Leadership during complex and tricky times requires more of us as leaders. It is a time where we need to dig a little deeper, tap into reserves we often do not know we have, and sometimes we need to learn new ways of operating.
The last few months have been like nothing I have ever experienced in Education, and I have driven this leadership swively chair through a Network Review in the early 2000s, a school closure, the National Standards debacle and numerous other moments of ‘crazy’. I would like to think I am well versed in ‘complex and tricky, with a side of crazy’.
This, however, feels different.
The load has been heavy.
It has been full on; something one of my colleagues described as a ‘full time adrenaline rush’, with many complexities to manage. I am expecting that throughout the rest of 2020 there will be some leadership casualties across the Globe as the additional pressures and strains take their toll.
Leadership in times of chaos is, in my mind, akin to trying to balance on a tightrope, juggling multiple cups of hot coffee, all the whilst humming a tune, chewing gum, dodging kamikaze pigeons, and finding you probably should have ‘gone’ before you started the journey! Come to think of it – in comparison, what I have just described sounds perfectly ‘doable’.
The ubiquitous nature of the Covid-19 Virus has meant that education globally has been flipped upside down, and turned inside out, and this has in turn required a rapid, and agile response. The Covid-19 Pandemic has been the single most disruptive agent of change for Education globally since the Second World War. This disruption poses both opportunity and complexity for leaders across the globe. Several months into this crisis, after navigating many of these complexities, there have been some leadership learnings that I have noted. The following learnings come from my own personal experience, and the lived experiences of my colleagues – I have purposefully looked only at the response from within my profession. This list would look most certainly different if I was to take the learnings from our world leaders. That would be more of a ‘what to do, and what not to do’ list.
Leadership Learnings from an Educational Leadership perspective
Learning One: Employ and tap into your Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
During times of chaos, knowing how to tap into your EQ is a helpful tool because it assists you to bring your ‘humanity’ to the table. This plays out in two ways; firstly, you can understand what your response is, and secondly, you can understand what someone else’s response is (think of it as a ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ moment – where you are able to walk around in someone else’s shoes). Both EQ understandings are critical when you are dealing with high emotions, stressful scenarios and high stake health outcomes. In short, this is about leaders having:
- Self awareness – knowing how you respond during tough times and the projection you send out to your team and your community, matters. Are you outwardly calm? (you may have the ‘squirrels playing in the traffic’ turmoil on the inside – but it is what you project outwards that matters). Are you in control of your emotions and can you regulate them? In other words, are you able to keep your cool when your cool is needed to be kept, and be deliberately calm? That is not to say that you must be an impassionate brick! Instead, as Brené Brown would say, embrace your vulnerability!
- Empathy – understanding the lived experience of others (and that it may be different to yours), accounting for this and then finding ways to compensate for an individual’s circumstances is at the heart of empathetic leadership. In times of chaos, leaders need to look out for not just the professional, but also the personal, circumstances of the team. People matter, relationships matter – all else is secondary. When in doubt, think about the impact your leadership decisions will have on the other person. Are you making it better or harder for them?
- Social Skills – being able to foster and maintain relationships, knowing how to have the ‘hard’ conversations with others, and being able to look for the unsaid, are helpful tools. Team members need to know you have their back, and that you are going to be consistent.
Learning Two: Supporting the team
This is all context-based. What it looks like for my people may well be quite different for yours. So ask. Find out from your team what things they need to make the situation better. Some may need a little personal support, like access to counselling, and some may need to work on something from their professional area. Consider yourself the ‘broker’. Find out what your people need, think about what that might look like, who is the best person or resource to connect them with, what is in your power to do, and how you might do it.
Learning Three: Planning and Data
I am a planner. Plans help me get my thinking straight and they help me determine the best courses of action going forward. For me, planning takes the ‘fear in my belly’ and gives it purpose, reining it in, and taking advantage of it. During chaotic moments, planning gives you direction for what you need in order to survive today and it gives you some control over what you might need tomorrow.
Data – both soft and hard, provides the planning with substance. It helps you make decisions that are based on fact and logic. The Covid-19 crisis is an excellent example of why this was critical. Schools in Aotearoa have had excellent direction from our Ministry of Education and our Ministry of Health in relation to what needed to be done, as our Country moved through the Alert levels developed to respond to the Global Crisis. In our context, data included how many families intended to come back under each Alert Level, who needed hard copy learning packs vs online options and finding out from our community how things were unfolding within each of their contexts, so we could adapt and respond in an agile and appropriate way.
Learning Four: Future Planning
Forward Planning is not so much about being a futurist or crystal ball gazer but putting in some reflective thinking about the ‘what if’ scenarios (see Planning and Data above!). In this case, think Boy/Girl Scout and the motto ‘be prepared’. Forward planning is about seeking multiple elements of feedback from various sources, and sourcing and incorporating ideas from the team. Pre lockdown, after observing what was happening in other countries with school closures, pre and forward planning at our place meant asking our Digital Improvement team to consider the ‘what if we had to close schools in Aotearoa’ scenario and to think about how we might respond.
To respond remotely we needed data. This meant finding out how many families had access to the internet and a device, and who might require a hard copy of learning. We also needed to find out what support our teachers would require (if any) in order to get going, especially our newer to the profession teachers. This pre-planning proved critical in the coming weeks and months. As our country moved into lockdown and schools were required to implement distance learning plans, we had 48 hours to get it up and running. This forward planning proved to be invaluable. This habit of pre-thinking what might be needed next, helped us navigate our way through the chaos.
Learning Five: Messaging and communication
For me there were four key takeouts regarding messaging.
- Timely – when it is chaotic the timing of communication is important. It is a fine balance of being too soon or being too late. The ‘Goldilocks’ moment of getting it ‘just right’ can be tricky. Giving people what they need when they need it, helps tame the chaos, and provide people with a sense of security.
- Audience – one message is not always useful for all audiences. What we communicated to our team about, was not always what we communicated to the community and parents, or our Board of Trustees. Like an onion, school communities have multiple layers. Often the messages were similar, but we found it was important to ‘bespoke’ the content to fit the context, as this ensured the right level of detail was provided to the right layer of audience.
- Personnel – ensuring the right person delivered the communication was also important. It did not need to always come from me, as the leader. Sometimes the appropriate ‘face’ was the classroom teacher, or our office manager, or one of our senior leadership team. What was important, was that those who needed to be in the loop were kept in the loop and that messaging was consistent and quality checked!
- Reliable – when you are in the midst of chaos, reliable and trustworthy information and messaging is important. Coivd-19 is a global health crisis that has had devastating consequences across the world. Our communities are anxious and they are looking to us to reassure them that their children, as they return to school, will be safe and that teachers have ‘got this’ online and distance learning environment sorted. Parents and caregivers are needing to put their trust in us, and in turn, we need to be able to reassure them that this trust is well placed. Presenting inaccurate, confusing or unclear messaging would erode the trust and confidence our community have in us. Schools have, as mentioned above, been provided with support to manage this as we have moved through the alert levels. New Zealand operates self-governing schools, and under normal operations, I am the first to encourage educational leaders to act in agentic ways. However, during a global pandemic, following the guidelines set by those more expert than me, keeps my staff, students and community safe. This is not the time to be ‘innovative’ and go off ‘piste’.
Learning Six: Self Review and adaptability
If you have been a reader of my blog posts in the past then you will know that I am an advocate of ongoing self-review and adapting based on the information you gain. The importance of this has been self-evident during the Covid-19 chaos. For our setting, it has been particularly helpful during the online/distance learning phase, and more latterly, as we start to think about the ‘so what, now what’ in relation to resetting and reimaging education delivery as we go forward. (more on this at a later stage) Reviewing what works and what does not has allowed us to adapt and respond in real-time, and not just assume we think we know it is working (or not).
Learning Seven: Team work and Team placement
I could not stress this enough – leadership during chaotic times is an awful lot easier when you have a good team around you, then when you do not. Just as important as the team, is where they are placed – in other words, what they are responsible for. A highlight for me has been how amazing all of our team have been – everyone has played their part and worked collaboratively to ‘get it done’, and I am very grateful. I read something about how good leadership during a crisis is about setting up ‘an architecture for decision making’ so that there is a clear line of sight and accountability, and people understand their role and what level of decision making they have control over. I agree. Knowing your team, adapting to new information as it arises, knowing what the team’s strengths are and how each of them fit into the ‘cogs of the machine’ calms the chaos and helps things run smoother and with more consistency.
Lesson Eight: Mutuality
Mutuality is that feeling of ‘we’re all in this together’. Leaders who project hope and an unyielding belief in the notion that a ‘better day is coming’ reap far more rewards than those whose lead from fear and intimidation. Optimism, whilst projecting a ‘quiet confidence’ and tapping into your EQ, help the team see that you are on top of the chaos, confronting the crisis and that you have their backs.
Another important element of mutuality is to tap into your networks – your colleagues are a welcome place of respite during these chaotic times. They are driving the same swively chair as you, and together, your collective wisdom is a great resource. I am profoundly grateful for the support and collegiality of my colleagues – together we have been able to navigate these choppy times, sharing the load and collaborating together to make sure we are doing the right things for our students.
Lesson Nine: Agileness
Leadership during tough times is a fast-paced, interchangeable ecosystem that requires a range of flexible and adaptable skills. In essence, this is about being agile. Agile leadership allows you to pick and choose the leadership style and approach that you as a leader might need for the context and the moment in hand. A crisis is where agile leaders really shine, because a crisis is unpredictable, and needs to be managed through. An agile leader is collaborative, uses feedback and information to make decisions, and looks for the opportunities in a crisis, where others might see only the roadblocks. Agile leaders encourage and grow other agile leaders across the team, and during chaotic times, an agile team can adapt, respond and meet challenges quickly. More importantly, an agile team will be able to reimagine and redevelop education in a post Covid world.
Lesson Ten: Kindness
Finally, the most important. Although I said I would not share any of the leadership lessons from the political world, I feel the need to make an exception for this one. Our Nations leader talks often about the importance of being ‘kind’, including highlighting this message in an address to the United Nations in 2018. It became an important reminder of what our Nation needed as she regularly reminded us all during the Covid-19 chaos to ‘Be strong, be kind‘.
I would like to take the ‘be kind’ a little further and tell you, and all the other educational leaders out there, to be kind to yourself. What you are driving right now is unlike anything our global education system has ever experienced before – it is an extraordinary time. What we have known has had to be rewritten, how we lead has had to be readjusted and the ways we deliver education has had to be reimagined. This is not an easy road to navigate. In time, it will become a moment in history that you were a part of, and it will have lasting consequences – both good and not so good – for a long while yet. Some, we may not have even begun to imagine. So, please be kind to yourself. Take it one step at a time and rest in the belief that ‘this too shall pass’ (perhaps like a painful gallstone but it will pass). Take time for you, trust in your instincts and feel confident that you are doing the best you can in a time that is unparalleled.
What have been your leadership learnings? How have you ‘calmed the chaos’? Do these resonate with you, and do you have things that you would add? Leadership is complex, and during chaotic times, even more so.
Finally, in case you haven’t been told this yet, thank you for your leadership. Who YOU are, makes a difference!
Very useful for my introspection. Thank you❤️