Do you know what would make the biggest difference to the development and effectiveness of your leaders? When it comes to the human side of leadership (ie. the challenges of leading others and maintaining your own personal wellbeing and effectiveness), chances are that it’s one of a few, very common needs.
In this article we share the top five development needs that school leaders bring to their coaching conversations, and some of the key mindsets needed to enable a shift in these areas.
At BTS we hold one of the world’s largest leadership databases, with anonymised notes from hundreds of thousands of conversations that our coaches have held with leaders across all sectors, and at all levels of leadership, from all corners of the globe. To inform our recent MESSY Leadership book, we analysed data from 6293 coaching conversations held with school leaders between 2018 and 2022, and coaching objectives set by over 1700 school leaders. Within this data set, the findings were remarkably consistent across our main BTS Spark regions of the UK, Australia, the US and Canada, giving a clear picture of the priority leadership challenges that leaders seek support with.
1. Top of the list was the courage and confidence to hold those difficult conversations, whether that’s a performance or feedback conversation that’s needed with a colleague, or some of the other tricky conversations that leaders need to hold with other stakeholders
A key mindset shift that’s needed here (along with some skills and tools to go with it) is from seeing conflict, or potential conflict, as something to be avoided, to recognising that conflict, or differences of opinion are actually an opportunity to learn and to strengthen relationships. Often what’s also needed, is a shift from always seeking to ‘win the argument’ to knowing how to build mutual understanding.
2. The second most common development need for leaders was knowing how to enable your middle and senior leaders to step up and take ownership and accountability. A critical leadership shift (in mindset and behaviour) that’s often needed here is from believing that your job is to be solely responsible for key decisions and results, to recognising that your job is in fact to empower and liberate your team so that you build collective ownership and responsibility. To do this, requires leaders to let go, and trust others to step up. Knowing how to build a coaching approach into your everyday leadership can be super helpful with this, so that even a quick corridor conversation can help to unlock others’ potential.
3. Our third theme was about engaging and influencing others, so that leaders can bring people with them, even those that may be very different or who may be perceived as difficult. For many of us, shifting some of our unconscious assumptions or becoming less judgemental can be a challenge here! Really making sure others feel seen and heard is vital. Genuine empathy is at the heart of engaging and connecting with others – so that instead of wanting people to understand you and where you’re coming from, you want to understand others and where they are coming from.
4. Fourthly, we have confidence – and overcoming imposter syndrome. This of course is pretty much universal – all of us struggle with our confidence and self-belief at times, even the most well-qualified and experienced leaders. To move beyond this is all about overcoming the limiting beliefs and ways in which we hold ourselves back. For some leaders, one of the key shifts needed is from a belief that ‘I have to be strong before I can be confident’, to recognising that actually, courage is born out of vulnerability. It’s also about understanding more fully why we react the way we do, and becoming more able to actually choose our response, even when we’re stressed and under pressure, rather than reacting automatically in ways that may not be very helpful for ourselves or others.
5. And in fifth place, we have a very practical, common theme – slowing down, moving from task to people orientation, often linked to the pressures of workload, which mean that leaders can struggle to escape from a focus on all the tasks they need to complete, to invest the time in relationships and developing others. Of course, many school leaders work hard to lighten others’ workloads, understanding the negative impact that we know overload has on people’s wellbeing, but, when it comes to the responsibilities of leadership, it is far more empowering, and usually ultimately more beneficial, to share responsibility and leadership with your team, rather than holding on to everything yourself. This development need is also about slowing down in order to invest, as a leader, in your own wellbeing – and this very often helps you to see things more clearly, and open up choices you didn’t see before.
If these needs resonate for you and/ or your team, and you would like some support, personally, for colleagues, or for a particular team, then please feel free to get in touch. One of the great things about coaching (whether 1:1, or small group coaching), is that it offers a ‘just for me, just enough and just in time’ approach. You don’t need to commit to a time-consuming longer-term programme or wait for a scheduled course to start, you can focus specifically on the need you have right now, and schedule the sessions whenever you want them!