To what extent do you view your leadership as a conversation? When the development plans, the evaluations, the observations, the governor reports, and the book scrutinies settle down for the day; when there is no supply teacher to find; when that safeguarding issue is finally resolved, this is a question we should consider carefully.
I view leadership primarily as relational. Management, although integral, is about goal-setting, events, tasks, doing things in a certain way.
Leadership, whatever else we have to say about it, is less about things and more about people. Leadership is about the relationships we have and our ability to influence others towards a common purpose.
Conversations, therefore, really matter, for this is the essence of a relationship.
Your conversations
Pause for a moment and consider the quality of your own conversations within the school that you work in. How good are they? How would you even know? If you evaluated your leadership through the lens of the quality of the words you spoke, what you heard from others, your knowledge of your colleagues and what you learned that day about them, how would your work look?
I am not talking about the extent to which you can make great small talk or a joke when it is needed – I am talking about the extent to which you are able to use the conversations that you have as a leader to build relationships, have a positive influence, engage beliefs, and help people improve their professional lives through talking, listening and learning from and with their leaders.
The quality of these conversations, one-by-one, little-by-little, day-by-day, might even be what makes the indirect difference to the outcomes of the students in your school. Susan Scott, in her book Fierce Conversations (2017), sees conversations as the thing that breeds success: “Our careers, our companies, our relationships, and indeed our very lives succeed or fail gradually, then suddenly, one conversation at a time.”
We are what we say. We are how we listen. We are how we learn, interact, remain curious about others. This happens every day in tiny ways. Our success as leaders, according to Scott, happens in the small moments and interactions with everyone around us. They breed success gradually, then suddenly, one conversation at a time.
With this in mind, and drawing on Scott’s work, I want to interrogate two often overlooked principles of the effective conversations we have as leaders with our colleagues and consider ways we can improve them.
The first is being present, or as Scott describes: “Being here and nowhere else.” The second is having the courage to interrogate reality. On this journey we’ll talk to Karen and James and see what we can learn from them.
Listening to Karen: Being present
It is 8:35am on a Friday morning. Assembly is at 9am. After this, you have some key items to complete for governors, a safeguarding incident to investigate, some important scheduling to do, and a budget meeting after school which you are worried will make you late for dinner with your spouse. It’s 8:35am and you need to go and get set up for assembly.
You hear a strained and whispery voice and a faint knock on your office door: “Could I speak to you for a minute?”
Karen is your year 4 teacher. She looks completely deflated and has large dark rings around her eyes. There have been issues in her personal life and in her class that have made this year really challenging for her. This isn’t the first time she’s come to see you in private. With this in mind, you know this won’t be a minute: “Of course. Come and sit down.”
The tricky thing is that this conversation will need to be relatively quick because assembly isn’t ready yet, but you can see she is in distress. You have so much to do and not enough time.
I am not about to advocate for leaders becoming expert counsellors. You probably already feel that way sometimes. But, despite the challenges, leaders do need to learn to be “here” with the person they are talking to, and nowhere else.
If leaders are ever going to be able to make good decisions, ask good questions, stay curious, be courageous, they must do all that they can to be present in the moment. It is impossible to do this well if you are thinking about the next meeting, emails, development plans that need to be sent... Time is finite and every minute counts.
As Scott writes: “You must have an insatiable appetite for learning more every day about who he or she is and where he or she wants to go and how this does or does not mesh with who you are and where you want to go. And all of this is helped significantly by your willingness to occasionally set aside all of the topics ping-ponging inside your own head and simply be with this person, here and now.”
The more we focus on being present in the moment and doing each moment well, the less likely we are to have to go back and re-do the decision we made, the less likely we are to misunderstand that person and what they said, the less likely we are to need another conversation at another point.
Sometimes taking five minutes of high-quality time with a person can save five hours later on. Having an insatiable appetite to listen deeply to a person builds relationships in ways that cannot be quantified. Being present in the moment, being “here” and nowhere else also makes a difference to the people we serve. They feel this even though there may not be any tangible “thing” you are doing.
So we’re making eye contact and are fully present, ready to listen to Karen. At this point, to get beneath the skin of the relationship with our colleagues, we need to go deeper and think about the intent of the words that are shared, the scaffolding on which their story hangs.
When we do this, we see our colleagues on a whole new plain. Like Scott says, when we listen to the intent of the conversation, as well as the words, we come to understand who or they are, what they want, where they are going, and how they want to relate to you.
If you pause for a moment and spend time thinking about each one of your colleagues, do you think you could answer questions about who they are, where they want to go, as well as how they feel and relate to you?
If your answers are simplistic, not clear or lack depth, I would suggest that you are not being present enough; you are not listening to the intent of their words in a way that might draw the best out of them for the children’s sake.
Being able to answer these questions helps you relate to people like Karen in these high-pressure moments. Being able to answer questions like these enables you to have the wisdom to be a leader who knows what to say, how to say it, and when it is best.
Talking to James: Curiosity and courage
You’re doing a walk around the school on Friday afternoon. Surprisingly, the day has gone more smoothly than imagined. On the second floor, before going down a corridor of classrooms, you glance in at the library that you re-developed and have talked so much to parents and school leaders about in recent weeks. You have told them all about the impact it is having on reading for pleasure.
But then you look again and see that it is an utter mess. Books are everywhere, displays are falling off, there is a pile of newspapers stacked high that haven’t been delivered to classrooms. You are shocked and dismayed, to say the least.
You seek out a conversation with the leader of reading, James, immediately, to understand what’s going on and why the library is like this. His response is that he hasn’t had time as he has been having to prioritise the most vulnerable bottom 20% of readers through interventions.
You don’t really know what to say next and don’t feel now is the time to probe any further. Although you haven’t spoken to him properly about the library for a few weeks, you thought it was all in hand. Yet another thing to fix and develop. Fast.
This reveals something important about leadership as conversations. The truth is: you don’t know everything about your school. Sure, you have a pretty good “top-level” view and know a lot of things people don’t know about. But you don’t even know most of the things there are to know about your school.
You can put on a good lecture to governors or other stakeholders about how wonderful your school is but sometimes you are a little taken aback by the sharp edges and issues that come up.
Alongside being present with the reading leader, listening to their intent deeply, it is crucial that the conversations we have with our colleagues seek to balance curiosity with courageous interrogation about reality.
If we go into conversations with the aim of getting what we want to know to improve our understanding of reality, we will simply continue to feed this vision.
Although subtle, if we start from the premise that schools succeed or fail one conversation at a time, what will eventually happen is that we will create something often referred to as “the imagined school” (see Evans, 2024; Hart, 2024) – a place where we work, teachers teach, and learners learn that includes many assumptions that are made about it which are half-truths and lean towards being overly positive.
This image or vision of our school where we work ends up knocking off the sharp, tricky edges and the hard problems and floats around in our imaginations. Until those sharp edges and hard problems become impossible to avoid. By which point it is probably too late.
Just think back to that library and the books all over the floor.
Our conversations should be both curious and courageous. Our conversations must be curious in the sense that we must enter them with a posture of not knowing the full extent of reality, and they must be courageous in that we are always willing to have our assumptions challenged, our ideas refined, and quite simply, be okay with being wrong.
In the midst of this, it is always right that we remain the leader and never undermine our vision or our principles and be willing to make tough decisions – but the balance of curiosity and courage are a critical first step to take.
In the same vein, it is not only us who has visions of imagined schools. Our colleagues do to. One of the skills of great leaders is their ability to get everyone on the same page. This is easier said than done. But, one conversation at a time, interrogating reality together carefully, leaders and teachers can build a culture where it is okay to challenge, it is okay to be wrong, and it is okay to consider carefully the problems that are emerging and why they are there.
Present, curious, courageous
You have had quite a lot of conversations today, but the two to reflect on most were the ones with Karen and James. You needed to be present with Karen, listen deeply. She’s a good teacher and in many ways, all she needs right now is “one minute chats that are actually 15”.
You needed to remain curious with James until it was clear to you why the work you’d done on that library was slowly becoming undone. This meant you could then be courageous with James to re-direct his focus towards making sure he is clear with staff about how they use the space and how he might be able to delegate some of his responsibility to others so he can monitor a range of tasks rather than being too focused on one of them as a reading leader.
Questions for reflection
- What was the ratio of talking to listening to questioning that you did today? What does this say about your leadership?
- What did you learn about your colleagues through your conversations today?
- How curious were you today about the work of others?
- To what extent is the school you talk about the school you actually work in?
- Was there any moment today where you held back from probing a little deeper with a colleague or challenging something? If so, why?
- Robbie Burns is vice-principal for teaching and learning at Bede Academy in Northumberland. Read his blog via www.howthenshouldweteach.wordpress.com and follow him on X @MrRRBurns. Read his previous articles for Headteacher Update via www.headteacher-update.com/authors/robbie-burns
Headteacher Update Summer Term Edition 2024
- This article first appeared in Headteacher Update's Summer Term Edition 2024. This edition was sent free of charge to UK primary schools in May 2024. A free-to-access digital edition is also available via www.headteacher-update.com/content/downloads
Further information & resources
- Evans: The imagined school, 2024: https://tinyurl.com/5cxkuct7
- Hart: The imagined school traps to avoid, 2024: https://tinyurl.com/3v7u559z
- Scott: Fierce Conversations, New American Library, 2017.