INTRO

School leaders play a vital role in providing every student in NSW public schools with a great education and the best start in life. They have a positive impact in classrooms and on their staff; they guide teacher development and engage their communities. Here at the NSW Department of Education's School Leadership Institute, our mission is to support all NSW public school leaders by providing world class, evidence-informed leadership development programs and resources.

Our podcasts will explore the key issues and challenges of school leadership. Hosted by Joanne Jarvis, the director of the School Leadership Institute - tune in and listen to our guests and colleagues share their expertise, insights and wisdom on leading with purpose and impact. Welcome to our Leadership in Focus series.

JOANNE

Hello and welcome to Episode 10 of the Leadership Conversations Podcast series. I'm Joanne Jarvis and I'm the director of the NSW Department of Education's School Leadership Institute. Today we will be discussing self-awareness, its importance to our school leadership, why it is a challenge and how we can develop it. With me today is Dr. Sharon Tindall-Ford. Sharon is Associate Professor of Educational Psychology in the School of Education at the University of Wollongong.

She has been a high school teacher, school middle leader and for over 20 years an academic in initial teacher education and teacher professional development. More recently, her work has focussed on the soft skills, the personal qualities and personal resources school leaders need to lead their colleagues and schools to have a positive impact. It's a real privilege to have you join me today as we discuss this important topic, Sharon.

SHARON

Thanks, Joanne. It's great to chat to you about self-awareness and school leadership. I guess, you know, in your role as a leader yourself, you're seeing a greater acknowledgement of the personal, the relational and the emotional aspects of school leading.

JOANNE

Absolutely. Let's start. What do you think has led to a greater focus on the personal aspects of school leadership?

SHARON

Well, I guess it's really multifaceted, but certainly the work of Daniel Goleman and other Harvard researchers who looked into the business industry and found that leadership effectiveness was really due more to those social emotional competencies, you know, the soft skills rather than IQ.

JOANNE

And what did they find?

SHARON

Well, in essence, was that leadership skills and knowledge got you the job. But really, it was those social emotional intelligences like that soft skills we're talking about were the really important ingredient for leadership success.

JOANNE

So, Sharon, could you unpack what you mean when you use the term social and emotional intelligence?

SHARON

Yeah, I think it's a really good point, Jo, in that we bandy that word around social emotional intelligence quite easily. But really, I think the way to think about it is about our awareness of and management of self and others. So, like simply self and social awareness and self and relationship management is really the ability to understand our self and others and the ability to manage our emotions and those of others, for positive outcomes for us and the people that we lead.

So, it's these soft skills that are shown to be essential for leadership success. And I guess you and I both have seen this in our work that we do

JOANNE

For sure.

So, there's actually no doubt in my mind that these findings have filtered into school leadership development. I think we've got a much better understanding of the moral and ethical imperative of school leadership, and I think that's led to a focus on school leaders understanding their values, their purpose, you know, who they are as a leader, their identity and how this influences how they lead.

How do you think this is connected to self-awareness?

SHARON

So, I think what we know is that high self-awareness is needed to understand ourselves. What drives us, what makes us tick, the triggers that we have, what we stand for, and how we feel and why we do the things we do.

So, in conjunction with understanding ourselves as leaders, there's a greater appreciation of the emotional nature of school leading and acknowledgement that school leaders need to understand and manage their emotions in sometimes really challenging situations, but not only just manage their own emotions, but critically manage the emotion of others.

And that is really, as we know, Jo, is really central to the daily work of school leaders. So, we can see that self-awareness of our own emotions and managing them and the management of other people's emotions has really been foundational to the capabilities for school leaders.

JOANNE

And as I reflect on my own time leading a school, I realise that often my task was to understand that I was managing the fear and anxiety of others. And when I understood that I think I was able to be much more empathetic in my response to situations as well.

SHARON

Yeah, I think that's a really good point because as school leaders, we're managing change all the time, particularly now in the modern school environment and managing change brings out, well change brings out emotions in people. So, understanding that that many people and that probably teachers are very much like this, is that they’re kind of resistant to change. So, there’s emotions involved all the time within the work we do as school leaders because we're managing that change.

JOANNE

So, what led you specifically to appreciate the importance of self-awareness for school leadership?

SHARON

Yeah, it's been a long road. Firstly, as an early career teacher, you appreciate that relationships are essential to get your students on board. So, developing those positive relationships with them. So, the personal relational nature of teaching was something I really became aware of early as a school teacher. Then becoming a mum, I was super focused on my children being aware of who they were as individuals and appreciating that they need to get along with others.

So that self-awareness of developing that within themselves. When it came to working in initial teacher education with pre-service teachers, school teachers and school leaders, that's when I found that self-awareness was a critical quality for the teaching and for the leading. So, and that was because I was a person who went into schools when pre-service teachers were flagged as having a problem.

And what I found was that it often became that the pre-service teacher knew how to plan a lesson, knew the subject content, had the skills and knowledge, but it was more about the inability to accept and act on feedback from the supervising teacher that became the real issue. And that's where I saw a lack of self-awareness.

JOANNE

And how did this manifest itself?

SHARON

Well, often it came to a lack of self-awareness on the part of the pre-service teacher understanding themselves and the impact on the students that they were teaching and the teacher colleagues they were working with. They just could not see how they were impacting negatively others. So that was really the cornerstone of, okay, well, self-awareness that is just a lack of self-awareness.

And interestingly, not often, but sometimes it was not the pre-service teacher that lacked self-awareness. It was the supervising teacher or school leader who may be a little inflexible, had a fixed mindset about how things should be and had difficulty in being empathetic with the pre-service teacher. So, over the last decade, I've worked more and more with school leaders, and particularly middle leaders whose work is probably the most relational in schools.

That is their, you know, teaching, their collaborating with their colleagues, their advocating and negotiating with school executive and relationships are central. So, self-awareness then becomes a critical component or aspect of their work.

JOANNE

I recall being a head teacher for ten years of HSIE as it is known, and you're absolutely spot on. You're in the middle and you're leading a team. You're trying to be the best teacher you can. And also, you're an important part of the executive to really try and shape the environment in which your team can thrive.

So, it's not an easy thing to do, though, is it?

SHARON

No, it’s not easy thing because it's complex because you're working with such an array of different people and they're coming with their own values, their own beliefs that have an emotional make up. And as a leader in a school, you're needing to balance that all the time what they're coming in with, but also what you're coming in with.

So that's why we go to this thing all the time about leadership, starting with self, and that's that self-awareness and from that self-awareness, you can connect with others that social awareness.

JOANNE

That makes perfect sense. What did you find in your research about school leaders who showed strong self-awareness?

SHARON

So, working closely with school leaders, middle leaders, pre-service teachers; what I found was those school leaders who were able to maintain positive professional relationships, they were able to lead and manage change and change, as we've just talked about before, brings emotions. But they were not overly emotional. They weren't negative or reactionary. They absolutely acknowledge when there was problems, they didn't brush it under the table.

But what they were able to do is connect with the people, whether it was a pre-service teacher or their teaching colleagues and get them to see that what was possible. They were able to work with the people to get the best out of them and best out of themselves. So, what they were able to do in essence, was they were able to understand their strengths and weaknesses, play to their strengths, negate their weaknesses, but bring people along on the journey and also bring out the strengths in the people that they were working with.

They were always confident in what they were doing, but it was always grounded in reality. They acknowledged when they didn’t know something, but they acknowledged that they needed other people around them to create the environment, to make the difference, and to get the outcomes that they wanted. And they weren't afraid to ask for help. And I think that, you know, that's a really great key of self-awareness is knowing, ‘Yeah, I know this, these are my strengths, these are areas I'm not so good at.’ And then, you know, tapping into all the different people because everybody has strengths and bringing them all together to create, you know, a really rich fabric of strengths.

JOANNE

Did you notice anything in that research around the language? The importance of the way leaders speak? Is that something that came through?

SHARON

I think what we see and I mean, it's not rocket science, it's those people who have that 'can-do' attitude, that positive language, importantly acknowledging the issues, not, as I said before, really understanding that there is issues, understanding that people feel maybe confronted, feeling that they are challenged, acknowledging the challenges, but finding a pathway to get up forward to make a difference.

So, it is your language, it is the body language, it is a way of connecting with people, acknowledging, but bringing them along on the journey. And that’s not easy.

JOANNE

In your research, you interviewed school leaders who demonstrated these qualities of high self-awareness. What did their colleagues think of them? How would they have described them?

SHARON

What we saw is that those are the qualities that were, you know, open, authentic, collaborative and had that, as I said, that 'can-do' attitude. But being realistic, they were the qualities that was seen as or indicated, high self-awareness.

JOANNE

So, picking up on what you've said, I'm hearing that being open, flexible, not having a fixed mindset is important for self-awareness. Could you unpack this just a little more?

SHARON

Sure. It's a good pick up this idea of being fixed that really gets to why self-awareness is so difficult for all of us, not just some of us, actually, all of us. From brain science, what we know is self-awareness is really challenging just due to our wiring, how our brains work. Basically, our brains start to make connections from an early age, and those connections get stronger the more we repeat them.

So, for example, as a young person, we may have moved around a lot. We went to different schools and we, due to those experiences we have developed an aversion to change. We might really like stability because we've moved around a lot and we really value being in the same place, the same school, the same house, the same friends.

And what happens or may happen is we start to develop insecurities, negative emotions about change. So, we develop behaviours and actions to resist change. And so, this gets grounded in our brain. This becomes just an automatic response. We don't even know it; we see change coming but what we do is we try and resist it. We don't even know we're trying to resist it, but that's how we feel.

So, we have these actions or behaviours to resist change and it becomes really cognitively what we call cognitively fixed. We have these automatic responses and we're not even aware of them.

This automatic or I should say this automaticity is really important as it enables our brains to be efficient. So once we have a response, an action that really works for us, we just keep on doing it and that leaves brain space to do other things, but we get set in these actions, behaviours and feelings and emotions that have worked for us, but they actually become so automatic we don't even know we're doing them. And that becomes a problem because what may have worked really well in some circumstances may not work for us so well in other circumstances. So we really need to be aware of this and there goes this whole thing about self-awareness yet again.

JOANNE

It's tough to be aware of these automatic feelings and the thoughts and the actions because they become ingrained, you know, so much over the years. So what do we do about that?

SHARON

Yeah, it's really tough to change them to make this internal shift, you know, to deliberately modify what we think we feel. That's really, really hard. As we know you feel something, you don't even know that you feel it. It just becomes part of who you are. But to really stop that and think about what something that's served us well previously might not be serving us well now, and just making that shift is difficult.

So I think, you know, first of all, we need to pull back and understand why we feel, think and act the way we do. So we really need to challenge our assumptions and push beyond our emotional comfort zone. And that really takes courage. And I know you talk in the SLI often about this idea of courage. And courage is really the secret sauce in continually developing our self-awareness that we need to really, you know, stop, think.

Why do we feel like this? Why do we think like this? Why are we doing this? And what is the impact it's having? And that's really super challenging because as I’ve said, our brains just want to keep on going and doing the things we're doing. It's automatic, it's saves brain space. We 'can-do' other things at the same time.

But that's where the danger lies and to kick what we call the prefrontal brain in and really take that time to think about it. It takes real courage.

JOANNE

I love the way you use the term secret sauce, as in S-A-U-C-E. and I think you've also described in your response then the the secret sauce of curiosity and its connection to courage, because we, you know, I think we can be curious, but it takes courage to hear the answers that we may not want to hear.

SHARON

Very true in that that's what self-awareness is all about, I think is getting the feedback, some of it we might not like and then really having the courage. So you might ask for it, that's curious, but having the courage to take it on and then really process that and really think about what does that mean for me and what is that going to look like for me and making those changes. And they're difficult.

JOANNE

Those are what I call my ouch feelings. This is all really terrific food for thought, Sharon. So, we really need to interrogate how we think, feel and act to develop our self-awareness awareness school leaders, don't we?

SHARON

Yeah, absolutely. We need to do this deliberately and consistently. And for school leaders this is really essential. Firstly, because as school leaders, people turn to you, you're the first person that people go to. People gauge what to do next based on your responses. So, what you say, what you do, what you portray is going to set what other people are going to feel, do and act.

So, you set that school culture, you set the emotional tone of the school that you are leading. So being self-aware helps you really understand what your impact is on others and helps you make those good decisions for self and for others. So, the other thing that I think is really interesting and kind of resonates with school leaders is this idea of mood contagion.

I kind of just touched on that before in that research has shown that we actually catch the emotions from other people and as I said before, as a school leader people look towards you. So, you're really the emotional barometer of the school, so you want to really set that positive, we talked about the language, that ‘'can-do'’ language and that empathetic culture in the school.

And so, it's your facial expressions, the words you choose, the tone of your voice, your behaviour, your actions really are the barometer of the school. So, you have a huge impact on how other people feel, think and act. So that's where your self-awareness is absolutely critical and getting that feedback and even though it's those ouch moments, they are what you need to really develop self.

JOANNE

And your connection to empathetic culture, I think is such an important component of what you just said then too, and its connection to once again, a curious mindset, because empathy comes from that really deep inquiry, a place of deep inquiry and really listening to what's going on for others. And of course, during the course of a busy school day, that can be really challenging for school leaders. So, what's the end result of a highly self-aware leader?

SHARON

It's a really interesting question, Jo. And I think what we've seen now is greater research in that area. Over the last decade or so that, firstly understanding that self-awareness is absolutely the fundamental for leadership effectiveness, that's the critical part. But then what does it look like? What's the outcome of that? Well, what we know is that the self-aware school leader improves communication, confidence, the relationships, their own physical and mental health, the physical and mental health of others.

And it really impacts the culture of the school. It makes people feel like they want to be there. And in the times that are tough in school when we know they are, it challenges. Then if we can use our self-awareness to create that really positive culture that 'can-do' feelings of, ‘Yeah, we 'can-do' this together’, that's what we want. And so, for a school leader to be self-aware that’s your outcome. You're going to have people on board and that's what we all want.

JOANNE

So, we've spent a lot of time talking about why social and emotional awareness is important. I'm sure our listeners are thinking, okay, so how do I develop it? So, what would be your advice about that?

SHARON

And I think as we talked about before, that that brain science, it's difficult and we can't move away from the fact that it's tough and not only is it tough, it's emotional because you're going to hear things that you don't want to hear and you can grow from that or you can block it. And what we're kind of arguing is it's time now for all school leaders to embrace it.

So how do we find out about this? Well, there's a myriad of ways, Jo and the key is to check on self-consciously and consistently. And, you know, we do this within 360s, and we do that within schools these days. So that's important but it’s then unpacking that 360 and having that critical friend, the mentor or the coach to have those really honest, deep conversations and sometimes those as you said before, those ouch moments.

But I also think, again, it may not be comfortable, but for school leaders to get anonymous feedback. So, you know, these days we 'can-do' that online or, you know, exit kind of tickets from a meeting. But getting that feedback, honest feedback from a range of colleagues and then having that discussion with a critical friend, a mentor, or a coach.

So, these things really support that continual development of our self-awareness, but you 'can-do' it ourselves internally. I think you can find something that resonates with yourself now, whether it's meditation, whether it's journaling, online psychological tests, and there's many of them now and they're free online, just helps us to touch base with self and increase our self-awareness. But I think it's being really mindful and asking yourself questions like, ‘Why do I feel like I do?

How can I be the best I can be?’ What we found is that question of ‘what’ - asking ‘What am I doing well? What can I improve on?’ What the research has shown is that ‘what’ questions are the most important that Tasha Eurich from Harvard University, she found that those highly self-aware leaders ask ‘what’ questions a lot more than ‘why’ questions. So not, ‘Why is this happening to me or why did this colleague do this wrong.’

It's rather, ‘What did I learn from this experience? What can I do to support my colleague so we can have a better outcome for them and for our school?’ So, I think it's a question of what not why.

JOANNE

I guess that points to a sense of having more control as opposed to when we ask a ‘why’ question it becomes perhaps more a sense of look what's being done to me, as opposed to actually assuming responsibility for circumstances.

SHARON

Yeah, we talked about language, and we've talked about changing brain, how we think. Well, ‘what’ questions we learn from our successes, from our failures and ‘what’ moves us forward, where ‘why’ moves us backwards, it moves us into rumination and why does this happen and negative thought, but ‘what’ is moving us positively forward. So, if we keep asking ‘what’ questions rather than the ‘why’ questions, we can rewire our brain and we can focus on the future rather than the past.

And if we keep doing this consistently, we'll move forward and will develop ourselves.

JOANNE

Sharon, this has been a fascinating session with you this morning. I really enjoyed it. As we wrap up, can I ask you to share one last piece of advice for school leaders?

SHARON

Thanks, Jo. I guess it would be the obvious is that our leadership starts with us. We need to be able to lead ourselves effectively before we can lead anybody else. So, to be the best we can be, you know, to set that culture, the mood, the tone that we want in our schools, to have the people on board and have that 'can-do' attitude, we really need to start with ourselves and keep developing self and it's what I always say is self-awareness is a journey, not a destination. So, it's something we just need to keep doing all the time. Getting that feedback from a range of sources and just sometimes having those ouch moments, but just keep developing self to be the best we can be.

JOANNE

Wise Words. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. You can visit the School Leadership Institute website for further resources for school leaders. You can Google the School Leadership Institute and follow us on Twitter @NSWSLI. Thank you for listening.