There’s No ‘I’ In ‘Team’, But There Is Definitely One In ‘Leader’
Want to reflect on your leadership skills? Stop thinking about what 'you' did as a team, and start thinking about what 'you' did as an individual
After many years of facilitating leadership programmes, coaching leaders and giving feedback, I’ve come to the conclusion that a great leader needs to have that sense of individual purpose.
More recently, I noticed it when I was giving written feedback to aspiring school leaders on their leadership projects.
I’d been reading leadership development challenges updates all day. These are a bit like a 30-day series of tasks and trials. They’re a chance for leaders to put new behaviours into place and practice them in a real-life situations to form new habits – a sort of ‘prototyping of the self’ as a leader.
My part in this is to ask questions, give feedback and make the leaders think about how they are growing in their role and what they are learning about themselves. The questions I ask are designed to get them to think about how they are being a leader, not just what they know about being a leader.
I’d spent all day ploughing through the papers, asking similar questions: • ‘What will happen to your thinking if you answered this question using the pronoun ‘I’ instead of ‘we’?
• ‘Rather than telling me about how the project is going, tell me how you are growing and developing.’
• ‘What are you, not those you are leading, practising and learning?’
To be honest, I was feeling a bit fed up with the same repetitive answers and stock phrases in leadership jargon that didn’t really tell me much about the new leaders, only about how good their memory was.
That was until I came across a little gem which made my eyes light up and my heart lift.
I read this one with relish, enjoying the clarity I was feeling about how this young lady was developing. I felt like she was sitting next to me. I could hear her voice; put myself straight into her shoes and I got a real sense of how she is growing, what she is learning and what she is feeling. Yes, out of 22 aspiring leaders, one was flying ahead – a true leader of learning.
How did I spot this one? What was it this leader did which was the difference that made the difference? She roused some positive emotion in me by answering the questions with ‘I’. Not ‘we’ or ‘us’ or ‘the teachers’ or ‘the staff’ – pure and simply she used the pronoun ‘I’.
By using ‘I’ she was letting me into her learning, her reflections, her thinking. By not using airy-fairy politically correct statements about ‘we did this’ or ‘the team did that’ she revealed a little bit of herself.
She showed me she was able to notice herself, her actions, her behaviour, her words, to reflect on her thinking and decision-making. She revealed her beliefs and her values, and her courage in her decision to share enough of herself to allow me in. She displayed her trust in her self. She showed me she was taking responsibility.
I smiled as I read her paper again, fist-punching the air in the privacy of my office. Yes, this young lady has got it. It wasn’t ‘me, me, me’; it was a definite and fully owned ‘I’. It was a leader’s answer using the correct pronoun for the question asked.
I believe there is an ‘I’ in every true leader, and it gladdens my heart when I hear it.
Joyce Matthews is a former teacher who now provides leadership development, learning and facilitation through consulting, coaching, speaking, workshops and seminars. Follow her on Twitter at @JoyceMatthews_ and head to her website at joycematthewsportfolio.com.
