The Future of School Leadership
To say school leadership has had a rough couple of years might be understating the reality. The amount of adaptive, stressful and unappreciated work that school leaders have done is almost surreal, and this has had some very real impacts on the current landscape as well as the future of leadership.
One, leaders are retiring earlier than they anticipated or they are choosing to do different things with their experience and expertise. For years, we have known that the baby boomer generation of school leaders would retire leaving a gaping hole of positions, and Covid was a spark that accelerated that trend and has led Gen X to follow suit.
Two, leaders and their communities have spent so much time in firefighting mode that they have almost forgotten how to step back, get out of the weeds, and plan with a longer horizon. We are hearing leaders report elevated feelings of burnout, and whether this is coming from feeling like their work is underappreciated or from the unrelenting pace of fires to fight, it is hard to tell. Many leaders are asking, “Is this really worth it?”
Last, the workforce has changed. Teachers are in short supply, and they know it. Behavior like quitting in the summer and mid-year exits are becoming more normal. Faculty and staff who draw arbitrary boundaries and push back against the general category of every job description labeled, “other duties as assigned” force leaders into a long overdue conversation with their teachers.
Leaders are asking: “How do I do my job if I no longer have the ability to force compliance or control through traditional practices or by leveraging general acceptance of culture in school where teachers are traditionally overused and underpaid?”
Schools are changing, teachers are changing, and so it follows, that school leadership will need to evolve as well. Here are some beginning provocations for leadership teams as we collectively face this changing landscape together:
Control and Compliance is not the Goal
We have been using these two C’s in educational leadership and in schools as a primary source of motivation. We use them with students in the form of grades, detention, gold stars, check marks and marbles. We use them with teachers in the form of food, praise, and the subtle virtue signaling around martyrdom. We often use extra responsibility as a carrot to motivate teachers to do more, and it makes sense because that is how we got our job. We outworked others, we had a good attitude when others didn’t, and we pleased the leaders that helped us get a leg up. Historically, critical thinking has been necessary to make social and cultural change, and as we expose students to these change makers in history, a common trait they share is the willingness to question the status quo. This same questioning is needed now, and school leaders will need to unbuild and unlearn. Audit your school for all of the compliance and control mechanisms, policies, ways of doing or being, and eradicate them slowly, methodically and totally. Replacing these archaic structures with policies of co-creation, diversity, and intrinsic motivation will help new things grow. This organizational phenomenon is called emergence, and it is highly possible that new ways of being will emerge when control and compliance are unbuilt as guiding principles in our schools. Control and compliance runs so deeply in the groundwater of school…expect resistance, sustained, indignant and morally self-righteous.
From Leading as a Leader to Leading as a Leadership Team
We know from sports that good teams beat teams with great players. We know from systems thinkers that the best vehicle is not assembled from car parts from other luxury vehicles because when you take all those amazing individual parts and try to assemble them into a car, they don’t fit together. Leadership, in general, in or out of schools, is a team sport, and our next generation of school leaders needs to have a much deeper pool of knowledge and experience in the following areas:
Behavioral Economics: The study of why people do what they do…in the real world. This mashup of psychology, sociology and what I would call good old fashioned common sense or curiosity explores the landscape of human irrationality and how we can better anticipate it, work with it, and get out of patterns of resistance to it. People will be people, and as Dan Ariely writes, they are Predictably Irrational.
Group Process and/or Organizational Development: Working with groups, facilitating conversations where agreement is not the goal, and making large scale change with groups that will naturally resist those changes are paramount skills largely untaught in educational leadership. True, you will see theories of change in leadership curriculum, but how often will students in these programs be given the opportunity to put those theories into practice and navigate the conversational space where disagreement runs rampant, and the emotional field is thick?
Listening to Help: The standard skill that leaders currently utilize is listening to solve. The shift leaders can make is subtle. Moving from solving to helping is simply shifting the focus of who has agency. Listening to solve is a leftover relic of leadership as a form of performing brilliance. “Look at me, I am so smart, I have the answers to your problems. I will share those answers with you, and you can learn to be more like me.” Helping is different, we listen to understand, and to empower and witness people exploring options and ultimately learning from doing. It is less glamorous to wait and witness agency than perform brilliance.
From Safety to Risk
In the future, educational leaders, especially those leading middle to upper class schools filled with privilege and power must be more difficult, less agreeable, and much more disruptive to status quo practices, systems and policies reinforcing comfort for those traditionally most comfortable. I don’t mean for the sake of being difficult, I mean to stand up to the considerable and unrelenting pressure to ensure nothing changes. Academic programs, teaching practices, school discipline, human resources, evaluation of teachers and students, it is all in need of examination. If you are leading a public school, I imagine that the best way to take risks is as a group, finding ways to mobilize against pressure, unions looking to conserve, or systems that require compliance. If you are leading an independent school, driven by a mission, it will require action more focused on that mission and less focused on the market, and this very well could cost you your job. Are we willing to make doing our job more important than keeping our job? In some ways, I see educational leadership similar to politics, we seem to primarily act from a position of conserving our positional authority and from a position of fear of losing what we have. This type of fear-based decision making is what a school system rooted in control and compliance breeds. I am hoping for a future where leaders risk-to-trust, not the other way around.
The Inner Landscape of Leadership
So, with this context, and so much change needed, why would leaders want to do this work given that it can feel like they are making everyone upset with the everyday potential of losing their jobs. I think this is a fair question, and it is possible that not everyone on the leadership track should continue, but there is a bright light at the end of this tunnel. Emergent systems are the most creative, the most adaptive, and have the highest potential for new growth and new learning. It is hard to admit that a lot of leaders' emotional strife or lack of resilience is self-imposed, but it is. So much of our negative experience grows out of trying to make people happy or control others, and as one begins to let that go, it can feel incredibly liberating, and the space you can lead from is much more creative. I think we underestimate how much a control-based, co-dependent way of leading can impact our energy and spirit. We know we should not be organized by other people, and this makes it worse because even as we try to make them happy, we know we can’t. Like so many things in life, when we are trying to get around obstacles, it is often true, we need to go through them, and for me, the reward is helping teach this mindset to young people. Put more directly, the reason this matters is because we all want the same thing - to create and build systems and organizations that allow, want and need us to grow into the fullest version of one’s self. In these emergent systems, we feel capable of infinite possibility and we are fueled by creative collaboration.
At Leadership + Design, we try to build programs with the above ideas in mind. We currently offer a Leadership Lab Program for any new leader looking to build a skill set, mindset and habits that are not rooted in control and compliance. We also offer a program for more experienced leaders called Becoming a Badass Facilitator. This program similarly tackles the skills, mindsets and habits that go beyond a Chat GPT best practice list, and aims to provide a cohort and opportunity to practice what to do when you have no help, no idea what will work, and all eyes are on you for help. We offer Wonder Women, so that women can wrestle with the unique challenges of leading as a woman. All three programs ask the question, “How can we show up differently to meet the changing needs, and also call out the changes long overdue?” If this resonates, hopefully you can join us because leadership is a team sport.
