Three Essential Elements of a Good Leadership Story

Using stories about your leadership experience is a powerful way of demonstrating you have the ability or capacity to step into leadership. A narrative allows a panel to read or listen along to your journey of leading teachers to an outcome that benefits our students, staff and community. Every good leadership story should have these 3 elements.

 

A good leadership story is about solving a problem.

 

For teachers at the start of their leadership journey, this is often one of the easiest areas you can instantly improve your strategy and mindset around creating powerful leadership experiences.

If you are currently already in a position where you are responsible for something (you coordinate a subject or year level, part of a committee or part of some kind of initiative in your school), you need to be able to answer these two questions:

1. What is the problem you are working to solve?

2. How do you know it's a problem?

These two questions will start to really improve the quality of your leadership experiences. If you do not know what the problem is that you are trying to solve, then you need to find out.

What is the problem you are working to solve?

Talk to people leading you, read policies that are the basis of the work you do or read the documents created by the school that support the work you do.

If you are doing tasks that don't seem to solve a problem you need to find out what their purpose is for the students and their outcomes at school.

 

How do you know it's a problem?

Look at the data that shows that this is a problem that needs solving.

What 'should' the data look like?

Look for evidence of patterns within this data.

Is this a cohort/faculty specific problem or a systemic problem?

 

Example

I was coaching a teacher who wanted to be a HoD Mathematics/Science within the next few years. The teacher applied for a role as year level coordinator and was the successful applicant. We were working together to ensure the work they did in the wellbeing space could be transferred to future curriculum leadership roles. They identified that the work they were doing was important (a portfolio of supporting students with attendance, uniform, and behaviour) but it was now no longer in the school AIP.  It had been a school wide priority several years ago, but it was now as it had become part of the school culture. However, the work they were doing was vital for the continued success of students which was supported by the Wellbeing Framework.

The teacher felt that the time and effort they were putting in daily, was not going to benefit their application in the future so it was a waste of their time and had begun to resent taking on the role. A lot of their work was proactive rather than reactive so there was no perceived problem for them to be solving and the problems were not 100% related to their desired role.

Since the school had already refined many processes for the majority of students, we looked for areas that could improve so that more students could succeed. They identified that there were some smaller pockets of students that needed support in different areas. They were the anomalies in the data and were taking lots of time to deal with every day. So that is where we focused on creating a process that would help them.

Through narrowing their focus on a smaller piece of the work they were doing daily; they were able to show improvement in the selected student outcomes over the time frame they were in the role. Now they had evidence that they solved a problem. This new process was repeatable and could be taken on by the other year level coordinators. They also now had evidence that they could create improvements in more challenging students whilst still maintaining the school’s high level of support for the majority of students.

 

 

A good leadership story is a priority for the school, region, or state.

 

In a leadership position you will be tasked with working with your staff to roll out new initiatives and make the necessary change to benefit our students. Understanding the big why of what you are doing is necessary so you can guide your staff through the change.

Sometimes these changes are systemic and come from our state and regional departments. Other times, it is due to our staff and student’s needs.

 

The Future Version of You needs to be on board with leading through change, so you need to gain some experience in this area. The best way to do this is to connect the work you are already doing with a school priority. This does NOT mean you have to do all the things. Bring on one or two and make a rollout plan for how you will bring in the necessary depth and breadth of the schools’ strategic agenda.

 

If you are coordinating a subject, ensure that you are incorporating as many of the school priorities into your unit plans. Create resources that allow staff understand and easily access what they need to implement these priorities in their classrooms. Find out what their challenges or roadblocks are and be proactive in helping teachers do their best. Share your teaching teams successes with others.

 

Always remember to collect data on where the staff and students are before you implement change so you can see how effective the initiative has been. This them helps answer the previous question of "How do you know this is a problem?" and shows you can implement improvements that are evidenced by data.

 

A good leadership story has you are working directly with teachers.

 

Focus on helping teachers improve their practice. You can only influence large numbers of students if you are influencing their teachers. As an aspiring leader, you are known for being good at your craft. You know you can improve students with your teaching.

Leadership is about impacting students through teachers.

By build the teachers capacity, you impact the students.

 

 

In conclusion the three essential elements are:

1. Solve a problem.
2. Is a priority.
3. Includes teachers.

 

Connecting each leadership story you use in your application to these 3 elements is important for getting a leadership role. If you'd like to discuss how you could do this, book a free chat here.