Head's Blog | With feathers | Embley School, Hampshire

Quite a tough start to this week if I can be candid. I guess that got your attention reader. Well, it was very little to do with school, in fact so little that it amounted to nothing at all. That said, I slipped silently under the radar (or so I thought) of the boarding staff in the early hours of Monday morning only to be visited by two colleagues brandishing a poster they had spent next to no time in skillessly creating. A grinning Rassie Erasmus sat atop the IRFU logo and so began the day’s ribbing about one of the most bizarre rugby games in memory. Add to that a colleague parading a yellow card at the back of assembly and you get the picture of the collegiality I am surrounded by. The lack of leadership and disciplined focus evident in the Ireland v South Africa game was arrested by our Heads and Deputy Heads of School who led the assembly. They took great care to share ideas around leadership and the expectations of those who work in teams. Beautifully setting out the Pilot, Participant, Passenger, Protester and Prisoner as modes of existing in groups; they invited a captive audience to participate and elect to identify which one they felt most suited their own approach to teamwork. 
 
There were Pilots - those who see a destination, steer the team in that direction and navigate difficulty. Participants, those who may not have their hands on the levers but are actively supporting and facilitating the direction of travel. Passengers, who are happy to be so steered and led but are less keen to take the wheel themselves. They may be disengaged, lacking buy in and go with the flow. The Protestors who, while essential from time to time, provide necessary critical input. That said if it is their only mode of being it wears the group down. Objecting to the direction without a proposed new course is more carping than constructing. Lastly the Prisoner, those who feel they cannot influence direction, don’t want to complain and cannot get off. Within team dynamics we will, I suspect, occupy each role at some point. I'm pretty clear in my own mind that I never want to be a Prisoner; that I can be the Protestor but not too much and that every Pilot needs a team around them to be effective. I was told once by a real pilot that modern commercial passenger aircraft are so computer based that the pilot has considerable support. Maybe, but I'm old fashioned enough to be glad there is still a person flying the plane.
 
Regardless of the role we occupy, there is a quality that is also significant. A quality of character in leaders and in those being led. I think that the capacity to be hopeful, to be unreasonably optimistic, is a core value for any leader. What, might you ask, is the difference between this unreasonable optimism and naive wish fulfilment? Well one is based on looking directly at the facts as they are and wondering what might be. The other is not looking at them at all and wondering what is. One appreciates the issues but refuses to be determined by them, the other builds castles in the air. In most decisions we have agency, we can willingly abandon that agency or not, we can accidentally abandon it by going with the flow, by not paying attention - but when push comes to shove we all have a decision to make.

Being optimistic is a decision, being hopeful is a decision, so too is being negative. Remember Hamlet! The other source of this unreasonable optimism is experience. Trust in the vision and the purpose means that when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune come, you can parry the blows. Of course, this is predicated on the nature of the vision or purpose. Where our horizons are fixed in the service of a project bigger than ourselves, we can trust in Providence or in purpose or in both. The humility of knowing that we are finite humans and the courage to start where we are, to do what we can and use what we have, gives us agency and optimism. That we do this in a collective binds us to purpose as a community and we are stronger together. As I said to a parent at the Sixth Form Parents’ Evening, I don’t need to know the final step, I just need to take the next one. That may be unreasonably optimistic, but it gives us hope and ‘hope is the thing with feathers...’