goal setting for leaders
SMARTER Coaching
Leaders may be managers of a team or an area of a school, but they are also more than managers, leaders must innovate - create something that did not previously exist - to achieve improved outcomes, these innovations may be better practices and processes, better prepared and effective staff, enhanced levels of engagement or collaboration.
Setting leaders up to lead, not just manage, means helping them develop a clear understanding of themselves – their strengths and their weaknesses - and what is salient for them in their environment, what matters, what ought they pay attention to. This development of a ‘salience landscape’ is tapping into and stimulating the leader’s capacity for perspectival knowing.
Leaders then need a process of fitting themselves to this landscape - an exercise of participatory knowing - until it becomes clear to them what their overarching motivation is – their goal - and what actions they need to take to move towards it over the school year. When done well leaders feel fully at ease that they are committing to doing the right things in the right way to best contribute to their and their school’s ongoing success.
SMARTER Coaching provides these two key developmental steps in one 60 minute session.
To find out more about this program, call 0418 432 316
John is founder and a principal of Group 8 Education. Passionate about improving education, John has extensive experience developed out of a background in strategy consulting, corporate and business unit planning, and change management.
John specialises in the transformational change of organisations, predominantly those where relationships are an important source of the value that the organisation creates.
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Four Ways of Knowing
Schools have historically focused on propositional knowing (knowing what) and procedural knowing (knowing how). Twenty-first century skills include these forms of knowing but also need perspectival knowing, a deeper form of knowing which guides us towards realising what is important, and what not, and where we should pay attention. Underpinning and affording these three forms of knowing is participatory knowing.
Perspectival knowing may be recognised as “situational awareness” and without this we can be foolish, using our time and attention in ways that are not meaningful to us, do not contribute to our thriving.
Most psychotherapy involves helping people to separate the meaning they make of events from the events themselves. This is another expression of perspectival knowing. We have more control over the meaning we assign to things than we think, and we have less control over events than we believe. By separating them we can handle life’s contingencies with greater equanimity.
Awe is another way to trigger perspectival knowing. We can contrast this with curiosity. Notice how we want to alleviate curiosity, but we want to perpetuate awe. Curiosity is about quantitative development – gaining more knowledge or skill, whereas awe is about qualitative development – opening us up and putting our world and ourselves into question, it makes us humbler, changes our sense of self and our perspective.
Participatory knowing is about knowing how we fit in the world and being in a right relationship with what and who is around us. This is a dynamic connection as other people are also subjects, also actors in the world, and the world itself can shift and change, so we need to be in flow with it. When we are well-fitted in this way, we know what is relevant and we can anticipate what might happen next allowing us to improvise reflexively with little self-doubt. With participatory knowing we are acting in the world, not just in a procedural sense but in a way where we shape and are shaped by the world around us in a playful way, handling complexity and ambiguity, the new and the different with ease, equanimity and, often, humour.
Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke (University of Toronto) claims that we often have too narrow an appreciation of knowing, only focusing on one or two kinds of knowing but to live well in a complex world we need to effectively engage with all four distinct kinds of knowing.
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Stages of Consciousness
An important consideration when developing school leaders is to have an appreciation of the levels or stages of consciousness that exist within a group of leaders both in terms of the range as well as the relative proportions of different levels or stages. The commonest levels are known within the STAGES model as Expert, Achiever and Pluralist (see below for detailed descriptions of these three levels of development). The structure of the SMARTER coaching process allows for an initial assessment for each leader which is then presented as a group profile.
More detailed information on the STAGES model can be found here and I cover this subject in an education context in my book Why We Teach which can be found here and is available in Kindle and paperback versions on Amazon here.
Click on the titles below to see a full description of each stage.
John has completed the training to make stage assessments during one-on-one structured conversations.
+ Expert (3.0) - Early Third-Person perspective - Subtle | Individual | Receptive
The first stage in the Subtle Tier is 3.0 Expert and is a repeat of the 1.0 Impulsive stage but now they are engaged with subtle objects as well as concrete ones and exploring the contours of a new individual subtle self. This stage generally begins in teens or early adulthood when the brain and subtle senses have developed well enough so that they can begin to visualise things they have never seen before. The capacities for outcome, goal, and future orientations - months into the future, even up to 2-3 years – begin at this stage. At 1.0 Impulsive we are cradled concretely in a parent’s arms. At 3.0 Expert we are cradled in the arms of respected role models, experts in their field. This comfort provides the safety and trust to develop subtle attachment and subtle bonding. In this new world there is someone there to guide us. This gives us the freedom to be exposed for who we are.
Experts begin to realise that for all the conformity at Conformist, they cannot completely conform. The result is a feeling of a facade, a mask that they wear in public, when deep down inside they are not that which they present themselves to be. This cognitive dissonance resolves by moving into the Expert level and accepting that, despite all attempts at conformity, we are on some level unique human beings. Experts do not abandon their principles but reassess them from the perspective of their unique Individuality. Instead of condemning themselves to a life of guilt over trifles, they now alter some of the principles to allow for, and even celebrate, their uniqueness. The energy that was put into perfecting social conformity now finds a new home in perfecting unique special skills.
As Experts focus more and more on their interior abstract reasoning and developing emotional nuances, they begin to see that these remarkable interiors and emotional capacities define them more than their exterior appearance, recently so prominent for them. Distinctions on the outside such as race, colour, religion, etc., are not now as important as the capacities they see on their interior. Inklings that others’ interiors are more important than their exteriors also, brings human rights and social justice into view. Moreover, they can project themselves into another’s shoes and imagine what the other is experiencing beyond what they themselves would experience, if in the same situation.
Abstract reasoning prioritises a focus on details - poring over books - making the Expert far more agile with effectiveness and technical prowess than with efficiency, seeing subtle hierarchies and categories which allow for efficiency may be difficult. They take pride in doing their jobs well and tend to work towards unnecessary perfection while missing deadlines. This supports a tendency to micromanage to ensure things are perfect, often affecting their ability to work well with other people. It is also difficult to prioritise among competing efforts or to grasp the bigger picture. This strong desire to seek improvements and to find perfection plays a vital role in handling the day-to-day running of things.
Experts often develop a belief in the superiority of their own technical abilities and commonly resent criticism, taking it personally and will dismiss criticism from non-experts, even though they can be quite critical of others and are prone to giving unsolicited advice.
Conformity still has a strong influence on many even though they are pulling away from prior concrete collective expectations, explaining why they are often critical of unfamiliar ways of handling a situation, and rely on established explanations and procedures, while they simultaneously defend against having their own expertise questioned. However, their social focus is more individualistic now. Experts tend to be able to see their own side of a conversation and not the opposing side, commonly giving them the reputation for being argumentative.
+ Achiever (3.5) - Late Third-Person perspective - Subtle | Individual | Active
Achievers are now readily able to categorise and prioritise the subtle, to see both sides of a situation and make well-reasoned choices, effectiveness and efficiency are more important than perfection, the 80/20 rule arises. Scientific approaches are an answer to everything, they believe deeply in linear cause and effect and objective rationality. Results are secured by trusting this objective approach, personal conviction, and energy. They can look further forward – five or more years - and have more of a “big picture” orientation.
A new quality that has emerged is the capacity to reflect on their thinking and feeling (metacognition). This allows them to see how their thoughts affect their feelings and their feelings affect their thinking, and the resulting insights can change how they behave. The combination of their metacognitive capacities, future orientation, capacity to prioritise and categorise subtle information, their ability to see options and make choices, and their active orientation supports their drive to achieve goals and outcomes in the future.
Achievers welcome feedback when it supports reaching their goals. This puts them in a good relationship with people who are working with them and they value teamwork aimed at achieving their goals. They can project themselves into another’s shoes and imagine/predict what they will be experiencing or doing. Attention and focus is on their own individual priorities and thus Achievers live parallel lives with those around them, tending to “talk at” people on subtle levels, rather than “with” them. Balancing different aspects of their life can be difficult.
While Achievers can see other’s interiors and goals, they still do not have the natural capacity to see that others are seeing them subtly, in return. This sets up subtle competition. Being the best at what they do in comparison to everyone else is valued by Achievers. Concrete boundaries were mastered on emerging from the Egocentric stage, Achievers now cannot see subtle boundaries. They can crash through others’ boundaries completely unaware of the damage they can do. Achievers explore their subtle power using the four categories they learned at the Egocentric stage but now in the subtle field. They learn about body language and how to use that to influence people (physical power), they learn about skilled argumentation, to advance their goals (intellectual power), they learn how to master their emotions by learning how thoughts affect emotions (emotional power) and they learn social skills of the successful, so they too may be successful (social power). Just like the Egocentric, they can do all these in delightful ways and in intrusive ways. It is now society and culture which sets limits on Achiever intrusiveness, we see culture wars between the Achiever who wants to be free, and the Pluralist Collective that expects politically correct behaviour.
+ Pluralist (4.0) - Early Fourth-Person perspective - Subtle | Collective | Reciprocal
Instead of suppressing Individual independence in a new collective, the new “rule” is to discover the subtle self without suppression, and this can only be done in reciprocity with others because others can see in you what you cannot see in yourself. Thus, Pluralists become curious about sharing feedback, thoughts, and ideas because they want to know what others are seeing in them.
Vulnerability and courage grow stronger and Pluralists create settings where it is alright to express genuine truths or voices. This open culture allows for more hidden voices to emerge both internally and externally. A person becomes increasingly more tolerant, understanding, respectful and even celebratory about diversity, both internally and externally. All human beings are to be respected, indeed all sentient beings. Those who do not share this belief will be called out and will often be treated without dignity or equality if they persist.
Pluralists realise that their prior sense of objectivity was only a small part of reality, any observer is always sifting what is observed through their own filters. Life is more ambiguous and less predictable than previously imagined; everything is relative to one’s context. Focus widens to see assumptions, judgments, ambiguities, and interpretations, though they often cannot yet label them with these words. Pluralists can stand in the contextual shoes of another and see how they and others are socially constructed by their contexts and complex adaptive systems.
Because Pluralists are not yet able to prioritise or categorise contexts, they tend to reduce the hierarchical connections between themselves and others, promoting the importance of two-way reciprocal relationships. Reciprocal approaches to co-creativity can eventually bring about an adaptability in the collective that is unavailable to earlier stages. Goal orientation is no longer prioritised over relationship and collective processes - often unwieldy - are used for decision-making. Pluralists experience a longer time frame - parent, self, and children’s lifetime - 20 or more years forward and back, but oriented to the present. The core lesson of Pluralist is deep honesty and complete openness, and the result is the discovery of authentic selves and a more open society.