School Leadership: A little over 10 years ago, former president of Coca Cola and acclaimed business leader Donald Keough wrote his cleverly counter-intuitive Ten Commandments of Business Failure.
Rather than churn out yet another step-by-step guide to success, Keough instead offered a “how-not-to” guide, laying out the pitfalls and blunders that companies and individuals make time after time.
Keough’s ten commandments of failure ranged from “assume infallibility”, to “put all your faith in experts and outside consultants”. Each commandment provided a cautionary tale for leaders journeying along the path to failure.
What might comprise the commandments of school leadership failure? Which are those most readily set to ensnare school leaders? In the spirit of provocative debate, I would suggest that a first few might include:
Isolated school leadership
Former FBI Director James Comey’s recent revelations about the Trump White House were as entertaining as they were alarming. Yet as much as Comey’s criticism was levelled at former President Trump himself, it was also directed at the “silent circle of assent” that surrounded him.
Such circumstances are far less exclusive than one might imagine. Many businesses, institutions, organisations, schools and colleges bear the scars of poorly considered decisions, flawed initiatives and vanity projects that can be tracked back to the same White House phenomenon that psychologists refer to as “groupthink”.
“The suppression of dissent is so risky since it can cause leaders to become overly optimistic about their capabilities.”
Indeed, schools are more prone to groupthink than many institutions, characterised as they often are by the trio of rigid hierarchies, isolated leaders and instinctively self-preserving leadership teams. Although team trust and cohesiveness are important, more so is the active encouragement of healthy scepticism and constructive debate.
The suppression of dissent and of “difficult” questions is so risky since it can cause leaders and their teams to become overly, even dangerously, optimistic about their capabilities and talents. Leaders who listen to and meet regularly and routinely with staff outside of their school leadership teams – not waiting for an emergency, a staffing crisis, or the procedural constraints of an appraisal meeting – are those best positioned to challenge the threat of groupthink.
Disconnected strategy
In our hyper-competitive, edge-seeking age there is hardly an enterprise or organisation worth its salt that doesn’t champion its strategic credentials or intent. The armed forces, the NHS, businesses large and small, government departments, political parties, charities, schools and colleges: all are busily prefixing their plans, analyses, outcomes and objectives with the ill-defined and often only vaguely understood word “strategic”. Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, offers substantial insight in his sweeping doorstop of a book Strategy: A History.
Freedman notes dryly that “There is now no human activity so lowly, banal, or intimate that it can reasonably be deprived of strategy.” There is little doubt that developing strategically is far better than developing randomly, but there are two most likely destinations for the average school strategic plan. Too high level and it sits on a shelf, divorced from the reality of school life. Too overly-proscriptive and it enslaves its community, crushing individuality and the characterful classroom-level innovation that makes all the difference to the students we seek to inspire.
“If a strategic plan is too high level, it sits on a shelf. Too proscriptive and it enslaves the community.”
Roger Martin’s The Big Lie of Strategic Planning (Harvard Business Review) effectively sets out some avoidable pitfalls, especially avoiding mistaking “planning” for “strategy” and encouraging leaders not to over-estimate their ability to predict the future and to plan for it in precise and technocratic ways.
That said, desert warrior Norman Schwarzkopf, leader of the coalition forces in the 1990-91 Gulf War, puts matters in their rightful order when he reminds us that “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.”
Under-valued subject leaders
Collective views amongst team-playing but proudly competitive heads of department are about as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth, since great subject leaders – just like the subjects they lead – really are inimitable. In Huh: Curriculum, conversations between subject and senior leaders, Mary Myatt and John Tomsett address the tricky question of how heads and senior leaders can meaningfully support subject leaders when they know so little about the subjects themselves.
“Discussions between senior and subject leaders are too often characterised by dispiritingly generic, one-sided conversations.”
It is precisely this lack of knowledge that often renders subject leaders – the most influential group in determining the daily experience, the progress and the development of our students (arguably far more so than senior leaders) – almost entirely marginalised when it comes to school development.
Instead, discussions between school leadership and subject leaders are too often characterised by dispiritingly generic, one-sided conversations about “GCSE specifications, data entry, Year 11 mocks, interventions… timetabling”.
What makes Myatt and Tomsett’s new book essential reading is that it provides the basis for far better subject-based understanding between senior and subject leaders. Without it, school development remains stuck in the “joyless trudge” of “improving progress” or “getting Cs to Bs”, rather than “shining an exploratory light on subjects and their importance to the lives of our children”.
And without it, school development remains about satisfying our regulatory bodies rather than satisfying our students.
Too much top-down change
Occasionally a school may be gripped by a leader who believes in explosive change. But the reason that so many of our institutions have survived and thrived for so long is that a succession of leaders, often spanning several centuries, have understood the importance of balancing change as a driver for school improvement alongside their obligations to preserve and to protect the institutions they lead, often from the buffeting but passing winds of social and cultural pressure.
Added to this is the fact that so many models of change leadership, such as those underpinned by the likes of John Kotter, are so difficult to apply successfully to the profoundly human institutions that are our schools.
For instance, although Kotter’s “Eight Steps” may offer a coherent guide to “linear” change in smaller scale commercial operations, they have often proved disastrous in more complex organisations. Launching large-scale, top-down change in a people-heavy organisation – potentially by confecting a “sense of urgency” – can disempower followers at best, irreversibly undermine trust at worst. Successful change is widely proven to be the result of all groups feeling that their insights and experiences are valued, participating in the setting of goals and the defining of projects at the outset.
Effective first step
Not unlike the premise of Keough’s commandments, identifying potential hazards and personal blind spots can be the most effective first step in defying them.
This article first appeared in the latest autumn edition of School Management Plus print magazine, out now.