The Authentic Leader by Andrew Morrish EXTRACT

The Authentic Leader

Authentic: (adj.) Meaning genuine, original. From the Greek autos, ‘self’, and hentos, ‘being.’

The Authentic Leader

A four-part model to lead your school to success

Andrew Morrish

BLOOMSBURY EDUCATION Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland

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First published in Great Britain, 2022 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

This edition published in Great Britain, 2022 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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PrefaceContentsix

Part 4 Create

13

14 Impact,

Afterword 213

The nine baseplates: a brief finesse 215 Acknowledgements 219 References 221 Index 237

‘I learned a long time ago the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side.’ Maya Angelou

‘The goal isn’t to be perfect, but to be authentic.’ Iyanla Vanzant

‘It matters not how straight the gait, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’

Final verse from Invictus, the poem by W.E. Henley that Nelson Mandela taught to prisoners whilst incarcerated on Robben Island.

To Cath, for everything.

Preface

‘Don’t worry about being good. Aspire to be authentic.’ Yann Martel

This book began more than a quarter of a century ago.

I’d been teaching for five years and had just handed in my research thesis for a Master of Education in Leadership and Management. It was about this thing called ‘organisational culture’, a beguiling kind of primordial soup that was beginning to emerge as a frontrunner in determining whether a school was effective or not.

I was not entirely convinced, although the research seemed compelling enough. I was conscious that I had never run a school myself and had no experience of making one ‘effective’, whatever that looked like, which was probably just as well because the whole affair looked dicey and way beyond my limited abilities. Besides, I could barely be trusted with knowing how to follow someone, never mindTherelead.was much I still needed to learn.

If truth be told, I felt a bit of a fraud writing all this stuff about how best to run a school, especially as being in charge appeared fraught with complexity and jeopardy and I’d never done it myself. It was like me telling a chief constable how to run a police station or a senior nurse a hospital wing. I knew nothing aboutSixty-thousandeither.

words or so later and I had no clue as to whether what I had written was worthy or would prove to be useful to anyone who happened to show a passing interest. I remember showing the finished product sheepishly to my boss, knowing full well that he’d see it as some kind of sorcery. I was right. I could tell what he was thinking: ‘What is all this stuff about rituals, myths, passion and emotions?’ For him, and many others of his generation, the secret to running a good school was that you worked hard, maintained control at all times and stuck to the script.

Feeling mildly perturbed, the question as to whether or not what I had written was even remotely relevant would remain unanswered for the time being. I guess I would have to wait and see. Maybe one day I would get to lead a school myself and find out if I was right.

And so there I left it on the shelf, canvas-bound and untouched.

It remained there for two decades until 2016, when I decided to write a book about how to lead a school. By this time, I had been a headteacher for almost seventeen years and had been privileged enough to lead several schools to outstanding, including from special measures. Throughout that time so many things had changed: the national curriculum, Ofsted, funding, assessment, workload agreements, appraisal, academisation, along with a number of new governments and countless education secretaries. I was still there though. Unscathed and as resolute as ever.

It was at this point that I remembered the abandoned thesis.

I had a vague recollection that I had made a mental note to go back to it at some point in the future. That future was now. I was intrigued to see if what I had written was true, relevant even. That things like purpose, culture and beliefs really were the main drivers when it came to running an effective school.

I took the volume down from the top shelf of the bookcase and gingerly began to read it. To my surprise, it wasn’t as bad as I had thought, despite the occasional cringe. I particularly liked that there was much I had been curious about. I was barely a few pages in – during the Statement of Intent – when I noticed I’d laid down a rather fanciful gauntlet with some questions that seemed way above my pay grade at the time:

● What are the factors and forces that make up the culture of the school?

● How do we go about identifying and changing them?

● How do these impact on the management of change?

● How will all this lead to greater school effectiveness?

Good questions indeed. Still are.

So good in fact that I’m still trying to solve them to this day, the incomplete leader that I am. Back then I had an excuse; I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never led a school before. Now I have, and so I guess the time has come to finally answer these questions, once and for all. Hopefully I’ve learnt something in all those years.

Here’s what I’ve mainly learnt: Change is easy, improvement is hard. We’ll discover more about this along the way as we work our way through the book. Researchers and authors will try to convince you otherwise, teasing and taunting you, as they did me. They’ll seduce you into believing that they have found the solution. That simply by applying what they believe is best for you, your school will be transformed overnight. That you’d be a sucker to ignore it. Besides, everyone else is doing it, so it must be true.

But transformation and improvement are not the same. ‘What works’ actually means ‘it once worked somewhere’. Most things will work at some point given half a chance, even if you do have to bash a square peg into a round hole.

Yes, change is hard, and improvement is harder. But making it stick is hardest of all.It’s all about impact, pure and simple. That’s it. Nothing else.

If you are the kind of leader who is driven to accomplish great things, then proper impact – sustainable impact – has to be meaningful. It has to add value. It must be deliberate, and it has to be on purpose.

Which brings us nicely to the whole point of this book. Purpose.

The model in this book will never transform your school overnight. In fact it comes with a cast-iron guarantee that if you simply work your way through it formulaically, it absolutely won’t. It’s not that kind of model. No: this one requires you to think hard along the way about what it is you are doing and to then apply it in such a way that you make it work for you.

Think of it as a multiplayer computer game, where each new level reveals a whole series of landscapes and terrains waiting to be explored. Yes, you and your team can whizz through each one and complete it in record time (you can even cheat and look up the shortcuts). But that’s missing the point. That’s not the purpose of the game. You have to solve the problems along the way, and only you can do that. Nobody else. That’s all part of the fun; it’s why we keep coming back for more. It’s what it means to become an authentic leader.

Introduction

Leadership all comes down to three things: solving problems, making decisions, and then accomplishing great things.

In fact, you don’t really need to worry about the last one, because if you do the first two well, by and large, all will be fine and great things will follow. Although problem-solving and decision-making may appear similar, they are very different. Problem-solving is a method, a set of activities required to analyse a situation deeply. Decision-making is a process that follows the solving of the problem in regard to the array of choices on offer that lead to the preferred solution. In order to solve a problem, it is inevitable that you will need to make a decision as a result of thinking carefully about it. Take going to hospital. You go through a whole series of diagnostic processes that seek to solve the problem of your breathlessness. Once you have the necessary information, you then have a decision to make in terms of how best to solve it and why. This could include doing nothing and living with the condition, medication, lifestyle changes, surgery, et cetera, along with a clear rationale for each. Ultimately though, the decision comes down to you. No decision is more right than another and the decision you take may well be different to the one someone else might make in similar circumstances. The point is, there is no correct answer: only the one that you believe works best for you (and those around you whom you trust).

Yes, there is much you need to know, and much you need to practice when solving problems in schools. There is plenty to get wrong and therefore plenty to learn. Along the way you’ll wonder if anything that you believe to be true is in fact so. Your beliefs will be sorely tested. If they are not, you are not leading hardLeadershipenough. can be as puzzling as it is simple. It constantly tests you in ways you were never expecting. This is why the central premise of this book is that an authentic leader is an incomplete leader. It’s important you learn to accept this

‘Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than you.’

Dr Seuss Start with you

from day one, either as an aspiring leader, head of department, subject lead, or as an experienced headteacher and CEO. If you don’t, you may end up losing hope –because no matter how close you think you are to solving the puzzle, invariably up pops the ‘Do not pass go’ card and you find yourself right back at the start. There are too many snakes and not enough ladders.

Authentic leaders know this, and they also know that, although they may not control the throw of the dice, they are very much in control of themselves. This is where strategy starts and success ends.

To lead well, you need to think deeply about what matters most to you. You need to find your leadership voice. And when you do, it needs to be authentic. Despite what you might have read, when it comes to leadership, qualities such as gravitas, panache and flair do not come into it. This might work for some, where bluster and bravado are what carries them through. But leadership can be fickle; it always finds you out.

What we need are leaders with substance, and courage. These are your authentic leaders – those who understand that before you can lead others, you need to learn how to lead yourself. It’s always you who writes the manual and the guidebook. It’s your story, your narrative. Successful school leadership always starts and ends with you: who you are, what you believe in, and why you do the things you Nothingdo.prepares

you for what it feels like as a headteacher, be it your first time or as an old hand in a new school. As a new headteacher in particular, it’s not until you sit in your office chair for the first time and close the door that you experience the weight of responsibility pushing firmly down on you. That’s when you feel it, right there in the pit of your stomach.

You sit back in your chair, look up and observe for the first time the sword of Damocles hanging perilously over you by a single hair of a horse’s tail. You notice how it could fray and snap without a moment’s notice and come crashing down on you. And then you realise that this is the price you pay for turning up. You understand why so few covet it. From Damocles your mind turns to another legend, the myth of Tantalus, whom the gods punished by forcing him to remain still with a huge boulder hung forever over his head, all the while standing alone in a crystal-clear lake he could not drink from, beside a tree whose bountiful fruit he could not eat. Oh, you know at least how he feels! Leadership can be as lonely as it is tantalising.

But that’s fine, you say to yourself. This is why you’re here. This is what bold and principled leadership is all about. This is at the heart of being authentic: so long as you stay true to your core beliefs and do the very best you can, you know you can live with the pressure and perils of the job. Leading a school is about making sure you keep on turning up and speaking from the same authentic and

unique leadership voice. Be yourself. Others will thank you for it, and you’ll thank yourself too in the long run.

Making the case

There are three reasons why I believe we need authentic leaders. First, we seem to have lost our way. Our current education system remains tethered to a creaking Victorian model organised around bells, tests and farming. We remain unclear as to the true purpose of schooling and why we teach our young people the things we do. There is still much we cannot agree on collectively, such as how best to assess our pupils or judge which school is better at what. We have no agreed cross-party, long-term vision for education, just a set of flimsy political ideals and whims that come and go with each new government.

The current tensions over who actually controls our schools remain as stark as ever: ministers, civil servants, her majesty’s inspectors, regional school commissioners, academy chiefs, or local authority bosses? Somewhere in there as well are headteachers. Each have perfectly legitimate views on the purpose of education, but seldom – if ever – do we get them in the same room together to agree on it. According to the latest figures on the Gov.UK website (January 2021), 37% of primary schools and 78% of secondary schools in England are now academies. For the first time ever, more than half of all pupils (52%) are now attending an academy. This means that as a legal entity in their own right, their annual accounts are filed at Companies House. Although a not-for-profit company, education is nonetheless big business. When I was leading a multi-academy trust (and a school for that matter), I was acutely aware that if I lost money, some of it was likely to be yours. You as a tax-payer had funded it. Now, when I run my own private company, if I lose money nobody cares. All of us have skin in the game when it comes to schools. We are all stakeholders. This is why, as school and trust leaders, we need to know the nature of the business we are in as the stakes are much higher, especially given the increased levels of autonomy, accountability and amounts of money involved.

Whether we like it or not, as teachers all of us are producers in some form or another. I am certainly not advocating a ‘production line’ approach – far from it – but we are all working in production companies of some form or another. We all have an end ‘product’ that is measured, tested and checked, and along the way we all aspire to producing beautiful things, none more so than at the end of each and every lesson. There is no doubt in my mind that perceptions about what this end product might look like has evolved considerably during my career,