What has March 2020 taught me about my leadership? Part 2 - Proactive vs. Pre-emptive

This is Part 2 in a short 5 part series of reflective blogs about what coronavirus has revealed about my leadership. Part 1 was about the imperative of clear communication and can be read here. I’ll post each one separately so they’re not too long:

1. Clear communication is everything

2. Striking the balance between being prepared and pre-emptive

3. Standing up for your values – you need them more now than ever

4. Times of crisis – you reap the culture you’ve sown

5. Protecting your mental health as a leader

Striking the balance between being prepared and pre-emptive

Collinsdictionary.com provides these definitions:

• ‘proactive’ = creating or controlling a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened.

• ‘prepared’ = ready for something that is likely to happen

• ‘pre-emptive’ = taken as a measure against something possible, anticipated, or feared

As leaders, we are absolutely conditioned to be proactive. It is a badge of honour. It is a sign of good leadership. I talk a lot about it as a desirable quality and encourage it in the leaders at my school.

However, COVID-19 has taught me an interesting lesson about getting the balance right between being proactive, prepared and being pre-emptive, which I view as a negative.

I think the use of the word ‘controlling’ in the definition of proactive is useful… it is entirely human that in a time of crisis we seek to gain a sense of control. Equally, how can being ‘prepared’ be anything but a good thing? Therefore as this scary, unknown situation started to emerge, schools across the country sought to proactively anticipate a myriad of futures and be prepared for them. We did lots of scenario-planning.

HOWEVER, in this ‘unprecedented’ (I literally hate this word) situation I think the key is that we just don’t know what is likely to happen and therefore much of the scenario planning (that I’ve been involved in at least) never came to pass. This is no-one's fault! It is simply a sign of the crazy times we're working in.

Whilst I can accept that I - and perhaps I'll rope in some other SLT colleagues - may plough some time thinking about scenarios that may/may not actually happen in the pursuit of being slightly more agile and prepared, I certainly don’t want to pass this on to other colleagues en mass.

March was such a stressful month, and many teachers were still trying to deliver their normal lessons whilst simultaneously trying to plan and populate whole online ways of working. I wonder if, actually, more school leaders needed to say: "We are NOT launching our online way of working on Monday. We need a couple of days to get it sorted and our schools only ‘closed’ on Friday at 3pm, so we'll have our solution ready to go on Wednesday." I certainly think we need to remember that when it comes to the return phase. We need to be courageous and say: "We need time, with staff, before the students all return."

My mantra in those middle weeks of March became ‘One thing at a time.’

To try and achieve this balance, I devised a timeline of ‘phases’ which included:

• Preparation - this phase consisted of cancelling upcoming commitments and gathering information - assuming it wasn't too labour intensive to do so.

• Immediate – this phase sort of ‘overtook’ us as our families quickly responded to the changing tone from the government and started to self-isolate.

• - Short-Medium Term - I re-purposed a twilight training session on the 18^th of March to share with the staff body what our approach to Learning from Home would look like IF we moved into the yellow zone. However, I also made it clear what we could do now, as our efforts continued to largely be focused on in-school learning and what would happen upon the announcement of school closure. See slide below.

• Longer Term – we carefully devised a moderate and sustainable approach to how and with whom we would start to introduce more intensive/live online learning experiences.

These two slides were used in the whole staff meeting on the 18th of March to illustrate the above:

Whilst, I don't think schools (especially middle leaders and teachers) are well served by their leadership teams being too pre-emptive right now, I think that we can get the balance right by thinking about our principles. Having the principles sorted provides a coherent foundation for the huge number of decisions that will have to follow.

For example, when we were planning for how we would cope with reduced staff numbers, we first established these principles:

And all actions and decisions flowed from them. This meant that coherent decisions could be made quickly when we needed to galvanise because something had changed. We were prepared without being pre-emptive.

I think there are two main reasons to rein in our natural desire to be super proactive and risk being pre-emptive:

• Workload. It's a concrete way of being respectful of our staff’s workload and wellbeing – even more important in such a stressful time.

• Trust. By saying to staff, we don’t have all the information to ‘press go’ on this decision yet, but also showing that the leadership team has given it some good thought you are doing two things: reassuring them that you are a safe pair of hands and also ensuring that when you ‘press go’ staff do have the capacity and good will to galvanise for you, because you haven’t ‘gone too early.’

I’m sure that the above doesn’t suit all leaders or organisations. It definitely doesn't suit all situations. In 'normal times' there are many scenarios we can anticipate and we are justly rewarded for being proactive and prepared. But right now, during COVID-19, stopping, taking stock and saying ‘not yet’ has been critical to how I have personally coped in the last month.

Thanks for reading, part 3 and 4: values and culture is coming up next!