Читать книгу The Noble School Leader - Matthew Taylor - Страница 14

Every school and educational organization is led by leaders who are seeking to develop and get better. All are learning skills and knowledge that will make them stronger, but few of them are able to focus on what is truly holding them back from succeeding, or from reaching their next level of personal growth.

The most significant obstacles to growth are “below the surface” of skills and knowledge. This book will refer to what lies below the surface as mindsets. Mindsets are made up of the elements that dictate our habits of human interaction: values, beliefs, motives, traits, and other personal attributes.

Every leader arrives in their role with mindsets that serve them and mindsets that get in their way, or self‐limiting mindsets. Leaders will work through some of these self‐limiting mindsets on their own, but with others they will hit a brick wall. These more elusive, deep‐seated habits of mind and behavior have been with leaders most of their lives. They tend to be so deeply engrained that leaders—and people in general—think of them as “just the way I am.” When we step into the role of leadership for the first time or are promoted to a new level, these self‐limiting mindsets often become more pronounced or take on new significance.

Over the last decade I have been immersed in the coaching and training of adaptive leadership—the human, emotions‐driven side of leadership where there are no right or wrong answers and decisions come down to choosing between competing values. Developing leaders through this adaptive lens, my colleagues and I have noticed several archetypes emerging in the kinds of self‐limiting mindsets that are common to school leaders at all levels. While these archetypes aren't new (most are leadership types that have been widely studied in the fields of social psychology and business), we are bringing them together in a new way and applying a new lens to addressing them. We have identified a group of seven self‐limiting mindsets that we see in various combinations across leaders, roles, and schools.

They are:

 The Transactional Manager

 The Unintended Enabler

 The Negative Controller

 The Pacesetter

 The Doer

 The Imposter

 The Implementer