When looking for examples of leadership (good and bad) there is a tendency to select one of three environments. The first is sport, the second is military, and the third is politics. Yet over the last ten years I have come to appreciate a 4th dimension of which we all have personal experience – the world of education.
If anything has surprised me since establishing Ceannas it has been the willingness of people – from a multitude of professional backgrounds – to connect with stories and analogies which are derived from schools.
This came to the fore last week when attempting to explore how benchmarking excellence in leadership does not always need to be external, either to the organisation, or indeed, for that matter, the individual.
It has fascinated me for more than 30 years how excellence can, and often does, occur in every organisation.
The phenomenon I was attempting to describe was one I observed as a headteacher of one school, a senior leader in three schools, and the director of education for hundreds of schools.
The fact is that a so called ‘poor’ school in terms of achievement would always have isolated pockets of excellence where the results matched or surpassed ‘good’ schools in much more socially and economically advantaged areas. In such circumstances the teacher or teachers overcame the challenges which overwhelmed others.
Such an observation led me to believe that the behaviour of the teacher was the defining factor – even in exceedingly difficult circumstances.
Great schools create an environment when such behaviour is the norm, not the exception. Unfortunately, the standard distribution curve of teacher impact in schools has not shifted much in my lifetime. There are typically some extremely poor teachers, a large majority around the average, and a small number towards the upper end.
School leaders can shift that curve to the right if they are able, or to the left if they are not, but a lot of those teachers in the middle do not change much at all, safe in that ‘Goldilocks territory’ where they are neither ‘too cold’ nor ‘too hot’ – although the analogy breaks down if we were to describe such teachers as being ‘just right’.
Great school leaders focus on pushing that curve to the right, and they use the examples and benchmarks that exist in their own school as opposed to anonymous comparisons which are too easily ignored as “not being the same as us”. The beauty of the internal comparison overcomes that problem as it is “exactly like us” as we are talking about the same children, the same parents, the same community, and the same socio-economic environment.
However, even here it is possible for the school leader to miss the mark by simply focusing on the numbers rather than the behaviour.
Simply saying to someone that if X can achieve Y, then so can you, is fundamentally flawed. For instead of focusing on outputs or outcomes, the real focus needs to be on the behaviours which result in exceptionality.
Moving beyond education it is a constant source of surprise that so many organisations fail to capitalise upon the excellence that exists within their own ranks. Fearful of singling out an individual, or a business unit, the typical strategy is to nominate them for an award, or more quietly recognise their efforts. The alternative approach is to set out to understand the behaviours that are leading to such outstanding performance and seek to spread that across the entire organisation. In many ways this tracks back to the idea of a ‘Learning Organisation,’ which I first encountered 30 years ago. A great idea but unfortunately rarely fulfilled.
Finally, I reckon there is something here for us as individuals. As my colleague and friend Herman Brodie points out the power of reference point dependence, where people evaluate things – namely themselves – against an existing reference point, most frequently an external reference point.
Such an external comparison is undoubtedly important, but just like the school, which has a range of practice, we as individuals will have occasions when we make an exceptionally good decision about what to do and carry it out close to perfection.
It is this facet of leadership behaviour that fascinates me, for what if the leader could gradually remove the poor decisions about what to do and shift even their average decisions towards the right on their personal decision-making distribution curve. Would this be a learning leader?
Thanks to those of you who have stuck with this stream of consciousness to the very end. I think there is something in this but sometimes it is only by committing thoughts to paper that an idea can begin to fully take shape – even if eventually to be discounted.