Some leadership musings from afar
I view leadership as a process that occurs within the minds of individuals who live in a culture – a process that entails the capacities to create stories, to understand and evaluate these stories, and to appreciate struggles among stories.
Gardiner, H. (2011). Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership. New York: Basic Books, pg. 22.
Recently my wife and I holidayed in Japan. It was a wonderful cultural experience. One day sitting in a cafe in the beautiful location of Kamakura, these ideas came to mind. Who knows why they did. I jotted them down and they have become the central threads of this short article. They are only musings. Musings that have arisen through both my own study and practice of leadership, as well as my experience of the leadership of others.
My ‘leadership’ experience has been at the middle and senior levels professionally. Principal leadership alluded me even though it was something I had always aspired to. From hindsight this has been a good thing in many respects; I would not trade the opportunities I have had to think deeply about leadership and learning within my current context. In addition to this, I have had the privilege of observing exquisite leadership and governance at the Trustee level of my School over many years.
Interestingly as a young undergraduate student I discovered an interest in what loosely could be described as organisational theory. It was probably a tad unusual for a 17-year-old to bond closely with this thinking, but such was life. One of my first memories of reading about what was then known as ‘management’ was a 1977 text by Newman and Warren, The Process of Management: concepts, behaviour and practice. According to these theorists’ ‘management’ was embodied in the context of planning, organising, activating and controlling! Interestingly the term leadership was not mentioned in this text. Leadership was subsumed under the ‘activation’ heading. Even at the time this was somewhat jarring for me, particularly the notion of control
Almost forty-five years have elapsed since. After much reading, reflection, experience, success and failure I now have some conception of the facets of both leadership and management that work for me. No doubt this will continue to evolve. Underpinning all of this is a reasonably good understanding of the curriculum and professional practice space that is both the intellectual and practical home in which I think about these concepts. All leadership has context, which includes the personal stories we bring to a space as well as the nuances of the space itself. To me the essence of leadership, at a very high level, comes down to these five verbs.
Listening
Noticing
Discerning
Deciding
Trusting
These five actions interact and intertwine in so many predictable and unpredictable ways to create the context of our leadership. It is deeply layered. Such leadership requires reflective slow thinking, strategic thinking, fast thinking, responsive thinking and of course on occasions reactive thinking. The coda to all of this is what I like to call collegial love; a stark contrast to Newman & Warrens 1977 reference to control.
Before unpacking this the question must be asked, what exactly are we leading in our schools and our educational institutions and what is the context of our leadership? The answer: we are leading complex spaces where both young people and adults are maturing and learning or learning and maturing or both. Often, we forget to acknowledge the totality of the human condition of learning in our schools. Schools are complex organisations with layers of consciousness. These layers involve staff to staff relations, staff to student relations, student to staff relations, parent to staff relations and community to school relations - the list goes on. In such complex environments, with so many layers of relationship, leadership and problem solving can be both excruciatingly difficult and incredibly rewarding. There are so often competing forces or agendas at play. Let’s unpack the five actions mentioned earlier which form part of my leadership truths.
Listening
So often we hear but may not listen. Listening is much more than hearing. Listening is attentive observant ‘hearing’ focusing on not only what is said but also on what is left unsaid, as well as the way both are packaged. It is an alertness to the entire scape of a conversation. Listening requires the ability to put people at ease so that they feel heard. As Franciscan scholar Richard Rohr observes, listening is the most profound affirmation of the humanity of the other! The importance of this fundamental leadership skill is often forgotten.
Noticing
Noticing is the essential partner of effective listening. Effective listening requires attention to how the words are communicated, the context in which they are spoken and the micro gestures involved in what is spoken and what isn’t. Noticing’s second cousin is attentiveness - attention to the unspoken as well the spoken, the seen and the unseen, the said and unsaid. According to Lord Baden-Powell founder of the scouting movement, if you make listening and observation your occupation, you will gain much more than you can by talk.
Discerning
Discerning is difficult. It needs time, space, wisdom, contextual experience and a modicum of luck or good fortune. Discernment may lead to a decision not to act. Deciding not to act is in itself an action which requires due and careful attention to a range of factors relevant to the particular circumstances, including compliance, risk and societal expectation. Thinking through such a lens is multilayered and perhaps it is becoming more difficult. Viviane Robinson’s words in her book Virtuous Educational Leadership: Doing the Right Work the Right Way ring true. She notes:
Leaders with strong problem-solving skills and interpersonal virtues are able to avoid dilemmas by treating their opinions as fallible rather than as truth and by treating others as people with whom they can inquire and learn rather than as objects of persuasion (pg. xviii).
Deciding
So often our decisions are not without cost or unexpected consequence. Leadership requires decision making. If such decisions come from listening, noticing and discerning, then hopefully worthy and appropriate actions can result. Absolutes can bring problems and often unforeseen problems. Right and wrong does exist. There are moral absolutes. Hopefully they are wise and appropriate decisions. As David Brooks notes in How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, (2023: 263), “wisdom is practiced when people come together in what Parker Palmer called “a community of truth.” Rutger Bregman ends his beautifully optimistic book Human Kind: A Hopeful History (2020: 399) with these words. So be realistic. Be courageous. Be true to your nature and offer your trust. Do good in broad daylight, and don’t be ashamed of your generosity. You may be dismissed as gullible and naïve at first. But remember, what’s naïve today may be common sense tomorrow.
Trusting
To me ‘trusting’ is such a tender word. Perhaps it is the fundamental component of effective and sustained leadership. To trust someone creates vulnerability. The older I get the more difficult I find this word. Once I would have taken the moral high ground in circumstances where I thought my trust had been broken or injured in some way. Moral high grounds are easy. The New Testament maxim why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eyes is so true. When trust is broken, either through lapse or accidentally, acknowledging it is so important. It helps us to move on and heal. We all have broken trust at some stage through lapse or error. Of course, it is the degree of the brokenness that is of crucial importance. Understanding this is a way to understand the complexity of trust especially in the context of building and/or mending relationships. The comments above regarding decision making have huge through lines into this trust space and what is appropriate and not appropriate. Dr Stephen Cherry (2024: xv), currently Dean of Kings College Cambridge in his book Unforgiveable? Exploring the Limits of Forgiveness offers some sage advice as a coda to these thoughts. Trusting can be so problematic. Many individuals and institutions have made terrible decisions when they have mishandled trust for whatever reason. Cherry looks as this reality through the prism of forgiveness. Forgiveness can be wonderful, astonishing, transformative, but the stakes are very high when forgiveness is discussed, and so it is important for its proponents, whether of a religious or a secular perspective, to get beyond the cliches and into the deep and difficult issues that are never far from the surface.
Collegial Love
Some might wince at these words. The importance of ‘collegiality’ was brought home to me early in my career. It became embedded in my thinking early on when undertaking some external study through the School of Education at the University of Queensland. The courses offered by the late Doug Ogilvie had a profound impact on me. Doug spoke about collegiality often and elegantly. Schools must be collegial places otherwise they will be dysfunctional. The underlying values and syntax of corporatism often gets this wrong when it tries to overlay schools as unique and distinctive organisations with the syntax and belief systems of the market.
These are some musings from Japan. It is amazing what random thoughts might come to mind at random times. Mobile phone technology has yins and yangs. Their ‘notes’ function can be very handy.
Dr Bruce Addison
ACEL QLD Branch President