Make Before You Manage: Leadership As A Creative Process
By Andy McHugh
Creative people in school leadership roles often feel like they have no time to be creative. They’re far too busy managing the day-to-day ‘busy-work’ of quality-assurance, managing people and dealing with unforeseen events. They went into teaching believing they could use their creative talents, but now they feel like those talents are going to waste.
In some ways, they’re right. Going into classroom teaching is not the same as going into a leadership position (at any leadership level). It requires not only a different skillset, but also a completely different mindset. Leading a team of adults is not the same as teaching a class of children.
But we don’t want to drive creative people from the profession. Their ability and propensity to innovate is what schools need from time to time. As the environment changes, financially, socially and politically, it will be those creative minds that are most likely to come up with a new idea to best fit the new status quo.
As someone who sees themselves as creative, I’ve introduced a ‘make before you manage’ approach to my daily routine. As the name suggests, the first part of my working day is spent doing something that is new, generative or drives my team forward. This might be a new teaching resource I’ve created, a new way to collect and/or analyse data, or new supporting materials like model answers and ways to address misconceptions, to help non-specialists in the department.
I don’t assign a timeframe to this daily practice, as my daily routine needs to be flexible and responsive to the ebbs and flows of the week. But I always do something. And that is the key. Building that habit of doing at least one new thing keeps me in that creative mindset and keeps me believing that I’m able to use my talents to make a difference.
But it doesn’t just work as a way to keep me happy in my job. It also continually drives forward the aims of the department, so that there is a relentless focus on improvement. The compounding effect of my own daily creative practice has meant that I have probably achieved a lot more in the past two years than I had in the previous ten.
I’m no more creative than I used to be. But by committing to practising it daily, I feel like I can flourish in a role that leaves other creative people feeling stifled. To those people, I would say keep going. Do something creative, even if it seems insignificant at the time, or you feel you ought to be getting on with answering all of those emails in your inbox.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with one footstep. After that, just keep moving forward one step at a time.
You can read more articles by Andy McHugh here.
