Middle leadership, described as ‘the engine room of the school’ (The Guardian, 2013) is, in my view, the toughest job you can have in a school. I was a bad middle leader. I just couldn’t get my head around the impact I was supposed to be having on the team while I was teaching my own class. It felt that the endless metaphors used to describe my role just made the waters muddier by the day. ‘Drive standards’, ‘cultivate trust’, ‘Embed strategy’ were all phrases that I heard repeatedly without any real guidance on how to do these things. The frustrating thing was that I could see others who seemed to be more effective than me in the role but I couldn’t work out what they were doing – what the active ingredients were of their leadership. Very often, it is a role that is presented to people in the way it was to me – without guidance or support. This blog is my attempt to unpack some of the metaphors that were thrown at me and distil some of the things that I retrospectively think help middle leaders understand how to be effective.
The engine room of the school
The fact that so often middle leadership is explained through the use of metaphors tells us something about the complexity of it and so returning to perhaps the most common middle leadership metaphor – ‘the engine room of the school’, seems a useful place to start. Engines makes things run but they don’t set the direction. That is the job of senior leaders and governors (most clearly of all, the Headteacher). One job of a middle leader therefore is to be sure that they are aligned with exactly what that direction is. How can they do this?
1. Be fully aware of the school’s development. If you are fortunate enough to work in a school with a 3-year plan, make sure that you are fully aware of that. Once you are aware of it, ask yourself, and your line manager, how your role contributes to that journey.
2. Be fully aware of what the leadership principles of your school are. This is tricky because very often, these are not explicitly stated. In these cases, it is worth asking a senior leader if this can be considered, ideally co-constructed and shared.
Be yourself
This second point is an interesting one. There is the notion that the best leadership is authentic and this is certainly true in my experience. However, Goffe and Jones (2021) wrote about ‘being yourself, with skill’. By this, they meant that we all have multiple facets to our personalities and rather than allowing ourselves to react to different situations, we should instead be deliberate with the aspect of our personality that we lead with depending on what the situation requires. The requirements of the situation, could be viewed through the lens of leadership principles. For example, if one of our shared leadership principles is development and you have been tasked with carrying out lesson observations within your department, your style of feedback should be designed with development in mind. Consider the two examples below:
A. I think you should use mini white boards to check understanding from now on because cold calling just didn’t give you a wide enough sample of who understood your explanation. It is a whole departmental policy to use them and so you really do need to make sure that is happening.
B. I noticed that there were four or five students who didn’t understand your explanation. I know that you cold called to check the understanding of some of the students but it seems like those four or five slipped through the net. Is there another strategy you think you could use that might provide you with a fuller picture? …. How about using mini white boards? How might that be helpful?
Hopefully, it’s clear how example B enacts the principle of development. If every leader is aligned with that principle in how they work, whether they are responsible for teaching and learning, behaviour, attendance or any other aspect of school life, conversations become more consistent and will generally be better received.
Cultivate trust
‘Cultivating trust’ is another fairly vague metaphor that is used to describe the role of middle leaders. It is clear that trust is desirable but what does the word cultivate tell us? Cultivation is about preparing the conditions so that a skill can develop. Therefore, we can think about cultivating trust as preparing conditions by doing certain things over a prolonged period. The prolonged period is necessary because cultivation of trust, like cultivation of anything, takes time.
There are lots of things you can do to cultivate trust but here are a few that I think are particularly important:
1. Be honest
Fundamentally, people need to believe that you are telling the truth. They won’t follow your lead if there is any doubt about your honesty. This is hard because sometimes there is the temptation to soften difficult messages or avoid details that might be uncomfortable to talk about. In the end, this represents too great a risk to your aim of cultivating trust. Even if your intentions were good, for example, telling a member of your team that want to model how to hold a parent conversation to them because their manner may have come across as defensive is a difficult thing to do. But, the long-term investment in trust cultivation is worth the short-lived awkwardness. By contrast, softening this message by telling them that this is something you want to do for everyone in the team is likely to be damaging to their view of your honesty when they ask other team members if they have had a similar message and find out that it is indeed only them!
2. Be vulnerable
There is little more powerful than a leader who exhibits vulnerability. Modelling getting stuck on a problem, a lesson having not gone to plan, difficulty with time management or wanting advice on dealing with a challenging student all send a message to your team that is OK to ask for help. Not only does this provide psychological safety but a bi-product of that is likely to be respect for your leadership. However, there is competence line that you must stay the right side of. Modelling making a serious safeguarding error, for example, is likely to be a serious threat to the faith that others have in you.
3. Care
You can’t fake this one. You really do have to genuinely care about others. Some leaders though find that their natural care is something they feel they need to curtail when they move into middle leadership. They see this as ensuring professional distance. You can still challenge people professionally and show them that you care. Yes, it is a longer-term approach but it is absolutely possible. As a general rule, remember that you are dealing with a person first and professional next. What I mean by this is, consider whether or not the person in front of you is emotionally ready for a professional conversation or if they need a personal one at that moment. Making sure someone is OK in themselves and letting them know that this comes first doesn’t mean that professional challenge won’t also be coming but just that you understand that they need to be settled in themselves in order for this to happen and that you value them enough to give them the time and space for this.
Drive standards
Driving standards is one of the most commonly used phrases in education. Of course, we all want standards in all aspects of teaching to get better but how do we contribute to that as a middle leader. I think the answer to this one comes in being good at the other three. If you understand how to align and act in alignment with the school’s direction, if you can cultivate trust so that people follow you in that direction and if you can do that with the authenticity of being yourself (with skill) then I would suggest that people in your team are highly likely to become more effective. Effectiveness is dependent on your aims and your aims are set by the people in charge of your context so alignment with that is essential to help people get better at the stuff that your setting holds up as important. People will reluctantly crawl behind (at best) if they don’t trust you, wary of being misled and this will slow the journey down, at times to the point of standstill. Courage and commitment to the journey from all involved will also move standards faster and for this kind of commitment, people need to feel a certain degree of predictability and safety about what the journey will feel like. Your authenticity, your commitment to be yourself, will provide this.
Closing thoughts
There are many other ways to break down the role of the middle leader but in my experience of being a poor middle leader, unable to unpack what it is I was supposed to be doing, what I really needed was someone to unpack the metaphors and analogies that are a necessary part of describing such a complex role. The examples in this blog are merely examples and the most determined leaders will take the concept of leadership metaphors and use the ideas here to interrogate more of them, drilling down until their middle leadership engine is truly purring.
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