Doing Middle Leadership Right

A Practical Guide to Leading with Honesty and Integrity in Schools

Lyndsay Bawden, Jade Hickin, Kaley Macis-Riley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000574968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Leadership dans l'éducation

Are you a new or aspiring middle leader? Or have you been doing the job for a while but want some practical tips to ease workload and support your staff? This book draws together real experiences of middle leadership, both good and bad, and offers practical tips to help you find your voice, support your team, act with integrity and work with the Senior Leadership Team to improve your school.

Covering all aspects of middle leadership including leadership styles, pedagogical approaches, the role of social media, how to tackle difficult conversations, staff wellbeing and much more, the authors will help you avoid common pitfalls, navigate highs and lows, and develop a school environment that enables both students and staff to flourish.

For any new, experienced or prospective middle-leader Doing Middle Leadership Right provides a professional insight into how to lead with humanity at the centre of your practice. It puts staff and their wellbeing first – focussing not only on how to have the highest standards for both students and staff but also how to lead ethically.

1 Ethical leadership and managing change

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160557-2

Surely we’ve all been there: your boss is lovely but hopeless at making decisions. Or, your boss gets brilliant results but tells you to ‘man up’ on your first day back after a bereavement: lovely person, crap manager. Hideous person, brilliant at getting results. Is the middle ground the holy grail? This chapter is aimed at helping us attain that elusive balance of high effectiveness and high humanity.

But what is ethical leadership, and what does it mean to be an ethical leader in a school? It can be pretty hard to stay true to your ethics in the face of long hectic days (weeks, months…), and decisions being made under pressured conditions, so in order to establish what this actually means, let's look at the key characteristics of an ethical leader:

Ethical leadership can be defined by the following traits¹:

1. Justice
2. Respecting others
3. Honesty
4. Humanity
5. Teambuilding
6. Value-driven decision-making
7. Encouraging initiative
8. Leading by example
9. Value awareness
10. No tolerance for ethical violations

But, what does this mean in relation to middle leadership in schools? Let's unpick this further:

Justice

As children, we were sensitive to injustice: when your brother got a larger slice of cake, when you only got 58 minutes on the telly rather than the agreed 60, or when an inferior piece of work was presented to the school in assembly instead of your masterpiece; as an adult our sense of justice is arguably more refined. Being treated justly is tied up in our self-worth and perception of ourselves. As leaders, we need to be just, not just towards others but towards ourselves too. We cannot be seen to have favourites in our teams or to value the opinions of one above another. We must include everyone in our decision-making and fact-seeking. For example: imagine you work in a school team where your department meetings are just for show, or for going through admin; all but one person is in the team WhatsApp group and it's in this group that the important issues are discussed and decided. This is an example of unjust leadership; that team will never function effectively, and the ostracised person will feel undervalued and ignored. In a profession with a recruitment and retention crisis, this is not just morally the wrong way to behave, but it's a pretty poor business decision too. Being just in this situation means deleting the group, or including everyone, or ensuring it's a non-work group, and bringing the decision-making into the formal work meetings where everyone can participate, so there's transparency and fairness in the process.

Respecting others

This means listening to what your team has to say and taking their views into account. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with them, or follow their advice, but you do them the courtesy of hearing their perspective. This makes your team feel valued and included and shows that you work collaboratively as a team. When we stepped up to middle-leadership roles, we all discovered that this was difficult due to time – everyone wanted to talk to us and we didn’t get any work done! Setting boundaries is crucial in managing this. Saying, can we talk about this after school, or let's schedule a meeting about this later in the week, is important for your sanity and productivity – but you must follow it through and set that time aside. Again, this is not just ethically the right way to behave, it makes good business sense: just because you’re the boss doesn’t mean you hold all the answers. Your team of professional colleagues will not only have brilliant ideas of their own, but they will bring a valuable alternative perspective, and often a more practical/workable idea, as they are closer to the action in the classroom than many leaders. You are harming the ability of your school to move forward if you don’t respect the views of your team – never mind the lack of motivation and value your colleagues will feel if their opinions are not listened to.

Honesty

Those of you who have read ‘Radical Candour’² will be familiar with the phrase ‘ruinous empathy’, which describes being so empathetic to someone that you can’t say anything construed as negative in case you hurt their feelings. It leads people to avoid giving candid feedback about performance in the mistaken view that being ‘nice’ is more important than being honest.

Lyndsay can write about this with certainty as she is definitely afflicted with ruinous empathy, or at least has been in the past. But the revelation for her has been that, in being too nice, she's actually damaging people, being a poor leader, and letting down the students and the school.

Here's an example; a colleague comes to you with a resource you know they’ve spent days working on, but you can immediately see it's not fit for purpose, and asks for your opinion. Lyndsay's (ruinously empathetic) instinct: be nice, tell them it's great, that you appreciate all their work, and thank them for their efforts. They go away feeling happy. But really, who does this help? Perhaps both Lyndsay and the colleague in the short term, as she's given them a verbal pat on the head, dodged a potentially difficult conversation (more on them later!), and made them feel good. Who does it hurt? Everyone: the colleague thinks their work is acceptable, and isn’t aware of what or how to improve it, and wastes more of their time doing the same in future. The students in their class suffer as they don’t learn the most powerful knowledge in the most effective way, thus wasting precious curriculum time.

The result of this is: you suffer, as the performance of your team is poor. The school suffers, as results don’t improve or go backwards. Your relationship with the team, as you’re seen as nice but ineffective, and nobody wants a useless manager, no matter how nice they are.

Honesty, plus kindness, is key for the long-term effectiveness of your team, and for all the people in your team individually – and is also the most ethical way to behave.

Humane

Whilst it's imperative to be honest, the way you are honest is crucial. Acting with humanity and remembering that people have feelings is a priority. Deliver news in person where possible, and be clear but sensitive. Give people the respect they deserve by taking time to speak to them one-on-one, and affording them privacy from others when delivering difficult news. For example, publicly criticising a colleague by name in a staff meeting, or as we have experienced, shouting at a member of staff in front of a classroom full of students, is not the action of an ethical leader. Not only is it counterproductive, probably leading to resentment and animosity from the colleague whose behaviour you want to change, it also shows you as lacking in humanity and respect. Leading through fear and humiliation will only take you so far; leading through humanity with ethics will engender loyalty, communication, and productivity.³

There are some very practical ways you can ensure that you’re being humane in your approach to leadership:⁴

• Be clear about your feedback: if you are simply giving an opinion, make that explicit; if it's an instruction, use your language accordingly: this is a priority.
• Be timely: Just because we are working on a Friday night, or Sunday morning, doesn’t mean that your team is, or should be. But if you ask them questions or send them actions at these times, it can be easy for them to see that as you expecting them to work then, too. A way around this is to delay-send on emails or to add a clear disclaimer about working patterns and flexibility. Another point on this is to think about the psychological impact of your timing: asking a colleague you manage on a Friday to have a meeting with you on a Monday, without being specific about the content or purpose, might have the unintended consequence of ruining their weekend through worry and stress. Setting deadlines is similar: do not expect your team to have actioned requests over the weekend – they have a life and deserve that downtime – or if they have part-time hours that need to be accounted for in the timeframe. Do not expect or presume that you can directly or by implication take up their time outside of work – this is why we have a hard-won directed time calendar.
• Make priorities realistic: we can’t do everything at once, and to demand so increases stress, as well as the chances of failure. We only have so much cognitive capacity as well as hours in the day. Establish your priorities, and be clear about what you expect and when. Seek feedback on the feasibility of this, and be reasonable. And ensure the why of the goal is clear to all – the best teams will have a collective sense of what is important and why, and will row together, and you set the tone for that culture.
• Give your time equitably: do not give in to having an inner circle, or clique; include everyone. This doesn’t mean you can’t have friendships, but in work time you have to be seen to be impartial, and actually be impartial. This reduces the impression of favouritism and helps you lead more effectively: tempting though it might seem, if you surround yourself with cronies all you will hear is an echo chamber of your own thoughts.
• Delegate and devolve decision-making: you cannot do everything, and why would you want to? Respect the expertise of your team members and trust them to do the right thing. Give them space to run their own agreed projects and teams, and show that you believe in them by giving them room – physically and virtually – to work. This means that not everything will be 100% successful or as you envisage it – it might be better, or it might fail. But that is a learning experience for them and for you. Showing trust in your team increases their trust in you as a leader. But crucially, you need to be able to judge when you do need to step in, and you need to be available for your team to ask you for support if they need it.

Case Study: Anonymous

I was working in a well-regarded and high-performing school; I was pregnant with my eldest child and in charge of Y11, stepping in for someone who was themself having a very difficult pregnancy and was on bed rest. On my way to school one morning, I skidded on ice and crashed my car. Luckily neither the car nor I were seriously damaged, but I was really shaken up, and very well aware of the precariousness of pregnancy. I booked an appointment with my midwife for some reassurance and called school to tell them I wouldn’t be in that day.

On my return the next day, one of my colleagues took me aside; the Deputy Head, on being informed of my absence, said ‘call her back and tell her she has to come in’. When told I had been in a car accident, his response was ‘Oh right, well that's OK then’.

Not one person from SLT mentioned the crash or asked if I was OK; it was as though it hadn’t happened.

So how did this impact me? I was devastated –it brought home to me how nobody on the SLT gave a damn about me, or my baby. It showed me that nobody cared about me as a person –I was just there to get a job done, nothing more. And it also made me 100% determined never to make anyone else feel like that, and to be the exact opposite of those leaders.

When I look back now on the times I have felt frustrated, undervalued, or terrified of yet another public reprimand, they have all been times when leaders have exhibited a lack of ethical leadership.

Teambuilding

Whilst your personal motivations are important, we need to remember that we are striving for a shared goal and that as Aristotle allegedly said, we are greater than the sum of our parts. Working towards a shared endeavour helps people feel connected and gives a sense of community. Teaching can be a very lonely profession, in classrooms as often the only adult all day, and then working on your own to plan or mark, so being a team combats that. Sharing workload e.g. sharing planning, marking work as a team, comparative judgement and consistently holding up behaviour expectations enables a feeling of cohesion and helps your team and therefore the school function more effectively. Even if you, as a middle leader and perhaps an established authority figure, don't need to employ certain behaviour management techniques, modelling those for your team shows that you are working together, as well as showing a united and consistent approach to your students. It's also another way of showing respect to your colleagues, to demonstrate that you don’t think that you’re above such practices, and that you ‘walk the walk’.

In a practical way, team-teaching and sharing planning not only develops people professionally but it can also alleviate any feelings of disconnect or isolation which might build up. And striving together for a common goal supports everyone in feeling valued and important. For example, when writing a new curriculum, it might be ‘easier’ to write it yourself – after all you are the most experienced teacher ...