Self-awareness leads to stronger collective leadership

Issue: Volume 101, Number 2

Posted: 23 February 2022
Reference #: 1HASyC

Professional development in psychological safety has been of great value to a group of school leaders who undertook a course together just before the pandemic changed the world in early 2020.

Lorraine Taylor

Lorraine Taylor

Rather than sitting on their laurels after a good ERO report, former Lynmore School principal Lorraine Taylor decided it was time to ensure that the school was running as well as it could from top to bottom.

There are many leadership providers and supports available in our system, however Lynmore School’s leadership team at the time, decided to undertake a course of Psychological S.A.F.E.T.Y training run by the Continuum Consulting Group.

The model is based on neuroscience and aims to help people feel safe to speak up and ask questions and not feel that they are going to be embarrassed or punished for speaking up, explains Lorraine.

“I think it’s really important that people can voice their ‘half-finished’ thoughts and ask questions and brainstorm out loud – because that’s what gives you that innovation in your culture. You have to give people space and time to ask what they think are ‘naïve questions’, but not feel embarrassed,” says Lorraine.

“It’s really important that people feel they can speak up because if they don’t speak up about things that aren’t working, or might go wrong because of a power imbalance, then we don’t get the best decisions being made.

“We did it in terms of continuous improvement and it was really interesting how empowered people felt by being able to speak out, rather than sitting in a meeting and listening to me, or someone else talk about how it’s going to be.”

Building a language

The school’s 10 leaders, including Lorraine, were put through an online assessment with about 50 ‘if you’re in this situation, what would you do?’ questions which had to be responded to rapidly.

Participants receive an in-depth (around 15 pages) report, which gives a profile of where they sit on a scale for:
S= security, A= autonomy, F= fairness, E= esteem, T= trust and the Y is ‘about you’.

“My one is ‘autonomous’ and possibly a lot of principals are. It means that if we were micro-managed, it would start to make us feel angry or withdrawn or whatever people do when they don’t feel comfortable. So being aware of where people’s triggers are is really important.

“For example, we had a discussion about something that needed to happen in the school and my immediate reaction was ‘we’ll do this and this and this, and we’ll tell people this’ and the assistant principal said to me (her main profile was around fairness): ‘Are you being really autonomous now?’” laughs Lorraine.

It was important to have a skilled, external person who is able to help staff unpack findings in a sensitive way, she says.

“What was fortunate was that across the team we had a real range of attributes – we were quite different.

“I think it gives you a language to speak to each other. You’ve done the work together, been through the workshops, you’ve got a level of trust and relationship building there and people can say ‘do you think you’re being fair?’, or ‘do you feel like your trust trigger is going off?’” explains Lorraine.

S.A.F.E.T.Y - S= security, A= autonomy, F= fairness, E= esteem, T= trust and the Y is ‘about you’.

S.A.F.E.T.Y - S= security, A= autonomy, F= fairness, E= esteem, T= trust and the Y is ‘about you’.

Robust discussions

The increased self-awareness, knowledge and acceptance of each other helped to build positive relationships and enabled honest and robust discussions around the rapidly evolving Covid situation in 2020.

“When things are stressful and changing rapidly like they are now, school leaders can get a little bit one-eyed on what they think should happen. They actually need group discussion to look at things from different points of view,” explains Lorraine.

“I think that’s a really important safety mechanism in the organisation, that we don’t just go off and say ‘this is what we’re going to do’. Because we know with something like Covid, where things are changing week by week, we’re in danger of reacting to things very quickly and disenfranchising parents, or teachers. We need to take the time to run decisions past everybody and value their views.”

Lorraine gives an example of decision-making around whether parents should be allowed in classrooms, or have to remain offsite and drop their children at the gate.

“That was a really robust conversation in the group, because there was a side of me that said ‘nope, we’re going to ban everyone from coming on the site and everyone has to drop their kids at the gate and that’s the rules’.

“But then people said, from a ‘trust’ model, do we trust that parents are making the right decisions for their child if they need to come on site? We need to trust that it’s important to them to come on site and that they are going to follow the rules. And someone said ‘are we being fair to those children who are really traumatised by leaving their parents at the gate, when they actually do need a parent or caregiver for just 10 minutes at the start of the day to get settled. And is that fair, or not fair?’

“Even though they are small things, they are small things that will really upset a community if you are heavy-handed,” reflects Lorraine.

Preparing for Omicron

In term 2, 2021, Lorraine moved to Silverstream School, north of Wellington and says that the training she underwent has continued to be useful in her new principal’s role.

“It has definitely helped me as a leader to check myself. If I know I’m in danger of going autonomous here, I need to make sure that I’m inclusive and try to ensure that I’m not the one dominating all the meetings, doing all the talking. So, it has changed my approach to leadership, even without doing the profiles with my team here,” she says.

With the new challenges of Omicron, Lorraine plans to undertake the programme with her new leadership team this year to build self and team knowledge to help them manage “potentially THE most challenging phase of this global pandemic in New Zealand”.

“Preparing for the challenges of Omicron, I think we have to be transparent and honest and open to suggestion,” she says. “I think where schools will go wrong with this, is if they set themselves up as experts and have a whole set of rules – instead of going to the community and saying, ‘Wow, this is going to be a tricky year and we’re going to need you to work in partnership with us to get the best outcomes for the kids in the community. And there are going to be days where we are struggling, but we’re in it together’.

“Every community has an entire range of people. We have to honour them all and make sure that the communications we send out are kind and acknowledge people’s views but also communicate that we’ve also got a health order that we have to comply with. We’re going to try to walk a line of everyone kind of feeling OK,” says Lorraine.

The programme helped the Lynmore School leadership team work cohesively through Covid challenges while still having robust and challenging discussions.

“I think the important thing to know is that everybody has your back and you have their backs; that no-one should be overlooked or ignored, that everyone’s feelings are real for them.

“Psychological safety doesn’t mean that everybody is nice to everybody all the time – it means that we embrace any conflict that we’ve got, and we give people the ability to speak up; and that people know we’ve still got their backs,” she concludes.

BY Education Gazette editors
Education Gazette | Tukutuku Kōrero, reporter@edgazette.govt.nz

Posted: 12:11 pm, 23 February 2022

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