Leading system change … what it takes

Part 2

Last week, I wrote about how school and MAT leaders are expressing the need for support with leading change in complexity, and how both the leadership mindsets and activities required to do this successfully are quite different to those that worked (or probably didn't work but were revered anyway) 'in the old days'.

The framework for complex system change I use in my consultancy clarifies that the primary focus of leaders during complex change needs to be on acknowledging that complexity and building an organisation-wide sense of belonging to the future changed state through relational types of practice.

But what does that mean? How can leaders do that?

As I noted, there's some really good evidence-based research into what works when it comes to leading change in this way. In fact, Deborah Rowland's work shows that attending to people's experience of belonging is the standout indicator of successful change efforts.

In the HBR piece referenced above, Rowland and her colleagues clarify that we're not talking here about belonging in the 'diversity, equity and inclusion' sense of the word, important though that is. Rather, what we are referring to is "survival-based belonging that enables any human infant to make it to adulthood and any human adult to fully function in collective settings they give loyalty to and receive identity from". This is about people's emotional experience of attachments at work, and the recognition that successful change needs leaders to help people first detach from the ways of working and routines (etc) they've come to depend on, and then feel secure in re-attaching to the ways of working and routines (etc) required in the future.

In terms of leadership then, it's fairly obvious that attending to people's most primal fears about attachment is not best achieved through command and control type behaviours, or those which create a separation and distance between the leader and those they lead. Those types of leaders have had their time in the sun. Rather, what's needed now as organisations and change have become more complex is a more relational form of leadership, and one that's alive to the psychodynamics at play in both the system and oneself.

I'd suggest that this is even more important in schools than in most other types of organisation because of the specific nature of the work; a nature that drove Freud to consider education an 'impossible profession’. After all, the core task of schools is to manage learning, and to learn is to change. As we know, change stirs up anxieties in everyone involved, and in seeking to manage these emotions, teachers create routines, rituals and structures to 'contain' these difficult emotions, and enable a sense of security, stability and safety. When a school leader threatens to disrupt or break these containing structures as part of a change programme, a teacher's fear of the potential unconscious response from students can mean that their defence and resistance is highly charged with projected emotion. As people like Bibby (2011), James & Connolly (2000) and Youell (2006) suggest, these emotions in and of themselves create a unique sort of systemic complexity; one which arguably requires a unique sort of leadership.

So back to Rowland, and in particular her model for the leadership of change in complexity, which she calls Change Vitality:

What this model suggests is that leading change well depends in the first instance on how you attend to the quality of your inner capacities as a leader; how you are able to tune in to your experience and both notice and regulate how you respond to it mentally and emotionally. Whether you choose to see this as mindful practice or using one's self as an aerial to pick up important data about what's going on, it amounts to the same sort of sensitive ability to sift through the chaff to get to the wheat. If I were being brash, this is about getting your own shit together before asking others to sort theirs out, but Rowland's description of being before doing - or of learning to stand still before moving - is way more elegant.

But of course there must then be some doing, and the model suggests that when what you do is informed by and outwardly consistent with who you are (and how others perceive you to be), then you level up again in the leadership of change game. And we really getting close to superhero status now.

But what really gets you into Big Screen IMAX territory and would enable you to wear those leadership pants outside your trousers, is when you put these personal qualities to use in three ways: building a shared purpose and meaning for others to engage with, representing - even embodying - the change you wish to create through shared experiences, and attending to people's need to belong (which includes acknowledging and dealing with the difficult stuff around disruption and loss).

To an extent, this is about rising above a need to be someone who others merely follow, and becoming a sort of instrument of the whole system, helping it to become what it needs to become. Of course the assumption here is that the change you're leading is being done for the right reasons; that it has ethical validity, and will result in a system that's better able to do what it needs to do. That being the case, then being in service of some kind of higher purpose can only be alchemical for change.

But as in the image, it all starts with your quality of being. That's the tip of the spinning cone on which everything else is balanced.