Looking after leaders (including you)

I have written many times about emotional well-being, stress and personal impact but that normally appears in my other blog "Teachers' Minds Matter" however this is the place to discuss the well-being of leaders. This article is simply a personal take on the matter and designed to ask you to reflect on your own actions and those of others. If you want a definitive view then I would recommend Staying Ahead by Viv Grant. In the posting "It's alright to be afraid" I talked about the courage that it takes to be a teacher and a leader. This post is largely anecdotal and may seem a little scrappy but I hope that the opinions and tales may be useful.

The danger of super-heads and super-leaders (even if you are one)!
Take care with your workload, for 2 reasons, firstly the impact on you and secondly on your colleagues. Hard work is one thing but inevitably your colleagues will look at you working your 60 hour week and thinking that they should be doing the same. Your actions place pressure on others (especially if you are good at your job) to aspire to your standards and workload. Unwittingly you could be making the lives of your colleagues much harder as they attempt to emulate you. Guilt is powerful and they may feel that if they are not matching you hour for hour then they are failing. I have worked for "super-leaders", and I always promised myself I wouldn't be one.

The first point was about personal impact. Be careful that the price you pay isn't too high. I would suggest annualising your hours and then working out how many 37.5 hour weeks you would need to do this amount of work. I tend to come out at around 60-ish weeks without holidays; that is far too much and I know I need to practise what I preach but please be wary. It is also salient to see then what you actually earn an hour! These hours will have an impact on relationships and potentially on both physical and mental health. So please be conscious of the demands.

Quickly forgotten
I understand that we do want to make an impact of the lives of children, we want to make learning fun, memorable and meaningful, but we need to ensure that we maintain balance. We can't be brilliant all of the time, we can't be hero teachers for 39 weeks a year and at times we do need to do a wordsearch just to allow us to take a breath. In my second post I worked with a venerable old science teacher who had been in the school for 30-odd years. He was a great teacher, the children loved him and the staff valued his wisdom. He took me under his arm and guided my early career. I was once off for a few days with a bad cold and came back to work probably too soon. He took me to one side and pointed out that I was not indispensable and ultimately I would only make it worse for myself and disadvantage the children more by being off longer.

But that wasn't the point I really anted to make. The teacher retired and was soon replaced. Within 2 weeks of the beginning of term his name was never mentioned again at school. 30-odd years off service and a 2 week legacy. No-one is irreplaceable. No matter how much you do, how hard you work and how much it impacts you you will be forgotten (unless you are catastrophically bad!). Have pride, do your job well, but don't sacrifice yourself for a legacy you will not have.

Stepping back
Many years ago I was working as a head of department. I tried to be a super-leader, working very long hours, placing unreasonable expectations on others, ruining my relationships at home and basically being a total arse. I eventually realised, though "prompted" by my wife, that this was all going horribly wrong and that changes were needed. Without dwelling on my home life too much I knew something had to give. I gave up the responsibility, handed over the load to a willing successor and went back to mainscale. Yes I missed the money but all of a sudden my week shortened by 20 hours, home became happier and I became healthier. By the time I left the school the hullabaloo over my stepping-down was long forgotten and by now I am a dim and distant memory only to be found in old year books.

Looking after your colleagues
Your colleagues will look to you for leadership and direction. My leadership goes beyond education and I regularly take on a pastoral role with staff. Whether you like it or not, you set the tome and expectations, you become a role model and so you have a responsibility to your staff to be a positive role model in all ways. Think of their well-being when bragging about hours worked, books marked and schemes of learning written. It may be unintentional but this is added pressure.

Looking after yourself
You have responsibilities, to your staff and probably family. Leadership in schools at any level can be physically tiring and emotionally demanding. The effects of these builds up over time and if you are not careful you hit a wall where pressure becomes stress, productivity drops like a stone and so does your emotional and physical health. So please work sensibly, get enough sleep, give yourself down-time, eat well and spend time with others.

An ex-colleague of mine used to pint out on a regular basis that you are a long time dead, so make sure you get in plenty of life whilst you can.

Down with management speak, the contentment revolution starts here!

On a recent holiday I was sat on the hotel balcony mulling over various matters and my wife asked me what was wrong. I explained that "I've got a problem". Without hesitation, but with tongue firmly in cheek she replied "A problem should be seen as an opportunity". Well this was like a red rag to a bull, and in a stream of consciousness and "robust" language I issued forth with a rant against this sort of nonsense.This is that rant.

My initial problem with her response was very simple, a problem is a problem, if it had been an opportunity I am sure that I would have said "I've got an opportunity". I am reasonable bright and I know the difference between the two, one is positive and one is negative. Maybe I'm being negative but I see a flat tyre as a problem, a nuisance, an inconvenience, rather than an opportunity to spend my time getting grubby and frustrated.

I have heard this trotted out on many occasions, so-called motivational speakers telling me (not discussing and debating, just telling) about opportunistic problems, but this is a case of the Emperor's new clothes, it isn't there. This is an opportunity to work harder and sort out something that someone else has done to make your life more challenging. In reality these management aphorisms have created their own mythology, a mythology which at its heart is designed to pile pressure on people, make workers compare themselves to each other, and to apply pressure to fit the mould of being an effective manager. Failure to turn a problem into an opportunity is seen as a failure.

I am not completely dismissive of all of this, there must be some wisdom here. Stephen Covey's "7 Habits..." states as Habit 7 that we should "sharpen the saw", in other words look after ourselves. But even this is still business focused, look after ourselves to make us more effective rather than for the sake of personal happiness. Unfortunately most of these maxims seem to be regurgitated junk or manifesto statements of sociopaths trying to squeeze the last drops of juice out of the orange by playing on feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

Behind the language is an implicit relationship between employer and employee. Business success and personal economic prosperity are at the heart of a majority of the books which populate the management bookshelves in airport bookshops (just an aside why are there 10 times more of these books than science or 100 times more than poetry?). I must admit that during my leadership career I have read many of these books, both general business management and specific educational management. My worry is that most of these books seem to ignore the humanity of colleagues, they are about the individual and just see others as cogs in a machine, cogs that either drive you or cogs that you drive. These cogs are generally not seen as a mutually beneficial machine, cogs are metallic and hard, impersonal and unemotional, but the reality of organisations is that the cogs are organic, these cogs are emotional, vulnerable and unique. Relationships are seen through an outcome-focused lens, a lens that equates professional success with output and profit. I would question if such a belief is sustainable and certainly whether everyone comes out on top.

This may sound like a socialist take on leadership, and may be it is, though for me emotions are as important as economics. At the beginning of the Bruce Springsteen's live video of Born to Run he says "remember in the end nobody wins unless everybody wins". When I first heard this as an idealistic teenager it stirred me, but now as a gnarled middle-aged man I still see it as a plausible maxim for ethically sound organisations, and especially schools. [A small aside I suspect staff at my previous school feared that it would be renamed Bruce Springsteen School].

Most schools are not profit making machines (even most private schools just break even and are charitable concerns) so why would we be wanting to use the language and philosophies of business where the raison d'etre is rarely the betterment of the whole community? Whilst schools operate within tight budgets, have expensive outgoings and often struggle to get to the end of the year, they are not businesses is the sense that the local supermarket is. I therefore feel that we need to be a little sceptical about adopting the philosophies of profit-making organisations where success is often judged in terms of profits and dividends. Ultimately what I am calling for (and also actively promoting) is a different metric of success. Can we see beyond the power, ego, personal gratification and wealth that apparently makes us "happy"? Can we aspire to be content? Can we make our ambition to achieve contentment? That contentment may be achieving good exam results with your classes, seeing low ability children make excellent progress or seeing a colleague thrive, none of which will make you richer. Could we have a simple ambition, to be content? Could school leadership set its main target to achieve whole school contentment?

We need to do something, teachers are leaving the profession in droves, there is a crisis in leadership and stress is going through the roof. Let's be brave, let's be content.