Better to have one thousand enemies outside the tent than to have one single enemy inside it.
Lebanese Proverb
In James Kerr’s book on the New Zealand rugby team, ‘Legacy’, he comments on the mantras that have helped create the high performing organisational culture that has – over a long period of time – ensured success for the All Blacks at the highest level. In elite sport, a united team is vital to success – a single disruptive element can damage the performance overall. The team is only as strong as its weakest link, so a significant threat to high performance can be from the ‘enemy inside the tent’. Kerr points out that the All Blacks adapted the above proverb into the catchy mantra (and forgive the language) of, ‘no dickheads’ in an attempt to permanently eradicate the potential of the threat from within their own ranks (perhaps it’s better if I term these people ‘dolts’ for the purposes of this blog).
Over the last ten to twenty years, it has become common for businesses and other organisations to take lessons in high performance from elite sport – and education is no different. Consequently staff alignment initiatives like the ‘no dolts’ mantra from the culture of the All Blacks have appeared in leadership training up and down the country – along with concepts like ‘marginal gains’ from cycling or ‘what makes the boat go faster’ from rowing – which have become just as popular. There is also an enormous amount of literature on what constitutes ‘effective leadership’ by many renowned authors. For example in ‘Good to Great’, Jim Collins, in his examination of companies that sustained success over time, makes the case for ‘level 5 leaders’ – those people who can manifest what he calls a paradoxical blend of humility and organisational ambition. Many other authors establish great clarity over the behaviour and attitudes of the best leaders. These concepts from elite sport along with popular leadership books, courses and inspirational conferences have enabled school leaders to look at the organisational culture, alignment, vision and values with a view to improving performance and identifying staff who have ‘not bought’ in and align them with the organisational vision or move them out altogether.
While this is valuable learning from leadership training – and leaders have developed their knowledge of excellent leadership actions and behaviours as a result – it is still undeniably the case that many leaders underperform or act in a way that is unethical or not in line with their, or the organisation’s, espoused values. Steve Radcliffe in ‘Future, Engage, Deliver, quotes research that shows that nearly two thirds of all workers believe that they are badly led, while John Kotter points out in his book ‘Leading Change’ that 70% of planned change initiatives fail.
So an obvious question seems to arise – if leaders have the knowledge needed to be successful, why does it remain the case that many do not put this knowledge into action?
The point of this series of blogs is not to add to the literature around what constitutes highly effective leadership, but to explore why many seem ‘anchored’ to behaviours and attitudes that prevent their organisations from achieving excellent outcomes.
This tweak in emphasis should then encourage leaders to examine all areas of potential underperformance within the organisation – including themselves. Perhaps not something they may have considered previously. So, not only will leaders consider staff underperformance, but they should also consider what happens to organisational culture if it is the leader who displays behaviours that are controlling, bullying, unable to collaborate and selfishly motivated? Surely this would become the greatest threat to the overall success of the organisation and become far more damaging over time to the organisational aims than a few non-aligned or underperforming staff.
As mentioned earlier, leadership training and development has made leaders highly skilled in aspects of managing staff and dealing with underperformance of others, but perhaps less skilled at reflecting on their own performance and ensuring the highest quality leadership behaviours over time.
So if the leader has the potential to be the greatest threat to an organisation – how is it possible for them to guard against underperformance and poor decision making?
An Infinite Mind-set
There may be a lot education has to learn from other endeavours, such as the world of elite sport or the business sector, but the aims of education are a little different perhaps to the aims of a rugby team. In sport you can win, lose or draw. Performance measures, the timings, the players are all clear and each match or competition are finite. In education however, we cannot win, lose or draw in the same way. It would be ridiculous to think of education in these finite terms – headteachers do not ‘win’ at tests and the pupils do not ‘win’ at school. I can no more ‘win’ at education than I can at friendship, creativity, parenting or being in love. In education (as with these other areas) there are bigger considerations and longer term goals that need to be taken into account. It seems obvious that in these ‘infinite’ pursuits the aim is not winning – the aim is to flourish and improve over time.
Perhaps then the learning we should take from the All Blacks is not what their most famous mantra suggests, but the infinite thinking that underpins that mantra – the goal for the New Zealand rugby team is not just winning games (although that is clearly important) – it’s bigger than this. As the All Blacks coach Graham Henry puts it, “The aim is to improve, to always get better. Even when you are the best – especially when you are the best”. There is a ‘finite’ element in this thinking – about winning the next game or tournament – but the broader, ‘infinite thinking’ is about organisational excellence, setting the standard for others, forever improving. Infinite thinking even encompasses impacting the system more widely, potentially in a way that benefits rugby worldwide. These are incredibly lofty aims and an example of infinite thinking in practice.
The best leaders employ this infinite mind-set in the constant pursuit of excellence. The most important thing about an infinite mind-set – and what separates it from the finite mind-set – is that the concept of excellence is not narrowly defined or focused on the short term. Therefore infinitely minded leaders consider how their organisation can be intentionally designed, not to amass short term ‘wins’ in the interests of personal glory, but to have a culture of long term improvement in the service of a ‘greater good’.
The infinite mind-set is the basis on which all the structures and systems of the organisation are built. So rather than the organisational culture being imposed from the top down by the leader, the culture is co-created from the bottom up by all stakeholders using an infinite mind-set to align the vision and values of all involved. It is evident from Kerr’s book that the structure and culture of the whole All Blacks organisation flows from an infinite mind-set. Alignment is high, respect for all is central and feedback for improvement is key. Most importantly, feedback is an expectation for all. Everyone is held to account. No one at any level avoids feedback about their performance. Feedback is given to the coach, the support staff, the captain, the experienced players as well as the inexperienced players. Feedback, honesty as the basis for reflection on personal performance are seen as the route to excellence through constant improvement.
It is this concept of success that school leaders need to focus on as they intentionally design their organisational culture from the bottom up. This ‘intentional design’ using an infinite mind-set with open and honest feedback for all has the potential to be the guard against all underperformance, including the ultimate treat from within – the leader who is not aligned with their own organisation. This is because the accountability that applies to everyone else also applies to the leader as well.
The problem with leadership however is that it is easy to be distracted from the infinite by the finite which causes leaders to have a ‘blind spot’ in relation to the feedback they receive (if they seek out any feedback at all in the first place). Leaders who focus too narrowly on ‘winning’ or are constantly focused on the short term may get some short term wins, which make them think they are doing well, but over time it is these leaders who can bring about organisational underperformance by not thinking more widely or with a longer term focus.
In his book, The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek believes that too many leaders see the work they do in finite terms, with ‘winning’ in relation to their own personal goals being the most important aim for the organisation to achieve. The focus on winning tends to warp the subsequent behaviours of these leaders and removes the focus from doing the ‘right thing’ to doing the ‘winning thing’. The ‘win at all costs’ mentality can potentially lead to behaviours that are ethically questionable and at odds with the leaders personal values – the leaders then become the ‘dolts’ they have been trying so hard to eradicate from the organisation. What Sinek encourages is a more infinite mind-set in which the leader is focused on success and improvement more broadly;
“An infinite mindset is the recognition that there is no practical end to our work. The goal is not to win or be the best in the infinite game; it is to strive to be better, to experience constant improvement”
This is the mind-set we need to encourage in school leaders. Sinek points out that the best leaders are able to remain focused on infinite goals through the development of a ‘just cause’ – an aim that is of service to others and that we are prepared to make great sacrifices to accomplish. This ‘just cause’ is most powerful when developed by the whole team – because it is the skill of groups of people to look at the bigger picture, beyond individual perspectives and motivations. Decisions made by the team taps into the ‘collective intelligence’ of the group and will always be better than decisions made by an individual – even when that individual may be the leader of the organisation.
In later blogs I will look at why leaders find collaborative work so difficult and why many become unlikely to relinquish their control on decision making. At this point it is enough to make the case that the ‘just cause’ has the potential to become the foundation that can be used to build the system and structures that govern the ethical behaviours of the organisational culture. The ‘ethical rudder’ that inevitably steers it towards always doing the ‘right thing’, rather than the ‘winning thing’. In education we usually refer to this organisational aim as the ‘moral purpose’ and it is the starting point for intentionally designing a school to have an infinite mind-set and a focus on social justice and better educational outcomes for all. With the just cause guiding intentional design, leaders create school structures with ‘the end in mind’ as Steven Covey puts it. When there is clarity over what is to be achieved, then the way to achieve it becomes clearer. School structures like managing the behaviour of pupils, dealing with staffing issues, teaching and learning delivery, assessment approaches, curriculum planning – to name just a few – are all designed intentionally using the just cause and the infinite mind-set as the basis on which all structures are created.
So, the aim of intentional school design is better educational outcomes for every pupil. But what constitutes ‘better’ educational outcomes is not an easy question to answer. At the macro-level there are significant and necessary debates asking, ‘What is school for?’. Educational thinkers and authors are challenging those responsible for education on this nationally and internationally. For example Ken Robinson’s thinking around encouraging creativity in education or Valerie Hannon in her book ‘Thrive’ who explores the need for a complete reinvention of education to enable young people to cope with a rapidly changing work environment. These are worthwhile debates, but the case being made by these authors and thinker is for a ‘top down’ re-invention of the purpose of education. This is not what is being argued for here. Infinite thinking and intentional design are more about a ‘bottom up’ re-conceptualisation of school leadership that centres on a clear moral purpose in order to get young people the educational outcomes they need.
The problem that arises when the ‘moral purpose’ of education is discussed is that some can see this as encouraging ‘fluffiness of outcomes’ and an argument for lowering expectations for vulnerable learners or even as an excuse for poor performance in tests – something for head teachers to hide behind.
Leadership guided by a moral purpose is in no way an argument for lowering expectations or some weak attempt to justify a poor performance.
In fact this is a weak intellectual argument, as it somehow implies that when leading a school there is a binary choice between high test results on one hand and being driven by a clear moral purpose on the other. High test results are a key part of what schools should provide, but they are not the only part. Schools that judge success simlply in terms of test results can ‘problematise’ those pupils who are vulnerable learners. Pupils who cannot add to the school’s narrow measure of success become marginalised and excluded. This point was made in 2018 in a report given by the Education Committee to the House of Commons;
“An unfortunate and unintended consequence of the Government’s strong focus on school standards has led to school environments and practices that have resulted in disadvantaged children being disproportionately excluded, which includes a curriculum with a lack of focus on developing pupils’ social and economic capital. There appears to be a lack of moral accountability on the part of many schools and no incentive to, or deterrent to not, retain pupils who could be classed as difficult or challenging.“
The emphasis in the quote above are mine, but they are made to clearly show that an excessive focus only on test results can warp the organisational culture of schools and potentially turn them into ‘exam factories’ focused on short term, finite ‘wins’. It them becomes a sad fact that these ‘exam factory schools’ tend not to cater for the young people who need them the most.
Anyway, a good set of test results only helps young people get ‘a foot in the door’ once they enter the world of work. Employers are looking for a wider set of skills – critical thinking, team working, problem solving, reliability and self management as just a few examples. But of course even employability is just a part of the wider purpose of education. To properly cater for the need of pupils and – ultimately – the wider society, schools must have a focus on pupil development beyond simply doing well in tests.
Test results are a part of what schools should provide pupils – and an important part certainly – but schools that are led with a moral purpose provide so much more for the young people they serve.
So, if we are re-conceptualising leadership of schools and how to establish highly effective organisational cultures, then it will be useful to more clearly define the ‘better educational outcomes’ that school leaders are trying to achieve. With a clear moral purpose and an infinite mind-set school leaders will design schools that aim to get high standards for every pupil – irrespective of background – including the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to flourish, not only in work and further education, but in life.
The Infinite Headteacher 