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Integrating vulnerability and reflective practices in educational leadership: A framework for professional growth

Writer: Chris PasseyChris Passey
Feb 188 min read
CHRIS PASSEY FCCT, DEPUTY HEAD, KIMICHI SCHOOL; CO-FOUNDER, EDUPULSE, UK


Introduction

It is likely that leaders may find themselves in reflective and overly critical moods, where they’ve been confronted by their own failings and shortcomings either through being called out for it or through their own decoding of a situation that they knew they should have handled better. But how can you make these moments meaningful enough to learn from them and to increase a sense of professionalism?


In this article, I will argue that, perhaps, instead of taking all our individual errors as disconnected moments in time, related only by virtue of our making them, leaders should be considering them in the light of meaningful assimilation. If we take a previous error as relevant and existing knowledge and place our latest mistake in the position of new information, then leaders should be able to create new meaning and learn from their mistakes (Cottingham, 2023). By investigating how others view the process of being vulnerable and aligning it with evidence-informed modes of recording self-reflection, leaders may see an increase in their vulnerability and therefore a greater buy-in from their teams.

The role of vulnerability in leadership

Vulnerability has both tangible and intangible aspects that focus on the concept of co-suffering (Eriksen, 2022). Forbes-Mewett and Nguyen-Trung (2019) defined vulnerability as the ‘potential to suffer’ (p. 6) and it’s perhaps logical to assume that a leader who demonstrates this quality is indeed creating, if not encouraging, the possibility of suffering in some way. Sharing this sense of vulnerability in teachers can lead to positive relationships and the building of trust among teams (Jopling and Zimmermann, 2023). Definitions of vulnerability that are directly applicable to educational leadership are rare, yet we know that the concept of trust is a key component when increasing relational reciprocity in leaders (Bruni and Tufano, 2017; Kleynhans et al., 2022 ). 

A brief study by Cornell et al. (2022) into the vulnerability of coastal hazards revealed an insight that could be applied to educational leadership. Their concept was a three-dimensional construct of vulnerability, in that they defined it in three connected concepts (see Figure 1).


Figure 1: The three dimensions of vulnerability (adapted from Cornell et al., 2022)
Figure 1: The three dimensions of vulnerability (adapted from Cornell et al., 2022)

While Cornell and colleagues were able to define these elements with regard to coastal hazards, we can apply the identified areas to educational leadership:

  • Exposure could be thought of as the level to which individuals display elements of vulnerability, whether through honesty about their emotional capacity or their faults

  • Sensitivity could measure how much damage may be done emotionally or reputationally from exposing vulnerability

  • Adaptive capacity is the ability to evaluate and appropriately reduce the perceived risk through either exposure or sensitivity.

 

In the myriad roles that we undertake in educational leadership, each of the above concepts becomes increasingly important and reliant upon one the others if we are to truly represent a vulnerable version of ourselves for the betterment of our teams and schools. A leader who can display elements of their vulnerability (exposure) by letting their team know that they are having a poor mental health day should have also been able to assess the potential risks of their honesty (sensitivity) and evaluate how much of themselves to give according to that risk (adaptive capacity).


Looking inward

The assumption that every leader can be sufficiently critically self-reflective to assess their own capacity for vulnerability is ambitious at best. But that doesn’t mean that it is not a goal worth striving for: Brown (2012, 2018) has continually stated through her many books and articles as a sociologist that teams benefit from a leader willing to be more vulnerable, allowing the potential for meaningful connections in teams. Goffee and Jones (2019), in their work on authentic leadership, suggest to ‘be yourself – more – with skill’ (p. 17). The implication here is that if you are feeling vulnerable, then revealing that emotional state with skill – or with adaptive capacity, as per Cornell et al. (2022) – will lead to trust, team cohesion and better outcomes for all, as suggested by Jopling and Zimmermann (2023).

However, we still need to take a step backwards from ourselves if any of this is to be achieved and, crucially, maintained at a professional level. Self-reflection is not something that comes easily to those leaders who are time-poor, but it can be an important element when looking to improve academic success (Lew and Schmidt, 2011). Professional development, as a vocational form of self-reflection, is one of the single most important drivers of success and change in our classrooms (EEF, 2021), and it is within these exponentially growing opportunities for development that we should also embrace the chance to be critically self-reflective.


Take a moment to think about the last time that you made a mistake in your leadership role and where the consequences of that mistake were inflicted upon those whom you lead – for instance, someone was hurt by the tone of your voice, you took an unpopular decision that caused upset in your team or you genuinely misspoke and one of your team was deeply insulted. We could end up feeling guilty, worried and stressed, and all while managing to teach, lead, strategise and safeguard – sometimes it’s impossible. We all experience these moments of personal vulnerability, and they occur with more regularity than we’d like to admit. Surely it’s part of the human condition, however, to make such errors in positions of responsibility; it’s how we deal with them that defines our leadership and our humanity towards our fellow teachers and leaders.


Do we consciously use our leadership position to create policies that benefit our teams? Instances of leadership vulnerability can lead to dynamic psychological safety: research by McKinsey & Company (2021) revealed that organisations led by vulnerable leaders are 25 per cent more likely to embrace innovation and experimentation, fostering a culture where new ideas can thrive without the fear of failure. Therefore, we can safely assume that if we want to achieve the latter in our schools, our leadership style must embrace vulnerability through a lens of adaptive capacity. Such examples might include an email embargo at the weekend, allowing paid time off for staff to be at important events, ensuring that staff are leaving at a reasonable hour or other such actions that allow the exposure of your humanity and understanding to be seen as a positive personality trait.


Application

The question is therefore how can we insist that our students are taught through a cognitive lens to recognise prior learning as the most influential element of a person’s capacity to learn (Simonsmeier et al., 2022; EEF, 2021; Cottingham, 2023) if we don’t apply it to our own personal and professional development? As leaders, we are agents of change (Bass, 1990), and we could take advantage of our own advice by not simply looking at our mistakes in isolation, which is frustrating and might never lead to change, but instead analysing them ourselves and looking for connections and patterns. This level of self-reflection requires us to evaluate not only our physical actions but also our inner motives, and this can prove problematic and takes time; there’s no quick fix (Suphasri and Chinokul, 2021). Hyde (2024) found that despite intense personal insights requiring some level of philosophical phenomenology, this lack of ability isn’t a restrictive factor if teachers are able to record their thoughts as shown in Figure 2 to guide their reflection.


What happened (the event)?

What was made possible in this event? 

How has this event subsequently affected my pedagogical practice and how has it changed me as a teacher?

Figure 2: Questions to guide self-reflection (from Hyde, 2024)

 

This evidence-informed approach to self-reflection appears to have a relational link to the work of Cornell et al. (2022). I propose an alignment of thinking between Hyde’s self-reflection and Cornell et al.’s dimensions of vulnerability, to present a potential tool for teachers to use self-reflection to enhance their vulnerability (Figure 3).


Figure 3: Self-reflection into vulnerability for teachers
Figure 3: Self-reflection into vulnerability for teachers
Figure 3: Self-reflection into vulnerability for teachers

Teachers and leaders could use this alignment of thinking to be evidence-informed when it comes to the nature of their vulnerability in relation to regular moments of connected self-reflection. From the initial stages of self-reflection, we could expect leaders to naturally begin a process of meaningful assimilation, because they’ll be able to observe and evaluate a previous error – treating it as relevant and existing knowledge – and assimilate it with new information from the most recent interaction (Cottingham, 2023). The active ingredients of both pieces of information (previous error and latest iteration) may, over time, combine to form a coherent thread from which the professional development of the leader may benefit.

Future research should be carried out in this area, to observe leaders and their varying modes of recording a similar metacognitive approach, with explicit links to developing vulnerability in order to help to build the suggested synergy with the cognitive science lens through which we are attempting to teach. When it comes to vulnerable leadership, the ability to self-reflect and apply these observations to our own professional development will likely produce an increasingly authentic and adaptive leadership style, from which stronger teams can grow; instead of seeing vulnerability as a weakness, its true value lies in its openness and ability to create new approaches to leadership (Corlett et al., 2019).


References

 
 
 

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