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In school
An invitation to lead Jo Cruse describes how greater authenticity in schools can transform students’ relationships with leadership This June, in front of over 100 Lower Sixth students at an independent secondary school, I publicly shared a very private battle. When I was 16, I was diagnosed with a potentially debilitating mental health condition, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). In response to spiralling levels of anxiety in the brain, this condition leads to a compulsion to undertake certain rituals – like hand washing, or checking that household doors are closed, or that the oven is switched off – in an attempt to create a sense of control. For me, this condition meant that I often needed assistance getting out of the house in the morning – if left to my own devices it would have taken me hours to do so. It meant that, as I watched my peers frantically solving calculus questions or writing French essays, I would spend 30 or 40 minutes at the start of an exam checking and rechecking the details on the front page of the examination booklet, unable to turn the page and begin. It meant I would fall asleep on the floor of my bedroom at night, because the thought of the numerous rituals I had to complete before I was able to get into bed was so exhausting, I sometimes chose not to. But this was not what my school saw. To the school community, I was a confident high achiever – Head Girl and top of my class – by all accounts, a success. Nobody knew the turmoil which unfolded daily behind closed doors. I saw my condition as evidence of profound weakness, something which threatened to undermine all I had achieved, so I told no-one. The examples of success I saw around me were of infallible leaders who were perpetually strong and seemingly never faltered. It was incomprehensible to me that these two things – weakness and success – could co-exist. But I was wrong. Since receiving that diagnosis at 16, I have been Chief of Staff to the former South African Leader of the Opposition, taught Politics and Economics at a prestigious UK school, and completed a nine-month expedition from Alaska to Argentina to share the stories of pioneering social entrepreneurs. I now lead The Unreasonables, which works with over 40 of the UK’s most ambitious schools to create cultures of leadership. The programme I ran in June, Debunking the Leadership Myth, sought to challenge the limiting beliefs which prevent students from embracing leadership, impediments I well understand because I, too, had been mistaken about myself and what constitutes a leader. My experience of managing OCD has given me a profound sense of empathy for the myriad challenges young people face as they navigate an increasingly uncertain world. It has caused me to examine why I felt I could not be both a leader and an authentic version of myself. And it has compelled me to explore how schools can best be supported to enable students to answer these pressing questions for themselves. Through The Unreasonables’ work with many prestigious schools across the UK, one fact has become abundantly clear: by 15 or 16, many young people have made the binary choice as to
whether they are leaders or not. The impact of this decision on students’ aspirations for their own lives can have a significant impact on their future trajectory. Why is it that students are making this choice? In large part, we find it to be because young people believe that leadership is not for them, but something for others – a concept of importance solely to their peers who wish to be Head Boy or Head Girl, or who dream of holding a future leadership role in government or business. Too many ask ‘Why should I care about leadership, if I feel it isn’t for me?’ Our response is two-fold. Firstly, young people are all going to have to lead something. It may not be a Fortune 500 company or a country, but, at the very least, young people will all have to lead their own lives. Self-leadership, the ability to take ownership of one’s life, is an aspect of leadership relevant to each and every student, irrespective of their career aspirations. Secondly, the challenge is to reframe students’ understanding of leadership. Often, students see leadership as convergent – that to be a leader they must fit a very particular, narrow mould which usually involves them being confident extroverts. Students’ understanding of what a leader looks like tends to be so impossibly narrow that it freezes many young people out of leadership long before they reach Sixth Form. In reality, leadership is being seen as increasingly divergent. The notion of leadership as being solely ‘strong and stable’ is being as swiftly dismissed in this field as it is by the UK electorate. The perception of successful leaders as tough, infallible extroverts is being subverted by an appreciation that leaders can occupy a multitude of places on a much wider spectrum. This understanding – that young people don’t have to look or sound a certain way, and can still be leaders – is essential to reframing their relationship with leadership. So how can young people be encouraged to embrace leadership as divergent rather than convergent? Allowing young people to see around them examples of authentic leadership – leaders who are prepared to present themselves as whole people in all the complexity which that involves – is one of the most powerful interventions in this regard. It is why we recently witnessed the Head of a leading UK independent school share with some five hundred girls, parents and governors the struggle she had gone through to manage, though not overcome, her stammer. Her openness made her no less of a leader. In fact, it did quite the opposite. In that moment, in choosing to take the school community into her confidence and present her authentic self, she welcomed many young women in that audience into leadership. For perhaps the very first time, they had been presented with an image of leadership which was not flawless, or an unreachable hero. It was an example in which they could see something of themselves. The national conversation around celebrating a more divergent understanding of leadership is gaining momentum. At the HMC Annual Conference last October, The Unreasonables’
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