Stephen Mitchell

I have recently started a course at Dundee University which has a heavy writing focus; presenting research ideas in a coherent and structured way.  As someone with dyslexia, this is terrifying.  So, I’m making a conscious effort to set myself 15 minutes aside at least three times a week to write.  Whatever I write will get popped on my blog and I’ll have a sense of self-achievement… that’s the idea anyway.

Ready… steady… GO!

‘Won’t get fooled again’ – a paper by Watton, Lichenstein and Aitken (2019)

Today, as part of my research project into leadership, I read a paper around personal values shaping leadership purpose, behaviour, and legacy.  As a school leader, for me legacy can be easily identified as the impact you have on students, which we all hope, will live on long after we leave our posts.  Values and behaviour are much more interconnected and therefore, they can be hard to define.

Alongside our personal values, individual schools and state departments have their own set of values, which don’t always align.  British values (the DfE set values), for example, are controversial in many school settings.  Watton, Lichtenstein and Aiken (2019) believe that “personal values reflect a silent power that impacts what we are drawn toward and driven away from, the choices people make and the people we trust”.  What impact would a teacher who does not align with the school values have on a child’s education?

In the paper, Watton explores the idea that a manager will ignite motivation in their followers (not a fan of that term!) by aligning these values and ‘nourishing, supporting and activating them to add significant improvements to their organisation’.

This all sounds fairly self-explanatory and agreeable… however, as the paper goes on, they explore the impact this has in the banking sector – a sector known for being ethically questionable.  Through research, they find that the managers/leaders who focus on ‘bottom-line’ or ‘external goods’ produce less motivated (and therefore less impactful)  employees.  This is compared to the managers who focus on follower engagement through sense-making and choose to focus on ‘internal goods’.

When translating it to school, I consider it to mean that an SLT focussed solely on results will not create as motivated a team as the SLT who focus on ‘ethical goods – i.e. the whole child’.  The school with a strong ethical and moral compass will create the more engaged staff base.

This is something, I’d hope, that all headteachers and SLT buy into.  However, with this comes a certain level of ethical stress – how does an SLT ensure this can happen when resource from the DfE is limited vs the high stakes audit culture created by Ofsted and the DfE… that’ll need to be another 15 minute write…