I enjoyed reading this recent TES article by Nancy Gedge, who writes about the challenge of saying ‘no’ when you’re in leadership, especially if you’re involved in the leadership of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. Being the practical, positive and constructive person she is, Nancy goes on to discuss strategies for saying no which still preserve respectful relationships.
I remembered a tricky staff meeting when I was a head. At the time when the ’25 tasks’ which teachers were no longer expected to complete were published (which meant, I think, that support staff just had more to do…) we met as a full staff to talk about managing workload. I’d been in post 5 years then, and I started by asking them, in groups, to discuss and come up with a list of anything they were doing now, which they didn’t think they had been doing 5 years before. Then I asked them to compile a list of things they were doing 5 years ago which they no longer had to do. Predictably, the lists didn’t balance each other out! A fair number of responsibilities and events had been added to the calendar/their professional commitments in the first half of my headship, and little had been taken away.
I explained that I didn’t believe this was because I had come in as the new head and suddenly demanded so much more of them. Many of the new things we had committed to hadn’t actually been my idea. But I was a head who tended to say ‘yes’. So when the Head of Lower School suggested we added a Year 8 residential teambuilding activity in the autumn term, or the Deputy Director of Music suggested we introduce an annual House Singing event to complement the established House Drama Festival, or the Head of Drama, encouraged by other staff, insisted that the staff pantomime we had tried in my second year should be something we committed to do every Christmas, I had said yes. We tried these events; they worked well. The pupils enjoyed the opportunity, the staff were enthusiastic about the experience, and the parents were appreciative. So then each became a part of the annual calendar and was repeated every year – but nothing was correspondingly taken out of the calendar to balance the workload.
We discussed how our ‘core business’ was teaching and learning, underpinned by strong pastoral care. The broader curriculum, developing leadership opportunities for students and staff, and investment in extra-curricular activities were all important, but if we spread ourselves too thinly, we risked our core business – the quality of teaching and learning and pastoral care – becoming less effective than we needed it to be. And we risked exhausting ourselves. So I suggested that from this point onwards, if staff came to me with an idea for something ‘extra’, that they thought would benefit the pupils and enrich their school experience, I might actually not say yes at this point. Or we might need to negotiate what we would park/rest/stop doing in order to create the time, space and energy the fresh initiative might require. And I warned the staff that when I said this, I knew they wouldn’t like it!
School calendars can easily become overloaded. Positive, keen and committed staff can overstretch themselves – and sometimes, in fact, students can be pulled in too many different directions because they want to engage in too many things – and that can jeopardise the core business for them, too. Life is all about balance, I think. How do we find the right balance and recalibrate when we need to?
Sometimes the staff I work with now, in my leadership development role, talk about the difficulty they have if their line manager asks them to do something in addition to their current responsibilities, and they don’t feel they have the capacity. We discuss how they might handle this. I’ve suggested that saying ‘not yet’ or ‘not now’ can be easier than a bald ‘no…’ – though, in effect, it means ‘no’. You can say it respectfully and regretfully – but assertively. Be professional, but be clear about what you feel is a reasonable expectation of what you could/should do. Another line you might take is, ‘I’d love to do that, and I’d want to do it well. If I take it on, can you suggest which of my current responsibilities I could release so that I have the time and space to make a success of this?’
And if you are a leader, remember the advice of international Principal Joanna Povall in her new book ‘Kind Leadership’. Joanna argues that sometime people see being ‘kind’ as being soft or weak. She argues that kindness takes strength and courage. Having that tricky conversation rather than avoiding it (while trying to convince yourself that avoidance is the compassionate option) is kind. And saying no, however you frame it, can be kind, and it can certainly take more grit and determination that trying to court popularity and please people by saying yes to everything.
What do you think?
Banner pic: Thanks to Gemini
jillberry102 