heavily on experts in the past (and even now in many areas of life). A reliance on experts will show itself in a hierarchical model of organisation, the person higher up makes better decisions and thus should be deferred to, all the way up to the most powerful person at the pinnacle of the organisation or political system.
The neocortex is the third part of our decision-making apparatus that brings some very powerful tools including logic, calculation, extrapolation, modelling and metaphor. These are ideal for solving problems that we have not come across before. In effect, this allows us to create something, a solution, an idea, a process, a product that did not exist before. However, the neocortex is only about 100,000 years old – young in evolutionary terms – and remains energy intensive and not very efficient, for example we can only hold about four variables in memory at one time. Thus if we have a new, complex problem (i.e. with many more than four variables) the only way we can solve it is through a collaborative process involving diverse views – sufficiently diverse that all variables are held by someone – and an environment in which all views are properly aired and then synthesised into a solution that no individual would be likely to come to by themselves but is accepted by all participants as the best solution. This is a distinct departure from relying on experts and leads to organisational forms that are much more inclusive, collaborative and flatter – or networked – in structure.
One of the difficulties for the individual is to know when to use which decision-making process. Buying a house we should rely on feel (too many variables but a well known problem). Buying a corkscrew we should rely on logic (ease of use, look, price, perhaps being the variables you might use). From a societal point of view, when we move from a stable environment to one in which the problems we face are predominantly new, how do we change our organisational forms in a timely way?
As a world we now face issues and problems that we have not faced before: peak oil, aging populations, limits to growth, climate change and rapid technological change. To solve the problems that these issues create we need new organisational forms. These forms ARE struggling to emerge but are being limited by old organisational forms and their embodied decision-making processes trying to maintain the status quo, sometimes harshly. The best decision? Keep on plugging away building the new!
Like/dislike and successful organisations
A successful leader creates the conditions for others to succeed. People are most able to succeed – and acquire the skills they need to succeed – when they are in a mind state of optimism, collaboration, creativity and growth. Of course, organisations can be successful with only a proportion of their people being successful (an 80:20 rule comes to mind – 20% of the people account for 80% of the success). Organisations are more successful, and perhaps more importantly, more resilient, the higher the proportion of people within them who are successful.
Leaders are critical in creating this successful mind state in their employees and they do so by how they engage with each one, some directly but most indirectly. An employee moves into this mind state when they are accepted, believed in and listened to by others, and critically by their leaders.
Acting against this are two interesting and well documented phenomena about positions of power. The first is that when people are in positions of power they find it hard to see the needs and actions of the people who are below them. The second is that people below them see with startling clarity everything that their leaders do and say, this is sometimes known as hyper vigilance.
This comes to the main point. Most leaders, like most adults, will have people they like, people they are indifferent to and people they dislike. Most effective leaders would say that they are polite and open to each group but spend more time with the people that they like. From the point of view of creating a successful organisation, it would make more sense for leaders to spend time with people who need their time (irrespective of whether they like them or not) but the first point above indicates that it is quite hard for a leader to know who needs their time. The second point above indicates that people below the leader will know with clarity who the leader cares about and who they don’t care about. Those the leader cares about will tend to be more successful, the others will be less successful or even fail.
It is worth exploring where like – and its opposite dislike – comes from. Essentially they come from three main sources: memories laid down in early childhood, projection of things we like/dislike about ourselves or associations with real experiences that we have had.
The first may need some explanation, explicit memory only begins after about 2 years old so we spend the first 2 years of our lives laying down emotional memories that are unlinked to explicit memories. What this means is that we can have a strong negative emotion because someone made a loud noise next to us as a baby. The fact that this person had certain facial characteristics can mean that thirty years later we can see similar facial characteristics and our memory triggers a negative emotion and we interpret this as dislike for the person.
In each of these cases the negative feeling that arises comes out of memory – not from the other person – and in certain mind states will trigger a cascade of further emotion. As people – and particularly as leaders – we can ignore the negative emotions and engage with a person completely as a person, and importantly, with practice we can learn to do this automatically, with little conscious effort. This allows us to engage with everyone on an even keel and determine whether they need our time or not. Thus we can extend the number of people we are helping to succeed.
-
Blogroll