… Need Not Apply

It always makes me really, really happy when visitors to schools I’m currently leading comment upon the positive culture present. Indeed, this often matters more to me than external praise around exam results, inspection reports or accreditation processes, mainly because I’ve learned over the years that you simply can’t get any of these things without giving a great deal of care and consideration first to the climate within your workplace. The positive and purposeful culture of a school is pretty much key to its success, basically.

With this in mind, one of the most important things that you can ever do as a school leader is to only appoint really good people, wherever possible, and particularly those of a kind who will actively contribute to the positivity you’re seeking to intentionally cultivate. The most fundamental rule of recruitment, in my opinion, is that you aim to bring someone in who is better than the person they are replacing, but – quite crucially – this doesn’t always need to mean better in terms of professional ability because this aspect of an individual’s skillset can be grown or trained over time. You want someone who knows what they’re doing, certainly, but, more than anything else, it’s incredibly important that you get someone in who is a good person and who will help to maintain the collective spirit at high levels.

On the flip side, to borrow a phrase straight out of the All Blacks handbook, you obviously don’t want to appoint any dickheads (their words, not mine, don’t @ me, and all that). This fairly brusque term, in case you’re wondering, comes to us in this instance from the New Zealand mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka, who explained during an interview in 2017 how a ‘no dickheads’ policy was introduced into the rugby team’s mindset and how this has helped them to continue to be the hugely successful collective unit that they are over time. Mr Enoka described such individuals as “people putting themselves ahead of the team, people who think they’re entitled to things or expect the rules to be different for them, people operating deceitfully in the dark, or being unnecessarily loud about their work.” Later, during the same straight-talking interview, he notes that “A dickhead makes everything about them. Often teams put up with it because a player has so much talent. We look for early warning signs and wean the big egos out pretty quickly. Our motto is, if you can’t change the people, change the people.”

There’s a lot that we, as school leaders, can take away from this comment, in my view. You need characters in a school because students often connect wonderfully with teachers who have odd quirks or outgoing personalities, but every single individual within a school’s staff body needs to also understand that no one’s personal needs are bigger than the school itself. This doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t build flexibility into your approach as a school leader – everyone is different, so it’s vital to know how to get the best out of everybody – but you just can’t have anyone who is so outlying that their demands and complaints become disruptive to the positivity of the school’s culture. Schools should be inclusive workplaces, but there’s a lot to be said also for individuals looking to fit into the way that things are done in a particular setting, even if this isn’t how they may prefer things to be or how they may have experienced things previously.

I’ve worked with a few colleagues over the years who would almost certainly fall into Mr Enoka’s ‘dickhead’ category, you see. Some were actually excellent teachers, despite their fairly obvious character flaws. On each occasion, it was not only deeply unpleasant that I had to share the same postcode as them for huge swathes of each day but also actually incredibly disruptive to the work I was trying to do. After a while, your focus can move from the things that you should be thinking about to wondering what the next moment of really bad behaviour from your colleague will be – what they’re going to say in that meeting, who they’re going to upset, what hand grenades they’re going to chuck into your latest plan, that sort of thing. Depending on the school you work in, leaders can suss such people out and move them on quite quickly, or you can be stuck with them forever until you decide to move on yourself. Either way, things rarely end well and teams can be hugely affected in a negative sense by the presence of just one individual whose sole purpose appears to be to cause trouble for everyone else.

So, when you’re building a team, you’re often looking for character over raw talent. Applicants with the strongest CVs up to this point may not always be the best fit for the collective unit you’re putting together, to be frank. Just because someone has a glittering track record of working in one or two good schools, it doesn’t always follow that they’d be a great fit for the team in your setting. Although it’s not unusual to read letters which can come across as a bit brash in terms of applicants talking loudly about their own achievements (I’ve done this, I’ve made this happen, I’m soooo amazing, you know what I mean), it’s always a good idea to look for clues about how well people are able to get on with others and to work as part of a team. You’ve got to work with whoever you appoint for quite a while, basically, so search for indications of collegiality as much as you do for suggestions of individual flair or professional brilliance wherever you can.

I should state at this point, however, that I’ve made a few bad calls in the past in terms of appointments, so I’m kind of writing from experience of having got it wrong before. For the most part, I would suggest, I’ve mainly followed my own rules and only appointed good people, but it’s not always easy to tell from an interview process if you’ve got a decision right and sometimes you only really find out once that person is in position and making lots of colleagues quite angry. The problem with recruitment processes for schools in general is that the professionals who come across as most appointable are often those who run on adrenaline during the interviews, and this can make people appear to be super positive and energetic on the day. Once they’re actually working with you full-time, however, and once the jet fuel has been replaced with a lower grade of petrol, you can see that you maybe should have gone for the other applicant who didn’t try quite as hard to charm you on the day.

People can also change, however, and it’s certainly possible to appoint someone who may not be the finished article in terms of character but who can learn from their colleagues and become a little better once they’re working in their new school. Sometimes, this is simply because their previous experiences in other settings have not really taught them the benefits of collegiality and culture-building just yet. With this in mind, it pays for leaders to go into detail about how important it is for every single adult in a school to know what specific contributions they are able to make in terms of supporting the cultivation of a positive culture. One of my own rules in this regard, quite simply, is that I wouldn’t ask any of my colleagues to do anything that I wouldn’t be prepared to do myself. In my current setting, for example, where the temperature can reach 50 degrees during the hottest months, I’m only going to ask colleagues to supervise the entry to and exit from school of our students outside because that’s something which I also do each day. Once your colleagues can see you doing this – once they can see the actual sweat you’re covered in and the effort you put into the duty – then they themselves can also learn about the importance and the benefits of what you’re doing. If I insist that others do this for me so that I can sit and have a cup of tea in a lovely AC-cooled office, then I’m damaging the positive culture of the school, and I’m being what Gilbert Enoka would deem to be a you-know-what.

I’m genuinely proud of the school I currently lead because of the positive culture which my colleagues and I have cultivated over time, and it always delights me that we get a great deal of applicants for all vacant positions during our recruitment season. My current school is a great place to work because we’ve got so many brilliant people working there, all of whom make their own specific contributions to the collective team spirit which is firmly on display each day. Like many international schools, and especially those which are growing like we are, we have a degree of transience within our staff body (usually around 10 – 15% annually), so we’re usually bringing quite a few new colleagues in each year. If any readers of this blog are interested in applying for any of the vacant positions and they believe that they have the skills and the personal characteristics required to join a great school, then I would welcome their applications. But, of course, dickheads need not apply.