Bold Decision Makers?
Can Leadership be a Waste of Time?
At a professional learning event on leadership in 2020, just before COVID 19 stepped into stop all gatherings, one learning point for me as a facilitator stood out above all others.
The group of 12 teachers were secondary practitioners of between 5- and 10-years’ experience. Most of them had been around a few schools before obtaining a permanent contract in a very large establishment.
A few had some acting PT or Faculty Head experience, either currently or in the recent past.
However, all were seriously considering the next step in their career and were applying for leadership posts. Some spoke of the time consuming, emotion sapping application and interview process. None of that really opened my eyes however. The surprise come when in groups of four, they were asked to think of leaders they had worked with and in the 4 groups identify the leadership attributes of effective leaders and those of the less successful leaders they had worked for.
They were a very switched on group of participants and engaged in every aspect of the 90-minute workshop.
But all the groups sprang to life when it came to highlighting one of the failings of leadership. Several shortcomings were mentioned, however the one mentioned by all 4 discussion groups and which elicited palpable frustration was the inability of leaders to come to decisions: these aspiring leaders identified prevarication, indecision, dithering, call it what you will, as the number one enemy of effective leadership.
My surprise came from the intensity of the teachers’ feelings of frustration at what they clearly identified as the one aspect of weak leadership which impinged negatively on either or both the faculty or school, they worked in. They also emphasised the negative impact this leadership trait had on their ability to do their job well and grow as professionals. The teachers painted a picture where the procrastination of a leader had significant rippling negative effects.
In their words it led to uncertainty, a lack of progress, people doing their own thing, zero innovation, a lack of a clear vision and inertia becoming the predominant ethos in the faculty and/or school.
According to David de Cremer in ‘The Proactive Leader: How to Overcome Procrastination and be a Bold Decision Maker’, this bad habit of leadership is the main barrier to progress. De Cremer describes procrastination as a leader’s tendency to delay making important decisions while executing the less important ones. However, he also found in research that leaders seldom see this fault in themselves that shines out clearly to their “supervisors and subordinates”.
De Cremer notes two reasons for procrastination: forces within the leader and forces outwith the leader.
The forces within include a tendency to get immersed in the less important or irrelevant issues, or if the leader is emotionally impulsive then they can swing from plan to plan, from priority to priority.
Leaders who do not feel confident enough to put into action their own priorities may be easily blown off course by outside pressures and trends especially if they are working in establishments whose environment is uncertain, vague and lacking transparency.
It would be interesting to meet up with the young aspiring leaders’ group I mentioned earlier as we slowly emerge from the COVID crisis. Their views on the leadership and decision making in Scottish education over the last year would be most interesting. I wonder if they would be impressed or critical. Would they, as they were to a person last year still be frustrated by procrastination and dithering or would they have found decisiveness in their respective workplaces? I suspect it will be a mixed bag.
I’m off to re-read that most famous of procrastinators – Hamlet! To be or not to be indeed.
Ronnie Boyd is a key consultant with Cor ad Cor and a university associate tutor. He previously worked in a number of local authorities in quality assurance roles and as a secondary school depute headteacher