Leadership doesn’t need a job title
In times of crisis, we see who the real leaders are. Here are eight ways you can join them.
Margaret Thatcher got something right when she said:
“Being a leader is like being a lady. If you have to remind people you are, you aren’t.”
Thatcher was a British leader. In the US, the political leadership is called the “Administration”, and this piece of language has filtered into the leadership speak of international schools. The “administration” of an international school refers to its top leadership, whereas the “administration” of most other organisations refers to the secretarial and operations team: the people who get stuff done, but who are unlikely to “lead”.
This subtle linguistic difference is thrown into sharp focus at a time of crisis. Many senior administrators have found themselves unable to lead; they’ve been so busy “getting stuff done” in firefighting crisis mode, that leadership activities have been pushed to the end of the day, the weekend, and “days off”. It’s time they got back to leading. Their communities need them at the helm, not in the engine room shovelling coal.
It would be wrong to think that senior leaders are the only people who can lead, but constructs in so many private and international schools have set up a position where that’s precisely what is expected.
Heads of Department and Grade Level leaders often feel they’re in a thankless, administrative, managerial, paper-pushing role. They sort out budget and paperwork. It’s rare that they feel empowered to take a front foot on pedagogy, beyond textbook choices.
And there are plenty of innovators, movers, shakers and talented people with no ‘leader’ or ‘head’ in their job title, who are keen as mustard to seize a project and get a chance to lead.
So what are some of the essential leadership parts of a senior leader’s job, that could be shared more, while also giving aspiring leaders a chance to step up?
1. Learn by Listening
Listening to others isn’t easy, because when you’re a leader listening alone isn’t enough. You need to be seen to be listening. So when you want your community to feel safe about the return to school after months of learning at home, ask them what would make them feel safe. Consider doing your listening in a recorded Zoom call, for example, so that others can hear their views being represented. Don’t feel you have to make any decisions, or agree to any ideas in such a meeting. It’s what one might call a “download” session, in line with Otto Scharmer’s Levels of Listening:
Cosmetic Listening is ‘pretend’ listening, where you have no intention of using what you’ve heard.
Downloading gives interruption-free time for people to download their opinions, views and ideas.
Conversation, where you listen in order to respond, allows you to dive deeper into parts of what someone has said, where it also interests you (but at the exclusion, perhaps, to other gems they might serve up)
Empathetic Listening is digging deeper into the motivations or evidence behind an initial download.
Emergent Collaboration can start to happen when evidence backs up a hypothesis, and both parties are able to start building ideas together. But you might want to defer this to another session, if the purpose of your listening is simply to get the lay of the land.
2. Craft and Keep Sharing the Vision
With the Board Chair and/or Board, and his or her fellow leadership team members, it’s important to create a shared vision. With the community, develop a shared understanding of the community’s core values and the purpose of the organisation. And with the students, ensure that they believe in what they’re doing, have aspirations beyond their immediate world, and that their experience connects an ever-increasing cycle of independence in their learning with their aspirations in life.
My job in our NoTosh team is to help leadership teams craft stunning vision stories. We get leadership teams and Board members together and take them through a meditation on some key visioning prompts we’ve designed. In turn, each of them gives their part of the story, while in real-time I rewrite what they say so that it connects, as one, into a long-form vision story.
When I read back what they’ve “written”, there are often tears of delight, and astonished leaders: “did we just write that?” For every one of them, in almost every instance, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard their vision read back to them. It’s also the first time they’ve had a copywriter write their words for them.
The resultant stories are long-form, and not really the kind of thing you’d put up on a website. And the stories are engaging for outsiders to the community, but they’re not marketing — you have to be part of the story, its creation, and the realisation of that vision for months and years to come, to get the same sense of engagement.
3. Innovate
Stop thinking you’re going to overwork the troops by asking them to come up with new ideas. On the one hand, senior leaders don’t want to overwhelm their teams, so they stand back from adding to their plates. But in doing this, we assume that what we’ve thrown on their plate already is valid. We also assume they’re overwhelmed. But they might have a better idea, an innovation that could kill off time-wasters and energy-sappers, and replace it with a brighter alternative. We’ll never know, unless we ask. Can you imagine if Mission Control told the boys up in Apollo 13 that, while they knew they should do something, they were worried about asking the team to work a bit too hard at the moment?
So identify your aspiring innovators and leaders, get them together, and ask they what’s on their mind. What problems have they spotted needing solved? What opportunities have they started to build ideas for?
And now map out the consequences of those ideas succeeding — what ‘old guard’ ideas, processes or projects would be worth winding down in order to boost new ideas that could do the job better?
The Three Horizons, described in my book on innovation, provides a simple lens through which to lay out, plan, and judge the relative success you’d need to see to swap the old way for the new way.
4. Communicate
Developing a strategy isn’t enough. You, as a senior leadership team, having to execute it all yourself isn’t going to get far, either. You need to inspire and activate those around you to get stuck in, too. Your narrative around strategy counts here — what are the stories you have to hand, as a team, which explain the benefit of your approach compared to all the other options out there? Clear strategy is useless unless you communicate — our 10-pointer on managing a crisis might help you out here, or if you can take the time dig into video and examples in this masterclass.
At the very least, make sure your stories are FAB ones:
Features: a couple of points on what you’re going to do
Advantages: a couple of reasons why it’s the best idea, in theory
Benefits: a couple of real, current examples of why your great idea is more than just a theory — it’s having an impact right now.
5. Decide
Too many leaders never actually take a decision. They faff. They put off. They make a decision not to make a decision. They leave others hanging. In NoTosh’s staff manual, leaving others hanging is a fireable offence, for which we’ve fired people. Don’t do it. Make a bloody decision, and then make sure people understand it. Leaders need to delegate, trusting the relationships they’ve developed, and have systems in place for people to recognise, before it’s too late, that things are going awry. Then you can decide, again, what to do about that. Don’t waste too much time worrying about what could be. Do a pre-mortem instead to make sure you worry just enough.
6. Do a pre-mortem: test ideas
Test ideas before you announce them. Be quick, and work through a pre-mortem. It takes at least an hour per idea or decision, exploring everything that could go wrong, and then changing your original ideas and plans to accommodate what you’ve now seen. We’ve written a full guide on how to do an amazing pre-mortem.
7. Act
Most organisations think they have a system for acting out decisions when they really just have a hierarchy. And when the chips are down, the hierarchy gets overwhelmed with the decisions deferred up to it, the leadership become the bottleneck. Set up a system for getting ideas done. Make it an opt-in — if people want to solve that problem or come up with an idea for that opportunity, let them. No extra pay. No job title. Just the glory.
Then make them work hard. Negotiate a target that feels ambitious and fun, work out the time or budget they need, and then let them get on with it.
Above all, remember that acting means someone else does the work — you should have your eyes on the next goal.
If you really don’t trust your teams, or the team just doesn’t know how to get stuff done, consider running a Kanban system to keep things sane and moving forward.
8. Ensure results: evaluate, evaluate, evaluate.
When things aren’t going right in a project, it shouldn’t be a surprise to a leader. They will have systems to gauge progress, but they’ll also be mentoring and coaching team members to spot disasters before the crew can spot a hole in the ship.
Ewan McIntosh is the CEO and founder of global learning agency, NoTosh. The firm develops strategy, and re-articulates the purpose and values of the world’s most innovative, forward-looking, successful schools.
