Purpose – Use yours to focus activity and motivate staff

In high-performing teams leadership flows around and throughout. Everybody is motivated and guided by a clear and compelling purpose.

The result is a creative and exciting school culture where you encourage leadership. Team members feel free to harness the energy of others to generate useful activity. I call this ‘asymmetric leadership’. 

One-directional leadership

However, high-performing teams are rare. Very often process becomes more important than purpose. Schools tie themselves up with bureaucracy that actually discourages initiative and leadership.

Senior members of the school control everything, and this stifles energy. This means that there is a very traditional view of leadership, linked to position, grade and status.

Decisions flow downhill, and nothing happens without the right level or authority signing up to it. There is an implicit (and nonsensical) assumption that with position comes immense wisdom and infallibility.

Normally the result of this style of one-directional leadership is that decision making is slow. You limit thinking to only a very few authorised senior staff within the school.

If the purpose is clear and well understood, any member of the team can bring others together to work towards it.

This could mean leading people of the same grade by harnessing their energy and getting them emotionally and intellectually engaged, or it could mean leading people of a higher grade.

Leadership should flow up, down and around in a vibrant, thriving school culture.

Defining your purpose

To avoid internal friction and to drive activity, you need to work hard to define the purpose of your team and the school.

That purpose should be ‘clear and compelling’, simple enough that everyone in the team will understand it (not too long and written in plain language), and emotionally engaging enough that people will want to work for it.

A structure that works well is for the statement to have two elements to it: ‘What?’ and ‘Why?’. The ‘What?’ guides activity, the ‘Why?’ fuels emotional engagement. 

A well-defined purpose can be incredibly powerful. It can inspire and energise. However, this only happens if your teaching body understands it well.

Too often we lose the purpose in corporate-sounding documents. Even though people know it exists, the purpose is not a lived experience.

This is where you as a leader need to ensure that everyone not only understands the purpose, but are also excited by it and focused on it. 

You need to discuss the purpose regularly to keep it in the forefront of people’s minds. Bring it into meetings. Link it to people’s objectives. Reference it in plans.

The same clear and compelling purpose should guide all work. If you get the purpose right, it will energise the whole school, pull people together, focus resources and give meaning to people’s work.

Neil Jurd OBE is the author of The Leadership Book and founder of skills platform LeaderConnect.