Love From Above

Ask any number of teachers in any number of schools in any number of places what they want from their senior leaders, and you’ll probably get any number of responses. Depending upon the range of experiences covered up to this point, as well as the diversity of current needs, some teachers may like their leaders to be inspirational, dynamic and stylishly go-getting, some may favour uncompromising displays of strength whilst others prefer empathy, support or sensitivity, and one or two might even want someone they can cosy up to so that a close relationship furthers their own career aspirations. An often-overlooked key attribute of a senior leader in education, however, is that those at the top need first and foremost to be present.

Seriously, before you get to all the adjectives that senior leaders would like their colleagues to use to describe them, you’ve got to simply turn up a lot. If you’re a senior leader in a school and no one knows where you are most days, then you’re kind of missing the point about what the school actually needs from you. In addition, if turning up to you means clocking in but then sort of hiding away somewhere and working on important documents on your own – maybe even putting a do not disturb sign up for good measure – then you’re also fairly wide of the mark in terms of being an effective senior leader.

So, let’s unpick what being present in a school as a senior leader means. To my mind, you’ve got to firstly be highly visible. At every opportunity, whether it’s morning or afternoon duties, breaks, lunches, events or anything else, you’ve got to be there and you’ve got to be interacting with members of your school community. As well as being a chance for you to build relationships with others during these times, teachers, students and parents all need to know that being able to speak to you about something wouldn’t be a difficult thing to do if they needed to because they see you out and about every single day. Secondly, as well as the out and about bit, you need to be accessible in other ways. It shouldn’t be a challenge to contact you in order to arrange a meeting about something, and if anyone needs to go through various layers of underlings first or if it takes about a month to get a response from you about something, then you need to rethink both your systems and your attitudes towards community engagement. Also, when anyone does want to speak to you, it’s undoubtedly important to them (or they wouldn’t have tried, right?) so you need to be present in both body and mind. Just sitting there and sort of nodding along with no real interest isn’t ok. Instead, it’s vital that you give whoever is speaking to you your full attention – and you can demonstrate this by employing clear body language – so that they know that they can trust you not only on this occasion but also in the future should anything else come up, which will most likely be the case because that’s how life in a school works, as we all likely know.

In order to get to the position outlined above, where you can actually build time into your day to be present a lot, easily accessible and highly attentive to the needs of others, you need to be super organised and make sure that not only do you know what you’re doing on each day but also that any key tasks are dealt with well ahead of deadlines. If you’re not super organised, then you’ll start to flap around a lot, you’ll never have time for anyone because you’ll always be busy with something you could have done at a different moment and your colleagues will notice and lose a little confidence in you as a result. The only absolute certainty and true commonality that I’ve experienced in all the schools I’ve worked in over the years is that stuff happens all the time – especially involving those little people whose needs we’re paid to support – so you can’t just rock up each day and not have any time to work with them because you’re too busy doing things you should have already addressed.

In addition to being present, senior leaders also need to be utterly predictable. If this sounds really boring to you and you’d rather be some kind of free-spirit who just turns up each day and explodes into a form of impromptu edu-jazz performance, then you’re probably in the wrong job. Being present, as I hope I’ve made clear already, is hugely important in lots of ways, but none of this works if no one knows which version of you is going to turn up each day. If your colleagues and the students in your care are walking on eggshells around because they need to know first if it’s angry you, or hyperactive you, or sarcastic you, or miserable you who has come to school today, then you’re not supporting the cultivation of a healthy and stable positive school culture. Schools work best when there are as few surprises as possible, so the routines you follow, the example you set through your own daily, predictable behaviours and the consistency of your approach will help this to continue to be the case.

Speaking of the example you set, there’s always going to be an element of the buck stops here with senior leadership in schools. This means, essentially, that you need to be highly adept also with dealing with both plaudits and pressure. If you’re happy to show off the accolades received by your current school during an inspection report or if you repost a school’s exam successes as if they’re your own, for example, then you must also be similarly ok with taking responsibility for anything that doesn’t go quite as well. If you want your colleagues to be able to take criticism on board purposefully and professionally, then this is something which you ought to have modelled yourself already on one or two occasions. This, to my mind, is another key facet of visible and purposeful senior leadership. Everyone makes mistakes, but as a senior leader you need to own yours and take responsibility for them so that you can show others that this is how things are done in our school culture.

The thing about very visibly taking responsibility for all issues which basically fall under your remit as a school leader is that the colleagues you work alongside will very quickly learn to know that they can rely upon you to support and protect them. You will still ask your colleagues to take responsibility for their actions and to own and learn from their mistakes, but there are unlikely to be any objections to this because they have seen you model how this is done already. They will follow your lead because they have seen how you react and respond to challenging situations, basically. On the flipside, if your reaction to a problem is to pass it down the line and to take no responsibility for it, then you’re actively contributing to a negative culture within your school. If there’s an issue which either clearly needs your support or which actually kind of involves you already, but your response is to hurriedly insist that those working at levels below you make it go away without any help from you and all you want to do is to bury your head in the sand and let others handle it, then resentment will build fairly quickly. All professionals need to feel the love from above in terms of their direct and indirect line managers supporting them with issues, and if you as a senior leader ever miss an opportunity to show support then you need to know that your colleagues just won’t forget this. They’ll always remember when you could and should have helped them with something, but you chose not to instead. The first step towards being a highly effective senior leader is being present and predictable. In addition, if you’re happy to take the plaudits for things going well, then you also need to be comfortable with dealing with pressure and taking responsibility for things which aren’t quite so successful. Similarly, colleagues working under you need to feel the love from above at all times, and if you choose to miss an opportunity to support them then this is something which they’re unlikely to forget.