Releasing the power of middle leadership

Sir George Monoux College has recently engaged in a leadership development project from which comes an insight into the role of middle leaders as an independent, agenda-driving force, rising above the early career steps of being aligned and reliable team players. College principal, Dave Vasse, and John Watters, founding director of Living Leadership, have reflected on the project in this article.

Dave Vasse: One of the effects of waiting almost 4 years between full inspections, owing to pandemic restrictions on the work of Ofsted, was to give me a magnified, high definition and slow-motion view of our college’s leadership team as it steered our college out of requires improvement to the positive report that was finally published on 30 December 2021. The role of our Pathway Leaders, each heading up a curriculum grouping of courses, was a textbook middle management success story, singled out for praise by inspectors, but the experience of those almost 4 years surfaced for me thoughts about what the long wait for Ofsted does to leaders and how, if we’re not careful, middle leaders can be trapped in a narrative where they are the faithful team players, reliable and ready to take instruction but ultimately not the authors of change that they should be.

These thoughts were clear to me in mid-2021 and led me to instigate a development programme for middle leaders in the college that would prepare us for a world post-Waiting-for-Ofsted. Back in 2018, I had been delighted to see the emergence of a determined, trouble-shooting Pathway Leader team, aligned to our goals and able to translate priorities into new approaches and good organisation. Incrementally, these characteristics could also be used to describe the teams they managed. But I also believed, and continue to believe to my very core, that middle leadership should be so much more than this. Waiting-for-Ofsted had become an exercise in ironing out unpredictability, putting into practice a very clear and non-negotiable set of expectations. Our team did that brilliantly, but I knew that we needed to be ready for our next phase very soon.  

When I first discussed the idea of development work for Pathway Leaders with John Watters, still months before our inspection, I described the college as in transition from having a single dominant agenda that was clear to all and for which preparation was everything, to a new phase where future options could now vary and new partnerships might be possible. Where high-alert timescales would open up and we could face up to the root causes of perennial obstacles; where our role in the community might change: a phase where uncertainty felt healthy and where surprising outcomes were not something to be panicked by. Our college was about to embrace greater complexity and our middle leaders needed to be ready. I wanted John to help our Pathway Leaders to see their own potential in setting the college agenda and to see the potential of working in unison.

I invited John to come in and see how people were working but asked him to be mindful that Waiting-for-Ofsted is like having a very hierarchical uber-boss sitting over you: it knows what it wants, it makes all the judgements, it has all the questions, and it knows what it expects the answer to be. 

We’ll move rapidly on from the Ofsted context, and I don’t mean to typecast the role of Ofsted. The learning for us that followed stemmed much more from noticing our own assumptions and organisational game-playing and, through that learning, giving middle leadership its own compass. 

John Watters: From working with Dave at previous colleges I knew he would be open to and expect what I would call a combined personal and systemic approach to leadership: personal, inviting self-reflection on one’s own leadership and contribution, and systemic, learning to see context and patterns of behaviour.

On the one hand the plan of work, if you’d seen it, might look similar to what could take place in any college: one-to-ones with middle managers, two team days with middle managers, a development workshop with all managers and a follow-on half-day for all managers. What’s distinctive is whilst the project had a broad set of intentions, there was space for emergence in what we did and how we did the work. Dave knew that insights would arise from the process of engagement and that the shape and specific content of what the college needed to do at Grade 2 and beyond could not be pre-specified. Individuals and the college management had to discover individually and together what was required for this next stage of the college’s development.     

In my experience, if you want to see how a team (or a person or a college) might grow and develop, then you must understand the context within which that team is embedded and their patterns of interaction: vertically (up and down the hierarchy); horizontally across the college between teams and between teaching and support functions; and at the boundaries, for example the pattern of interactions with students, parents and carers. I observed the college in action, both in formal and informal settings. 

The approach to this work is not a traditional diagnostic phase and then report model. Rather it activates, through a judicious mix of challenge and support, everyone involved in the work into more active noticing and inquiring into which assumptions, routines, rituals, practices, rules, and processes serve and enable, and which ones constrain and limit the college. 

Dave: John's early work highlighted how easily organisations adopt habits and routines and make assumptions about how others are experiencing the system. Together we looked at the roles that individuals played in meetings and how the space to discuss is controlled and managed, and by whom and how far the existing dynamics maximised the potential of these meetings. Two characteristics of the college system became clear. 1) We recognised that our middle leaders were highly committed and working to a clear mission, displayed high energy and were proud of the way that the college had evolved. 2) The impact of a sustained drive for improvement and the presence of capable people in senior leadership posts had resulted in a system which was now overly ‘top-focused’. There was potential for the middle managers to work together as an integrated team, not just as skilful executors of ‘top’-level directives, but also as initiators, connectors & innovators. 

John: How do you build systems thinking capability in a college?

We brought together managers in the college (a group of about 25 people) for a day’s experiential learning in systems thinking based on the work of systems theorist Barry Oshry, followed by 1-1 coaching sessions and a half-day follow-up session for the same group a month later.

Managers are immersed in a series of short exercises where they are engaged in real work - shared important urgent tasks - that activate their everyday responses. They operate in one of four key systemic contexts:

• Top – the condition of complexity and uncertainty with designated accountability for the whole or a part of the organisation.
• Middle – the condition of tearing, operating in the space between individuals and groups who have differing needs, goals, priorities and perspectives.
• Bottom – the condition of vulnerability where decisions made elsewhere (often at a higher levels of the system) impact your world in significant ways. This is also the space where the core work of the organisation gets done.  
• Customer – often characterised by the condition of neglect, where the customer’s needs are not being heard or met.

In the workshop, we pause the action frequently to get a rapid and rich picture of the experience of the whole system. What is life like for you right now? What are the challenges, issues, and dilemmas you are facing? What are you feeling? How are you experiencing other groups? 

We invite honest, courageous speaking and curious listening. The debriefs quickly reveal that these exercises are like a mirror on the college - reflecting back the assumptions and patterns of behaviour which are present in the college every day. This can be challenging as well as illuminating. The impact can be dramatic. One manager, unfamiliar with being in the Top space, named the vulnerability and feeling of risk that came with stepping into the Top space in the exercise. Through this sharing of experiences, a recognition grows in the room that each context - Top, Middle, Bottom and Customer - has distinct challenges and a distinctive power. People recognise that power is distributed across the system and each context can make unique contributions to the strength and vitality of the whole organisation: Tops as Shapers, Middles as Integrators, Bottoms/Workers as Creators/Producers, and Customers as Validators.   

Empathy and humility palpably increase in the room. Why? Because people are literally walking in each other’s shoes. As the day progresses people start to see that there are predictable, habitual patterns of behaviour that each group can fall into unawares and which limit the effectiveness of the whole system. These patterns are not related to personalities or the particularities of a sector or industry. The patterns occur across the greatest range of organisations and with the greatest variety of characters occupying the various roles. 

I feel a growing sense of partnership and common humanity in the room as people begin to appreciate that everyone is doing the best they can with what they’ve got in their different contexts. And a realisation emerges that a systemic perspective offers a way out of the common and contagious BMW behaviour (blaming, moaning, whining about ‘them’). There is acknowledgement of the shocking cost in time and energy of this common kind of negative story-making and storytelling. Practices are shared and experiments are generated about how to interrupt this kind of behaviour, firstly starting with ourselves and only then moving out to others. The kinds of stories we tell ourselves and each other matter more than we think. 

We follow up the day with 1-1 coaching sessions where managers consolidate the insights and the practical implications for leading in their sphere of influence in the college.

The final half-day session opens with me naming my own self-reflection and prediction that this final session will probably result in some useful conversations but not a significant shift - maybe a 7/10 in terms of possible outcomes - reasonable but not amazing. I share my feeling that this low expectation sits uncomfortably, and feels like a lost opportunity. I name the qualities - courage, openness, willingness to take risks - that I would need to embody as the facilitator to co-create a session which had a chance of being 9/10. In small groups I invite everyone into that same conversation.  What prediction (probably unconscious until it is noticed and named) does each person have for this session? If they were intentional, what ambition would they have for this conversation? How would they need to show up to create that outcome? I can feel the energy shift in the room. I invite reflections in the whole group and one middle manager speaks up and names an unhelpful default dynamic of the college which, if we slip into, will limit what can be said and done today. The courage which he embodies, in naming the pattern so clearly, is contagious. Others join him in speaking up, naming the possibilities of a shift for the college in this next stage. In-depth work is then done in sub-groups: directors with the vice-principals, middle managers in dialogue with the principal, support services managers together. Then the whole management system comes together to share insights and next steps. It was a 9/10 session - an experience of a whole system that is alive, engaged, learning and exploring new territory.  

Dave: The most dominant characteristic of our leadership culture that we noticed through the systems thinking workshops was how easily we settled for the idea that middle leaders should be, primarily, reliable fixers and team players, working in service of “the agenda” and dependent on it.  This is the domain described as “the socialised mindset” (Immunity to Change, Kegan & Lahey, 2009).  If we settle for this, we reduce the need for collaboration across middle leaders and we’re unlikely to afford space for middle leaders to inquire into the root causes of performance.  A compelling case emerged as we reflected on the workshop with John for middle leaders to work with a “self-authoring” mindset and we began to think deeply about how to make that a reality.  We noticed that if middle leaders were cast primarily as the “fixers” then it was hard for them to appreciate as leaders the importance of learning to be comfortable with uncertainty and contradiction. A senior leader highlighted the importance of “helping people to have a less reactive response, especially in pressured situations or where decisions could be controversial”.

Middle leaders highlighted new awareness of their emotional response to leading.  A Pathway Leader felt the sessions gave an “insight into the relationships within organisations and how they generate emotive reactions; working alongside other managers made me much more empathic toward their experiences of the organisation”.

One Pathway Leader reflected: “The sessions made it clear why collaboration is crucial. This was important for our middle management team where the value of collaboration was at times missed – we finally saw the value. The sessions encouraged us to be vulnerable and open with each other. Made us see the value of tackling bigger college wide issues together rather than being alone.” 

Our new leadership framework

As a leadership group we have now articulated our beliefs about leadership in the form of a leadership framework.  We considered whether this was too reductive or plain unnecessary, but we make a strong case for the framework. We have a Monoux Teacher Framework that clarifies our views on effective teaching, giving important ideas depth and coherence and serving as a platform for training, coaching and recruitment of teachers. We have a Monoux Student Framework that outlines our everyday aspirations for students and informs how we plan their personal development. A Monoux Leadership Framework has a similar purpose: giving clarity about how we should lead and being clear that leaders also must engage, evolve and grow. And we ask our leaders in 2022 to recalibrate how they are working in service of the framework. We didn’t set out to write a comprehensive statement on leadership, but rather to focus on two specific areas that we believe need growth and encouragement. Leaders recognise within the framework much of the language that we started to use in our project with John:

Our leaders should develop personal authority and the ability to drive the agenda, attentive to their learning horizon. 

• Focusing on personal mastery, the increasing ability to produce results by understanding what makes the biggest difference: leading self, with skill, in context
• Being deeply reflective and inquisitive, guided by a moral purpose
• Having a deep sense of responsibility and commitment towards work
• Seeking out and observing patterns, listening for meaning and holding contradiction 
• Not being overly fixated on events
• Being aspirational and bringing energy, not fearful and prepared to challenge cynicism
• Displaying emotional literacy; channelling emotions productively

We want our leaders to build a culture for team success, recognising the complexity and uncertainty of the environment in which we work.

• Making connections to facilitate cooperation and participation 
• Challenging existing processes
• Inspiring a shared vision
• Managing conflict, chaos and change
• Building trust
• Researching into the wider context for education and its future possibilities
• Developing good relationships, promoting the ideas of others and seeking feedback
• Being daring with new ideas, including where there are no guarantees of success, drawing on domain expertise
• Showing up and modelling these important cultural behaviours.

Colleges can read more about John’s work and systems thinking here. Dave can be contacted at Sir George Monoux College for any questions or further conversation. SFCA also runs its own middle leadership training programme; email us for further details.