Where did you learn how to be a school leader?
Take a minute. Pause. I want you to think about the answer to this question. I’ll give you a little time.
If you’re anything like me, your answer covers a few different avenues. Perhaps, like many school leaders, you learned on the job. Maybe a particular professional development or graduate school experience was influential to your growth. Or perhaps a particularly good mentor guided you.
In many cases, schools seem to leave the development of school leadership skills to chance, relying largely on either a person’s willingness to self-identify or on administrators tapping those who “have what it takes.” In my leadership journey, I was tapped early on (a clear indicator of some of my own privileges), and then learned a great deal on the job, which included more than a few mistakes.
While this approach has worked (by some measures) for a long time, it does fail in a few key ways. For one, if we rely on “tapping” or self-identification to spot future leaders, we miss opportunities to be more strategic about leadership development. Beyond that, traditional modes of spotting talent tend to favor those with backgrounds that garner systemic privileges, causing us to overlook or ignore many qualified individuals. What’s more, by not thinking more broadly about our next crop of leaders, we run the risk of eroding the engagement of our current faculty—a group generally eager for meaningful growth opportunities.
Expand Your View of Leadership
It’s clear that schools need more inclusive and strategic approaches to identifying leadership in general, but it’s a particularly urgent matter right now. As millennials (those born between 1981 and 1997) become the largest single generation in the workforce and baby boomers hit retirement, the need for skilled leaders in our schools is critical. All industries in America are facing a dramatic change in the shape, body, and face of leadership, and independent schools are not immune. According to NAIS’s 2009 report The State of Independent School Leadership, by 2025, two-thirds of sitting independent school heads will retire.If the deficits of our current approach to leadership development and the urgency of making a change are apparent, where do we begin?
For starters, let’s remember that traditional views on leadership often too narrowly define the concept as being tied to formal authority. But it can be tremendously empowering to take a more expansive view. For example, the NAIS School Leadership Institute (SLI) has adopted a framework grounded in the work of James Kouzes and Barry Posner in their book The Leadership Challenge. The essence of their argument is that leadership in organizations is not tied to a particular role, nor is it rooted in an individual’s personality, but rather it is a set of learnable practices and behaviors. Put another way, it’s not about who you are, but about what you do. Kouzes and Posner further remind us that leadership is everyone’s job and that it should not be relegated to those in designated positions of formal authority.
This is not, I hope, a groundbreaking idea. But I wonder how often this occurs. While many schools have faculty development programs, how many of them focus specifically on the behaviors and practices associated with leadership?
We often outsource a great deal of leadership development, relying primarily on conferences and seminars. Why can’t this happen within our own walls? After all, we are adept at building leadership programs for our students. Why have our adults been left out of that work?
Adult leadership development does need to be thoughtfully constructed and implemented, but it does not require completely new initiatives. In fact, many existing school structures can be adapted to create inclusive, strategic, and engaging leadership development programs.
Measure What You Value
The saying “What gets measured gets done” is something of a cliché, but it does at least partially reflect how we set priorities in schools. Therefore, if we want faculty to be actively working on their own leadership skills, these elements need to appear in our evaluation structures. Faculty evaluation systems rightly focus primarily on what happens in the classroom, but schools miss a tremendous opportunity by excluding goals and performance standards explicitly tied to leadership.Schools could define some number of leadership competencies that align with the organization’s mission and values, articulate what mastery of each competency looks like, and then incorporate feedback around these skills into faculty evaluation. Such structures, coupled with careful attention paid to an individual’s potential for future growth, can help identify future leaders. What’s more, because the evaluation net catches all members of a school’s personnel, this approach avoids issues tied to the “raise your hand” or “tap on the shoulder” approaches to leadership identification. (This framework is adapted from one outlined in “Turning Potential Into Success: The Missing Link in Leadership Development,” a recent Harvard Business Review article about cultivating talent by Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, Andrew Roscoe, and Kentaro Aramaki.)
Talk the Walk
Most school leaders strive to “walk the walk,” ensuring that our actions convey not only our values, but also our approach to leadership more broadly. I would argue, though, that it’s not enough to merely hope that our actions provide a model for those around us. We also need to talk explicitly about the behaviors, practices, and approaches that we take in our daily work. Why do we make the choices we do? How do we go about seeking buy-in? What is our approach to managing conflict? Much of what school leaders do is visible, but even more rests beneath the surface.Why don’t we pull back the curtain? It’s time for school leaders to talk more openly about the work of leadership. The various constituents with whom we interact on a regular basis would benefit from hearing not only why we do what we do, but also how our own philosophy of leadership underpins our work. But this is tricky. Leaders have to strike a balance between discussing the approach to leadership while not making themselves the center of attention. And yet, clarity around our own leadership is so critical; Kouzes and Posner even include it as one of the 30 dimensions they measure in their “Leadership Practices Inventory.”
By bringing thoughtful discussion of leadership into all levels of school culture, we can convey the powerful notion that these skills are not just something that can be learned, but rather are something we expect everybody to learn.
Rethink the Value of Mentorship
On my first day of teaching, when I was 22, I was assigned a mentor—a veteran teacher who was instructed to show me the ropes. Many schools offer new staff a mentor, but such programs often exclusively focus on bringing a new teacher up to speed. What a missed opportunity. New faculty certainly benefit from having an experienced shoulder to lean on, but there is also tremendous value in being a mentor. Mentoring others prompts reflection on our own practice and values and who we are as educators.As I reflect on my own leadership path, I can see that I grew the most when I mentored other teachers. As a mentor, I acted as a translator, bridging various elements of our school culture to a teacher learning a new environment. Participating in the growth of my colleagues planted the first seeds of leadership in my mind. After all, what is leadership if not a sense of responsibility for the development of those around us?
By broadening the scope of mentor programs to address not only the needs of the new faculty, but also the growth of the mentors themselves, schools can bring a new level of strategic thinking to developing the leadership capacity of all faculty.
Share the Complexity of Decision-Making
Beyond mentorship, the other early hook for me was serving on my school’s admissions committee, where I learned how enormously complex many strategic school decisions can be. Whether hiring, allocating financial aid, or developing curriculum, the choices facing school leaders are rarely simple. Of course, these operational elements need to be guided by people with sufficient experience, but leaders can broaden exposure, when appropriate, to the systems, structures, and processes at the heart of running schools to those teachers who are less experienced.But it’s not enough to just put faculty on committees that tackle complex issues, which many schools already do. The critical next step is to frame such opportunities as part of the development of leadership skills, not merely shouldering one of the many “other duties as assigned.” These roles give faculty opportunities to see what it means to manage complex, competing interests with limited resources in service of the institution’s future.
Shifting our thinking from “we need a faculty rep on this committee” to “we want to instill in our faculty the skills necessary to envision the future of our school” would pay huge dividends, including, ideally, a shift in faculty perception of such tasks from “have to” to “get to.”
Provide Meaningful Next Steps
While periodic exposure to the practices of leadership is critical, at some point we need to allow aspiring leaders to apply these principles and theories. To do so, individuals need meaningful roles within the school that grant them some degree of autonomy in decision-making, the opportunity to struggle (and maybe fail), and the chance to make concrete previously abstract ideas around leadership. But how often are such roles available?It would be neither sustainable nor wise for schools to artificially create a slew of new administrative positions to accommodate this population. That said, perhaps there is room to examine how often existing positions are open and how, when they are open, they are filled. For example, in some schools, department chair positions rotate, allowing many the opportunity to stretch their leadership muscles in a well-defined role. Or perhaps grade deans follow a class of students through middle or high school. Such an opportunity has a natural lifespan that allows new people to enter the cycle more often.
While creating a good learning environment for students is my primary focus, I enjoy that I also get to create a learning environment for adults. In all of our schools, our students and our faculty live simultaneously within written and unwritten curricula. For too long, questions of leadership and the growth of associated skills and practices have lived almost exclusively in our faculty’s unwritten curriculum.
But if schools deliberately pull together elements they already have in place (mentorship, evaluation, faculty seats on key committees), they can develop a more explicitly defined leadership curriculum for our adult learners. Doing so will enable us to meet the coming wave of school leadership transition with a diverse and reflective cohort of leaders.
Where did you learn to be a school leader?
For our next generation of school leaders, I hope the answer is, “I was taught while I was teaching.”