Leadership Philosophy Musings Part 1 - What do people want in a leader?

As part of the leadership course I am participating in we all have to write our own Leadership Philosophy really getting clear in our heads what sort of leader we want to be and what we hope to achieve with our teams. Below is my first attempt to begin to write out that philosophy. I am going to first look at what people want from their leaders and what I think they deserve from them.
When trying to determine what it is that I value in leadership, and therefore the type of leader I wish to be, I decided to think about my first couple of years of teaching and think about the leaders I was exposed to and the sorts of impact they had on me and the lessons I learned from them.
When I had just started teaching what I needed most was feedback and an opportunity to talk to people about my teaching and get advice and honest ideas about how I could improve. Really what I needed to encourage me to grow and take risks and take on new challenges, was validation that I was doing a good job and the knowledge that I was being appreciated. It was important to me to know that what I was doing was contributing to the team and to the school vision and the team vision.
In my first years of teaching I had amazing leaders, all of whom are still with me and still leading me. My mind thinks particularly about my AP (one whom I have discussed on this blog before and who is responsible for much of my present confidence and the reason why I love my job so much). This person was always there with her door open for advice, encouragement and a friendly word. Her ability to make you feel like you were someone she respected, relied upon and valued as an integral part of her team were things that had a big impact on me and on how I view leadership.
My KLA manager has been another person I admire and who has had a big impact on the way I lead. His manner when conducting meetings is amazing. His diplomacy is something I admire immensly, as is his ability to craft his faculty meetings so that despite the fact that there are many differing personalities and differing opinions in this very large faculty, harmony is always maintained, and a resolution and productive outcome is always obtained by the end of his meetings. The focus is always on the curriculum and how to obtain an outcome, never on the attitudes and negativity of certain members of staff and this is something that I aspire to. The ability to lead your team along with you in a positive direction despite the sometimes difficult environment of school life is something that is the mark of an effective and efficient leader and is something that I try to keep in mind when planning and conducting my own meetings. This person has always maintained an open door policy, able to offer friendship, support, understanding, ideas and focus for my sometimes scattered mind. I only hope that one day I will be the calm, thoughtful, wise and considerate person he is and that I will have the same sort of intuition with people that he seems to posess to allow him to respond to people in a positive way that reaffirms them and makes them feel reassured in their purpose.

So let me try to summarise these things in a way that makes them a possible inclusion in my own leadership philosophy:

I think that a leader should lead by example and be the very best leader they can be. I think that everyone deserves to be heard, to be trusted and valued in their contribution to the team, to be shown compassion, empathy and understanding and to be listened to without judgement. I think that people deserve to have their achievements acknowledged and celebrated and that this is one of the most important elements in building the confidence and capacity of your team.

I want to be the sort of person who leads through inspiration, not domination and I want to motivate and engage my team by enabling them and entrusting them to participate and contribute fully to achieving our mutual goals. I want to build a team environment that is trusting, collegiate, repectful, innovative and dynamic and one that utilises people's abilities and strengths, giving them purpose and celebrating the achievements of the team and the individual. I want to enable my team to achieve with me and without me. I want to set up a team that has such mutual responsibility and shared vision that any one of the team members could take over from me in an instant and none of the momentum would be lost.

As I was writing this I stopped in order to write up an action plan for my BYTES team. When term 3 begins, I will begin a series of fortnightly lunches with the team (2 meetings a term is not enough to get anything done) and I have planned out the first three of these meetings. These I have set up under three headings:

1. Team (Creating a vision for the team).
2. Values (What Qualities do we value in our students?)
3. Action Plan (Developing an action plan to improving student learning in our program).

This might be a lot to try and achieve in three lunchtimes but I have developed activities to get these things happening. I think that this is really important to set up the team this way before we embark on further developing our curriculum for the following years.

I am also brainstorming ways in which a session like this might be adapted to put some of the responsibility for learning back onto my Year 11s. They are the noisiest, most disengaged bunch of Year 11s i have ever taught and I think it is important that at some point before next year they develop a responsibility for their own behaviour and their own learning - after poor Exam results that they all deserved (lack of work, excessive talking in class, no drafting, planning, revising) they wanted me to justify why they got such bad marks. I need to do something before leading them to the lions of Year 12 so perhaps this is the new start we need for Semester II. I will keep pondering.