🤔 How many of your beliefs about leadership stem from your own experience?
It’s amazing how much I have learnt about leadership from observing my own headteachers and leaders during my career. I have decided to write a series of posts to describe this leadership learning. Please do comment if any of these experiences resonate.
This leadership lesson reflects my early career as a teacher - way back in the last century. In some ways, school leadership hadn't evolved at that point to what it is now, but I still learnt some valuable lessons along the way.
⚽ My headteacher at the time was old school. He loved football, and his highlight of the week was coaching the boys’ team or taking them to matches. His priority seemed to be the football and his relationships with the footballer’s parents.
🤐 Generally, he was friendly and approachable, but every so often he would be cold or even snap at you. Usually, he laughed and joked with the children, but every so often would fly into a rage and shout at them, sometimes scaring them badly.
🔢 He didn’t understand data and would pick targets out of the air, without using any evidence to inform them!
💡 Leadership learning:
These are the things I learnt from my first Headteacher:
🌟 Firstly, how it’s important to focus on the right thing. You might be passionate about football, and there are no doubt some great benefits, but it can’t be the main thing to the exclusion of all others.
🌟 That if you value something and prioritise it, you see improvement. OFSTED noticed that our boys consistently outperformed girls in most academic subjects at the school (which bucked trends at the time), which I’m sure was linked to football and the boys high profile/ high self-esteem, rather than their aptitude or the quality of our teaching!
🌟 This is obvious, but you need to be informed about strategy – you can’t just focus on something without any rationale.
🌟 You need to be consistent – even if you’re having a bad day – leaders set the weather. Because my headteacher was inconsistent, I ended up walking on eggshells with him half the time, as I never knew how any interaction would land.
Do you recognise any of these attributes? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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