Headteachers and Senior Leadership Teams in schools across the country are full of committed, talented people. They want to make great things happen for their pupils. Even if they are inspiring and visionary, without a receptive culture, the best ideas will fail to take root with no lasting change. Culture overrides strategy – but culture can be changed – perhaps even intentionally.
A culture is the “guiding beliefs and expectations evident in the way a school operates”.
Fullan, 2007
Fundamentally it comes down to the combination of conversations that staff have in doing their jobs. These create a culture. By changing the conversations staff have, the culture can change. Formal structures such as observations and appraisals can have limited effectiveness because they are so dependent on staff perceptions and actions. Informal structures (some business literature refers to these structures as ‘tribes’): staff room talk, touch points in a day, and perceptions of key stakeholders – parents, staff, management, pupils can have more significant effects on the culture of a school.
The culture of a school is perhaps best understood by listening to the conversations in the staff room at break.
The specific challenge for senior management is putting structures in place to cause a particular culture. If these structures devolve into tick box exercises that have limited effectiveness at the coal face (observations and appraisals?) then any intentional attempt to alter a school’s culture will fail. It’s the network of conversations that cause a culture.
As a teacher there are moments of inspiration, and collaboration that make the job worthwhile. Yet they can seem few and far between. It’s creating this sense of team across levels of the organisation that’s the challenge. Over time, where there is a mismatch between leadership’s behaviour and what they say, cynicism grows. Where leaders create a positive environment, there is increased collaboration. Inspiration beats legislation but it needs constant nurturing.
It’s the day-to-day interactions that cause the kinds of conversation create a positive environment. It can feel like leadership are having the same types of discussion all the time: but that’s what it takes to create a culture. If the senior management team are having a forward-thinking conversation, then it will need to be created with middle management. Without middle management, nothing will take root. Middle leaders are the key to any wider implementation of a vision created at senior management level. It’s their translation of the Principal’s direction that multiplies the message and creates the culture. Culture is a leadership conversation.
Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash
James D'Souza 