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Beginning leading
Great leaders select themselves â or do they?
PROFESSIONALISM FOLLOWERSHIP VISION INSPIRATION
Through the soft light of Londonâs early morning the new, young, unblemished teachers are setting out on their early morning commute to school. It is Londonâs Llareggub, gobbing gulls on the Embankment, as Miss T click-clacks her high-heeled way to the Tube, past rehearsing Guards in their undress uniforms on Whitehall, left-turning, right-wheeling, presenting arms in anticipation of a Royal Birthday. The caterpillar that is Transport for London will snake her through the suburbs to Britehope Academy while she rehearses mentally the French verbs that Year 10 will conjugate wrongly later, and wishes it were to a waiter in a little French bistro with breakfast croissants beside a soft Mediterranean. Roy Minton Rhodes, geographer, drags a weary Welsh foot out of his grey semi in Croydon that should be white, a now pollution-kippered former-rural idyll, leaving his still somnolent partner in bed, and takes the overground that doesnât have the advantage of blocking out the view with tunnels, imagining in his mindâs eye an ox-bow lake seen from the air, preferably about a thousand miles south of here. A red double-decker, foetid with last nightâs alcohol and green ginger curry, struggles through the shopping streets of Peckham which will later be crammed with pedestrians but now play host to sinister crowds of obese pigeons and inky corvids picking over the litter-bins and on past the Rye, that once was actually countryside, carrying Denby to magic mathematics with the Year 7s. Britehope calls them all; and with the new day, aspirations are rising in their respective breasts, contemplating their future careers in the world of education they have begun to inhabit.
***
A colleague of mine, Professor Angela Thody, pointed out very aptly that most of us start the leadership journey by being followers. Our awareness of leadership begins by watching it in action.
Cast your mind back to your first day in the teaching profession. Did you have a leadership role back then? Even without one, do you recall feeling tenuous on that first day, in unfamiliar surroundings, doing alien things among people you didnât know? Yet over time, you gained in confidence, and even aspired to be like at least some of the leaders you saw in your workplace.
So how do teachers like you transition from follower to leader? It can happen in many different ways, but the more common routes are:
You start out as a follower (i.e. a team member, a member of staff with no defined responsibility with respect to others), and then your leader, Mrs Z, goes off sick for a few weeks. The head says to you (and maybe to others): âWe have to cover Mrs Zâs roles; so you can take on this bit of the leaderâs work; Miss E can do that bit; and Mr Q can do another portionâ. On a temporary basis you have transitioned to being a leader, and you barely noticed the change, perhaps.
Eventually, your sick colleague returns. But the head says to you: âYou did OK with that responsibility I gave you; you can carry on now in that role â it will assist Mrs Z as she gets back into the grooveâ. So youâve made it to being an appointed leader (probably unpaid), albeit on a smallish scale.
Or you might volunteer for a job. You donât lead a subject, a year, or department; but when a school production comes along you become a lynchpin in it. Colleagues notice you have some skill at getting others to do what needs to be done: they see a spark there. They think: those skills are transferable; they ask you to transfer them to a school leadership role on a more permanent basis.
Maybe you work as a follower in a great team and you like the way your leader works. You think, âIâd like to model myself on him/herâ; so you set out to move into a similar role, maybe in a new location.
Some people get frustrated by what they see as poor leadership; they seek out a similar â or even a different â role where they can lead and do it better.
A few people find their follower role comes, right from the beginning, with a responsibility to lead some portion of their work.
Others will be what is popularly termed ambitious; they know that they want to progress professionally, take on more responsibility, climb the promotion ladder. They like the challenge. They have a thirst for controlling some aspect of their professional work so that they can reflect: âThis is my doing, it works well; Iâm proud of thatâ.
I was interviewing some vocational students once and a candidate told me he wanted to enter the Church as a profession. I asked him what he wanted to do in the Church. âBe a bishopâ, he said. No ambiguity there, then!
Beginning and middle leaders cover a range of roles: subject leaders, heads of department, faculty heads, curriculum co-ordinators, year leaders, pastoral leaders, and so on. (From time to time in this text I may nudge you to look at senior leaders and how they operate; this is an important part of career progression even though it is not the theme of this book.) All of these leadership roles are interesting and important, but none of them escapes the need to work with others (whether as colleagues or in teams), and none is able to escape these interpersonal issues of leadership and followership.
***
What I like best about Angelaâs article1 is the section where she investigates different types of followership â positive and negative. Without covering the whole ground of her article, it will be interesting to pursue some of the pointers she identifies, though for the present purpose I have adapted, omitted, or re-named some of her categories. In any school team there are likely to be people who fall into these types, and you can try to spot your position in this typology when you yourself are a follower. Followers may act in these types or play these roles either consciously or unconsciously.
Active-passives probably make up the largest number of followers. They support those decisions the leader makes which they favour; they also acquiesce when they are not so enthusiastic, providing a willing support to the leader without moving beyond passive acceptance.
Exemplaries are probably the next tranche of leaders in waiting: they âsupport and work closely with leaders, participate actively in decision making, are willing/able to question and critique leadersâ ideas, think independently, are energetic and assertive risk-takers and self-startersâ.
Loyalists might be described as the complacent minority, seek a quiet life â they âlogically justify their support for leaders before granting their quietly determined and unwavering loyaltyâ.
These follower types carry out between them more, or less, essential roles in the team and on behalf of the leader:
⢠Being handlers of toxicity in the team and beyond it: toxic handlers sense problems arising and cure them before the leaders have to deal with them or even hear about them.
⢠Being earnest disciples: they absorb and transmit what they have learned from the leader.
⢠Being sidekicks: these individuals often âaccompany the leader physically but are officially invisible. On this rests their helpfulness; they have little vested interest in the leaderâs own role but help the leader to make contributionsâ.
[I had to go back a long way in my own career to envisage when I had a sidekick, but I did. I was in my first year of teaching in a school where over half the staff members had not served more than a year. We had a young man assigned to the staff: I will call him JP. He was a pre-college student, so aged no more than 19. He was to spend a year with us before he went to teacher training. He was paired with me for that dreaded experience â doing Friday duties in the playground of our secondary modern school. The chances of a wet Friday going horribly wrong thanks to a cadre of older, more disaffected, students were considerable. JP did not really have any authority, so I had to take the lead in whatever was necessary. But we developed an intuitive understanding; and JP was my eyes and ears while I dealt with any incidents that arose. You needed eyes in the back of your head because the less amenable students would constantly test young teachers like me. JP was my eyes and ears. We made a good team.]
⢠Being gatekeepers: they filter âwhich of the information/problems/challenges/requests coming to leaders will go to them. They are loyal and organizationally knowledgeable; their value in reducing the burden on the leader is unquestionedâ.
⢠Being muses: that is, people who offer ideas but hand over credit for them to the leader.
⢠Being aspirants, mentees, apprentices (leadership trainee roles): these are team members who are working towards leadership skills. They may try to impress the leader and will use learning opportunities.
⢠Being seconds-in-command: âThese followers suppress in public any differences of opinion with the leader, consciously develop skills which the leader does not have or does not choose to have, transmitting them as accurately as possible the leaderâs views to other followersâ.
Inevitably, there are balancing negative types and roles, and we will look at those a bit later in the chapter. At this point I would just flag up the pleasure of working with an Exemplary.
It really is a delight to have someone on your team who is in tune with what you are trying to do, and who is aspiring to do something similar in due course. My Exemplary was a man about ten years younger than me; but we shared a philosophy about teaching and a view of how leadership should work. This did not prevent him from having his own views in specific situations; and I was always glad to have another perspective on the issues we faced. He developed a very high level of competence; and I knew that he could deputise for me on occasion if I had to be in two places at once. We did, occasionally, play Mr Nice and Mr Nasty as a way of moving on intransigent situations. We knew there were some of our followers who responded better to him, or better to me â and we played to that. It was a rare interlude where a leader can fully share the burdens, knowing it has the merit of bringing on the next generation.
***
Leaders, then, emerge from the whole body of teachers, in a variety of ways and with a myriad aspirations and motivations. Before suggesting some ways in which this initial interest might be captured, something needs to be said about the ground from which they emerge: the teaching profession.
In the space available it is possible only to summarise the bare bones of professionalism as it applies to teaching, but it is important to do so. Leaders in the education system are the people who have the day-to-day oversight of professionalism at the unit level. They need to be aware of how its tentacles reach out into their own work and those of their followers.
The Department for Education (DfE) laid out the bare bones of the issue in a document about teachersâ professionalism which covers eight areas within which teachers should operate effectively. They must:
1.Set high expectations that inspire, motivate, and challenge pupils.
2.Promote good progress and outcomes by pupils.
3.Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge.
4.Plan and teach well-structured lessons.
5.Adapt teaching to respond to the strengths and needs of all pupils.
6.Make accurate and productive use of assessment.
7.Manage behaviour effectively to ensure a good and safe learning environment.
8.Fulfil wider professional responsibilities (i.e. towards fellow teachers and parents etc.).
For my part I would add a couple of more detailed provisos which bypass the civil servants. I think that teachers have a duty to teach students to become discerning learners: to have open minds, to collect evidence, to make deductions, to analyse what they are told, and to draw insightful conclusions (incredibly crucial in the electronic age). I was interested to read a research-based article recently which suggested that teachers should rediscover Benjamin Bloomâs conceptual structures for education â Bloom put in perspective the teaching of mere information, and demanded that students should be able to analyse, apply, synthesise, and evaluate their knowledge. Decades of government obsession with testing has reduced much so-call...
