Systemic leadership starts on the front line
I’d been asked by a MAT CEO to explore how the senior leadership teams (SLTs) in the trust’s dozen or so schools experienced being part of the trust. I chose to focus on the ‘second tier’ SLT members, comprising those ‘below’ Deputy Head or Vice Principal in each school’s organisational chart, or - as they put it - those in the business of ‘turning strategy into reality’.
The MAT’s executive team - the CEO and his deputies - didn’t feel that they knew these people very well, and it turned out that they were right. Those in this ‘second tier’ didn’t feel well known, didn’t feel understood and didn’t feel particularly valued. Their engagement with the MAT and their understanding of what it expected of them depended entirely on what the ‘first tier’ - the Principal and Vice Principals - chose to pass down the chain, but it was never optimal. Decisions from the MAT often didn’t make sense as they arrived without any context. Moreover, because the MAT executive’s relationship with the school was managed entirely through (and by) the ‘first tier’, those in the ‘second tier’ felt that the boundary between the school and the MAT was located somewhere above them. Below that boundary, they were part of the school, not the trust. And they felt that this was by design.
The impact of this was profound. Even though most said that they were ready and willing to be engaged directly by the MAT, most also said they felt distant from it, and disengaged. They were extras in its story, and could not therefore make sense of the parts they were told occasionally they had to play. This was particularly confusing - disconcerting, even - because the MAT was very clear that its intended culture was all about connection and belonging. Indeed, the fact that these people felt disconnected and detached was a real shock to the executive team. They were actually hurt, but they also quickly saw that the damage was more than cultural. They were also failing to fully engage the goodwill, brainpower and capacity of a large number of highly competent - and well paid - people in MAT-related work, and were even at risk of losing some of them.
As this experiential pattern was emerging from my group discussions, it became clear how closely it mirrored what I’d found in other trusts too. In fact, something one of the group members said reminded me of how the CEO of another trust I was coaching had described how she felt unable to break through the surface of the schools in her trust, both because of resistance from those in the school and also - more interestingly for me at the time - because of a resistance on her part to disrupt what looked like a stable system.
Speaking informally with others too, it seems to be a very widely shared challenge, suggesting that there’s some systemic issue at play. So what’s going on?
Thinking about leadership
“What is leadership?” “How do you define it?” “What’s the understanding of leadership that drives your practice as a leader?” I like to ask these questions - or others like them - early on in a coaching programme or consultancy project so I can get a sense for how my client frames their role and rationalises their behaviour. What I get back is usually something quite vague about setting vision, deciding strategy and directing activity. Sometimes a client will veer off into some book-referenced model or other - servant leadership, authentic leadership, uplifting leadership, etc - or they might talk about modelling their behaviour on a leader who inspired them by being relational, or charismatic, or (in one case) ‘sage-like’! But I’ve found they rarely venture far from the definition of leadership offered by John Kotter in his seminal mid-90s book Leading Change; a definition that was almost immediately baked into most business schools’ programmes and came to dominate the theory and practice of leadership for the next decade:
“Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen, despite the obstacles” (Kotter, 1996)
It’s understandable why and how this caught on. It’s pretty compelling, and it sat nicely in its mid-90s context of forward-looking optimism. The Soviet Union had fallen, ending the Cold War, boosting the confidence of the western capitalist model and bringing the hope of a more peaceful world order, whilst the emergence of the internet promised a radical new era of innovation.
The problem is that the world has changed since then. Even terms like ‘uncertain’ and ‘unpredictable’ don’t adequately describe our experiences anymore. The decade and a half after 1996 were turbulent enough, with millennial angst, 9/11, concurrent wars in the Middle East and then the global economic crash of 2008. But the 15 years to date have been turmoil, culminating with a global polarisation of politics, a pandemic, the return of war in Europe, and an increasing acceptance of the climate crisis all coming in under a decade and seemingly out of thin air. These days, it’s words like ‘brittle’, ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘anxious’ that make more sense of what we now see and feel.
No-one could have predicted these things, and anyone that did would have been roundly condemned as mad. So why should we now expect anyone to ‘define what the future should look like’, or listen to anyone who claims that they can? Perhaps more to the point, the future’s not looking particularly inviting at the moment, and faced with a choice between The Great Unravelling and some idealist/denialist ideology or other, most of us are quite happy to retreat into the relative safety of the present.
In this dynamic context, those engaged at the cutting-edge of leadership development have come up with very different ways of thinking about what it now means to be a successful and effective leader; one which recognises that the complexity of the task in hand requires something far more collective and adaptive than the old definitions allow[i]. In these circles, effective leadership is now about creating the conditions in which people can perform at their best and make the decisions they need to make according to what they see on the ground in a fast-changing environment. This is about as far as you can get from the idea that the leader’s role is make decisions on the basis of a predicted set of nominally stable circumstances and aim to inspire people by holding true to them over the course of a planning cycle, “despite the obstacles”!
The trouble is that the practice of leadership - particularly in those fields (like schools) that tend not to engage with leadership development theory - has not caught up, and still has the leader making all the decisions. The result is what Geoff Marlow, a consultant specialising in helping technology businesses become more entrepreneurial and ‘future-fit’, calls the double disconnect.
Disconnected leadership
For Marlow, the ability of an organisation to make the most of its capacity depends on four interrelated behaviours:
How well it makes sense of itself, its context and what its stakeholders expect of it, all of which are changing more rapidly than ever;
How well its makes decisions about what it needs to do and what it shouldn’t do;
How well it takes effective action based on those decisions; and
How well these sense-making, decision-making and action-taking behaviours are acknowledged, prioritised, joined-up, managed and distributed throughout the organisation.
This isn’t an altogether new idea. Writing in 1965, Edgar Schein, a well-known thinker on organisational culture and development, clarified that all organisations face two concurrent and continuous challenges:
The need to continuously adapt externally to a rapidly changing operating environment, and
The need for a corresponding internal integration that enables and supports the external adaptation.
Their ability to manage these things - their culture of ‘adaptive coping’ - was for Schein, the key sign of an organisation’s effectiveness. What is new, and why Marlow’s clarifying concept of a double disconnect is so important, is just how quickly things change now, and therefore just how quickly the failure to build an adaptive culture can result in organisational dysfunction and failure.
Marlow explains this with an illustration which I feel is so useful I’ve re-presented it below:
The triangle diagram is a fairly typical way of representing an organisation. If you ask people where decisions are made, they will almost certainly point to the top of the organisation, at the leaders huddled around their boardroom table.
If you then ask where the action is taken, people will tend to point to the people on the ground, at the front line, facing the customers (or students and parents, etc).
But if you then ask where sense is made, people aren’t quite so sure because it’s not generally recognised as a key aspect of organisational activity in the same way that decision-making and action-taking are.
Leave people to think about it for long enough though, and they soon realise that sense-making happens when and where the action is taken. In our case, it happens through interaction with the student or parent, through learning what works and what doesn’t work in practice, and through engagement on a day-to-day basis with a wide and diverse range of people.
The trouble with this is that, if all the decisions are still made at the top, then they cannot be adequately informed by the sense and understanding being generated at the bottom about what happens when decisions meet reality. So there is a disconnect between sense-making and decision-making. In addition, subsequent decisions are likely therefore to appear increasingly out of touch - and maybe even nonsensical - to those being asked to turn them into action. So there is a second disconnect between decision-making and action-taking. The double disconnect.
The impact on people and effectiveness
Because the reality being faced on the front line is becoming ever more dynamic, complex, unpredictable and difficult to make sense of, the double disconnect is getting worse. This presents a number of existential challenges to leaders and leadership based on the old model. Firstly, their decisions are likely to be meaningless, irrelevant, ineffective and qualitatively ‘wrong’ even before they reach the front line. We’ll not go into the psychological effect that this has on leaders here, but it’s not pretty!
Secondly - and more serious from a systemic perspective - is the impact on people who are expected to take action based on decisions that don’t make sense. This is what some of the ‘second tier’ SLT members in my client MAT meant when they talked about working on one thing and making good progress, only to be told to stop that and start working on some other initiative or strategy that often seemed opposed to the first, with no clear rationale given for the change.
What would you do in that situation? Or, as a leader, what would you expect an experienced and senior colleague to do?
Well, people act in three ways.
They might question the decision and ask “why?” But how might that go, do you think? Honestly?
It’s obviously the responsible thing to do with the agency that comes from years of experience and a decent paycheque at the end of each month, but - as a leader with lots more decisions to make and stress to contend with - are you really going to welcome questions from everyone about everything? In schools, people who try this approach a few times tend to be marked as troublemakers and told to just get on with it.
This is what most people tend to do anyway … they just do it.
But what must that be like for an experienced professional, having to spend their time doing things that don’t make sense, just because they’re told to? It would feel like you were expected to be like a child again, wouldn’t it? And, over time, it would - quite understandably - result in apathy, cynicism, disengagement and - in the end - departure to somewhere that values your adult capacity for sense-making.
There are a number of obvious wellbeing and performance-related reasons why this isn’t good, but in the face of a recruitment and retention crisis, it’s catastrophic. And all because of an outdated perception that a leader’s role is to make decisions.
There is a third option when faced with nonsensical decisions, which is to think for yourself and do something that makes more sense instead, and which is therefore more likely to work in the prevailing context.
In my experience, sadly, the sort of non-compliant and maverick employee who who exhibits this sort of free-wheeling agency tends to be about as welcome in a school as a vomiting child. The great irony though is that it is exactly the sort of behaviour that’s required to enable an effective adaptive coping cycle, which is key to organisational survival. Moreover, it is also exactly the sort of behaviour that emerges where leadership is informed by up-to-date thinking, and aims to create the conditions in which action-takers can perform at their best and make decisions that need to be made according to the sense that’s made on the ground in a fast-changing environment.
Points for reflection
What is your own understanding of your role as a leader? What does ‘leadership’ mean to you, and why?
Think about your journey to leadership and how your ability to connect with the front line has changed over time.
Do you recognise the double disconnect in your school or MAT? What behaviours are present that might be an outcome of this?
What might you do to avoid or address any disconnect?
[i] This is not the same as saying that everyone’s a leader (because they’re not) but rather that the leader’s role is to engage everyone in their leadership so that the organisational system works as an integrated whole.