Welcome to Praxeum
Transforming leadership development for leaders of education
I really enjoyed seeing the outcomes of the University of Nottingham's School Leaders' Work & Wellbeing project.
It began in 2021 by exploring school leaders' experience of lockdown and most recently looked at what interventions might be needed to help them stay in their vital roles despite the poly-crisis, omnishambles or clusterf*ck (delete as appropriate) that seems to have followed. The findings align very closely with what I hear through my own work coaching and supporting school and MAT leaders.
Gathering data from a series of roundtables comprising school leaders, Toby Greany and his team at Nottingham found that people said they needed more support from peers through networks to overcome the isolation that appears to have got worse as schools seal themselves off in trusts and lockdown 'social distancing' habits persist, plus support from trained coaches and access to professional - possibly therapeutic - supervision.
In coaching and consultancy, my clients say they find the reflective process incredibly helpful, particularly because the safety of the space we create together enables a perspective on their work that cannot be attained on their own. Things that may confuse or invoke fear in the workplace look very different and more accessible from the angles we gain. Some are surprised by how liberating and developmental it is, particularly those who have had 'coaching' before but now see that it was actually mentorship or advice.
The research also found that the leadership training which is government-funded and therefore most easily accessible in a context of financial constraint is not really fit for purpose. The rigidity of the NPQH curriculum can act like a "straitjacket", stopping leaders from "developing their leadership skills fully, as it stifles reflexivity, higher-level thinking and intellectual curiosity."
My clients say the same about the NPQEL programme too, though often in fruitier terms, and it horrifies me. How can this be? How can such an important profession be so poorly served in terms of leadership development?
In my more cynical moments, I wonder if this is by design. After all, reflexive, self-aware and curious leaders are far less likely to be compliant and accept the thin gruel that is labelled as 'evidence-based' or 'best-practice', let alone tolerate having files kept at the DfE on their insubordinate opinions. Who knows, they might even question - or possibly reject - some of the centralised control around limited curriculum and be more innovative too, god forbid!
It's appeared to me for some time that a key challenge in the sector is the satisfaction with - or at least acceptance of - inadequate training and support. There seems to be an understanding that it's crap, but ... well, it's all there is, so, you know. This has a whiff of self-deprecation and learned dependency about it; of a sort of consent that these things are decided for us by someone 'higher-up' and 'better than', and that's all there is to it.*
It also seems to relate to the closed nature of the system; to the fact that it's almost entirely self-referential. As part of their training, school leaders tend to only be presented with domain-specific leadership stuff, as if leading a school requires a wholly different set of skills to leading other sorts of organisation.
It's just not true.
You don't see leaders of hospitals, government departments or technology companies reading only books that focus on their niche, mainly because those books don't really exist. Leadership is not domain specific. The skills and attributes that enable leadership are universal.
But like Truman in the Truman Show, it's hard to know what you're missing if the world you're in is all that your training allows you to know, see and hear.
In some ways, this was a flaw in the Nottingham study. All the data seems to have been gathered from school leaders themselves, and if you’re in the boat, you’re unlikely to want to rock it. The result - to my mind at least - is that many of the suggestions for how things might be improved are limited by their horizons. They are certainly not transformative.
And boy do we need leadership transformation in schools at the moment.
Any school leader will tell you - if asked in the right way - that their world has gone hatstand. Tired, jaded and uncertain staff are struggling. New recruits are arriving with different needs and expectations. Change is harder and harder to manage. The things that worked last month don't work today. Projects stall at every hurdle. Teams work in siloes and defend their turf with increasing levels of aggression. Everyone's angry about something. And they are under ever more pressure to deliver against more strident performance targets whilst also being told they have to deal with novel, important and sometime competing priorities around DEI, wellbeing, sustainability, recruitment and retention and - of course - concrete.
Look beyond schools though and you'll see the exact same thing. No organisation is immune from the volatility, uncertainty, complexity or anxiety that characterises the 21st century condition, and so leadership development thinkers - and leaders themselves - are all over it. The papers, books and articles I read to inform my work with school and MAT leaders are full of deep reflections on how complexity has outpaced the development of effective leaders, and what might be done about it.
The difference is that the schools world seems distant and detached from this thinking, perhaps because it has always thought it was immune from external forces. Every day's a sunny day in Truman's dome!
But when even successful and high potential school and MAT leaders are asking themselves big hairy questions like “what is it all for?”, "how can I lead if I don't believe in what I have to do?" and “when will it feel like I've done enough?”, then something needs to change. Because without the right support, these questions go unanswered, then echo and amplify, leading to a growing sense of discontent, loss of productivity, burnout and - ultimately - resignation.
So, what do leadership development specialists in the outside world feel needs to be done to enable leaders to face into this heavy weather and do effective work?
Well, firstly, there's a need to review what we understand by 'leadership'.
My training in systems-psychodynamics approaches to leading organisations encourages me to see leadership as "a psychosocial influencing dynamic" which enables intention to become reality through collective action (Western, 2019). From this perspective, one's effectiveness as a leader - as set out by Richard Claydon - depends on one's ability to understand oneself, other selves, the leadership role itself, oneself in the leadership role, how one adapts to influence people, and how that role adaptation impacts the system.
NPQH or EL anyone? Anyone?
Secondly, there's a need to ponder that third point in Claydon's list: what actually is the leadership role?
For Geoff Marlow, a consultant who helps companies overcome the barriers to innovation, the increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world we're in means that a leader's role can no longer be about setting a vision for the future, aligning people to it and then inspiring them to make it happen. When Kotter defined it as such in the mid-90's, it was probably already a bit out of date but just about tenable from his lofty perch at Harvard. However, a leader adopting the elite, distanced and directive approach suggested by that role description these days will very quickly find themselves without an organisation to lead.
For Marlow and others, the role of a leader now has to be about creating the conditions in which others can lead their own work; to unblock, unlock and unleash good decision-making and action-taking closest to the 'frontline', and then to facilitate the strategy. This is the stuff that enabled David Marquet to turn his ship around, by signalling intent, providing qualified trust and then getting out of people's way.
So what’s needed are leaders who understand how to create workplaces in which people are empowered and motivated to collectively solve complex issues. This sort of work is not without inter-personal risk. These spaces are edgy; they have to be. So they have to be safe enough for everyone to feel okay with putting themselves and their ideas forward. Out of spaces like this will come energy, ideas, connection and achievement, but creating and leading them requires a wholly different set of skills, aptitudes and mindsets to those that previous generations of leaders could rely on, and a wholly different type of leadership development.
So this is why I'm building Praxeum ... a leadership development programme based on the state-of-the-art in leadership development thinking but designed exclusively to start where leaders in MATs and other complex education-focused organisations find themselves now.
Welcome to Praxeum …
Praxeum is a research-informed leadership development programme for leaders of education. It provides reflective, experiential and energising spaces in which participants are supported to understand and develop their capacity to lead, and provided with opportunities to experiment with system leadership skills.
Its aim is to enable confident, competent and ethical leadership in complexity.
Importantly, Praxeum is not domain specific. It is focused on the art, craft and skill of leadership, and on developing each individual’s capacity to lead. Participants are encouraged and supported to apply what they learn in their educational contexts, and to then bring back their experiences of this for sense-making and reflection, both individually and as a group. But their practice of leadership - how they apply their leadership in the contexts of their expertise - is up to them.
To that end, Praxeum might be thought of as a basecamp or lab for leadership**.
But what makes it so different?
Most leadership development programmes are competencies-based, strengths-based or models-based, and yet there is no evidence that any of these approaches work. In fact, there’s an increasing amount of research that suggests they do more harm than good. Afterall, the outcome of programmes based on these approaches for the last 40 years is a form of leadership that has not increased productivity, has not improved creativity, and has harmed people physically and mentally, It’s also fuelled many of the global challenges we face today. In short, they have failed.
So Praxeum takes a different approach. It’s the only programme for leaders of education which:
focuses specifically on developing their individual capacities for ethical leadership;
uses vertical leadership development methods as the catalyst for that growth; and
is framed by the urgent need for leaders to develop an understanding of systems and how people interact with them … to understand system leadership.
So what is vertical leadership development?
Well, to start with, it’s not horizontal development, which is the focus of most leadership and talent development programmes in the education sector, and all the programmes currently available to school and MAT leaders. These aim to increase technical or domain-specific skills and build a selection of in-vogue leadership competencies. They also sometimes present trainees with a leadership model or two to follow or use as a framework for their practice. This is all important, but it is only half of what a leader needs to be effective in the current dynamic context, and it’s not the first half!
Image from BeingFirst
In contrast, vertical development is about building the more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking, being and doing required by a leader to effectively develop and use their psychosocial influencing dynamic to achieve their intended aims. It’s called vertical development because it’s based on levels or stages of thinking, and involves ‘levelling up’ by gaining new perspectives and mindsets needed to make leadership more effective. Rooke & Torbert’s classic HBR piece ‘The Seven Transformations of Leadership’ is a good way into the thinking behind this. From a systemic perspective, vertical programmes result in more interconnected, interdependent leadership cultures.
To enable this vertical development, Praxeum combines the thinking and tools from several approaches and seeks to provide catalysing opportunities for leaders to grow or ‘level up’. Each participant’s start point will be measured using a proven and robust 360-degree instrument and monitored in a variety of ways through the programme. The development itself is enabled through the three primary conditions that research suggests most effectively catalyse vertical development:
Heat experiences which confront a participant with a complex situation that disrupts their habitual way of thinking and disorients them. These highlight how one’s current way of making sense of the world may be inadequate and in need of an update;
Colliding perspectives that challenge a participant’s existing mental models by exposing them to others with different worldviews, opinions, backgrounds, and training. These highlight other possible angles and perspectives they might take; and
Elevated sense-making which provides an opportunity for integration; for a more expansive and advanced action logic to emerge and, over time, to stabilise. This is enabled through facilitated opportunities to reflect on these experiences and perspectives, and to process what they mean in one’s context.
The focus of this aspect of the programme is to address the leader’s 'inner structure' - their values, assumptions, beliefs, fears, identity and mindset - and to explore the extent to which this 'operating system' is in need of an ‘upgrade’ in order to match the complexity of their dynamic contexts. Leaders who are aware of the need to develop these aspects of their self and character have the capacity to progress from self-centred and reactive ways of working to more creative and integral ways; or from unconscious leadership to conscious leadership.
Becoming a conscious leader takes deep, reflective and deliberate work on one’s fundamental action logic (mindsets, motivations and drives), and yet one’s capacity to progress from unsophisticated and inward-looking action logics to highly sophisticated and transformational ones requires heat experiences, colliding perspectives and elevated sense-making which bring about deep shifts in a leader’s ‘operating system’. This vertical development is distinct from horizontal development, which is focused on expanding our knowledge and skills but only at the level of thinking and logic. Vertical development is about being rather than just doing.
This work on each participant's vertical development is uniquely supported in Praxeum by a focus on building an in-depth knowledge and understanding of critical systems thinking and its application in the management of complexity. Because let’s face it, leaders of education - whether in schools, MATs, colleges, universities, or businesses - are having to face into increasingly complex challenges that require novel approaches and solutions.
System leadership is about how you lead when you’re not in control, and when you need to influence others across boundaries rather than rely on your authority. It describes a way of approaching ambiguous and apparently insurmountable problems where the only certainty is uncertainty; where no single person or organisation can find or organise a solution on their own; where demand seems to outstrip available resource; and where progress is vital but only possible by involving the energies, ideas, talents and expertise of as many people as possible, even (especially) competitors. Effective system leadership requires an understanding of how complex systems function, and how groups, other people and oneself interacts in and with the systems they are in.
To develop these system leadership capabilities, Praxeum will present participants with a structured syllabus that draws from two main sources: the Tavistock’s model of systems psychodynamics and critical systems thinking, mainly as defined in Professor Mike Jackson’s work. I have a range of qualifications (and experience of applying the theory) in each field.
The aim is to help participants move beyond classical management theory and its mechanistic, rational view of organisational dynamics and management which emphasises the need to forecast, plan, organise, lead and control. These deny the reality of human experience and behaviour, and depend on there being a predictable future in which it is possible to set goals that remain relevant over time; on sufficient stability for tasks to achieve their intended aims; on a passive, unified and rational workforce; and on the possibility of seeing clear measures of success. These assumptions simply do not hold in the modern world.
Lots of approaches have been tried in response to this - lean, six sigma, agile, process re-engineering, knowledge management, balanced scorecard, etc - but none have lived up to their promises because they seek to reduce complexity and solve specific issues. They focus on the parts rather than the whole, and in so doing, they miss the crucial interactions between the parts.
They are not systemic enough.
Praxeum exposes its participants to the idea that systems thinking is the only appropriate response to complexity, and that looking at the irreducible whole and its emergent properties is at least as important as looking at the parts of which it is composed. And it presents them with access to a range of material, theories, research and approaches which they can use in seeking to manage complexity; to become ‘multimethodological’ in a context where there is no one silver bullet.
These resources are currently being collated and curated in an emerging community platform for educational leaders.
But there’s another vital layer too.
The majority of a leader’s challenges result from human nature - our cognitive limitations, dysfunctional behaviour, group dynamics, differences of perception, unconscious drives and emotions - and, to a large extent, our anxious, defensive and threatened responses to complexity. So Praxeum also provides a grounding in systems psychodynamics. This is an established field of human relations practice that draws on psychodynamic, group dynamics and systems theory, and focuses on the interaction between the structures, norms and practices in organisations and the emotional life of those who work in them. It explores the unconscious forces that underpin some of the most complex and challenging dysfunctional organisational behaviours and features and, by shedding light on them, provides new ways of viewing and addressing them.
The transformation of your leadership begins with the acknowledgement of a realisation ... that the way you’ve learned to play the game is no longer sufficient. That your knowledge, skills and drive as a leader is no longer enough. That what you now need to be an effective leader is the mindset capacity to apply your knowledge, skills and drive in new ways.
Welcome to Praxeum ...
* Some escape ... I supervise a few of them in Anglia Ruskin University's MBA (Educational Leadership & Management) programme. They are working on some incredibly innovative and potentially disruptive research projects, ranging from how best to support social and emotional learning across a primary MAT to restorative practice in a Vietnamese private school. It's heartwarming!
** In fact, the name ‘Praxeum’ is from the Star Wars stories, where it was used to describe a place for the ‘distillation of learning combined with action’. It was where the Jedi arts - the 'ways of the force' - were learned and a new order was established to go out and transform the fortunes of the universe.