Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Before we talk about the five books, can you give me some examples of how you have seen leadership helping children with their education?
My belief is that every great teacher is a great leader. That is a core skill of teaching, because the definition of leadership is bringing people to a place they need to get to, that they themselves don’t think they could reach. I have seen a number of teachers who have set ambitious goals and used strong values within their classroom. They have worked relentlessly with their pupils, pupils who at the beginning of the year did not think they could achieve such results, to exceed their expectations. This is true leadership.
I have also met headteachers who have been able to instil that ethos in all the employees in their school. Great teachers use lots of different techniques to lead their students. For example, I recently saw a lesson where the teacher was illustrating Pythagoras’ theorem by taking his class of boys out to the football field to measure where they would have to stand in order to score a goal directly from a corner kick. The class then measured the different lengths and angles. I thought that was a really creative way of teaching the theorem.
Let’s discuss what makes a good leader. Your first choice is Jo Owen’s Tribal Business School, which explores how we can learn lessons of survival and success from different tribes around the world.
What is interesting in Jo’s book is how he shows that the challenges of leadership are so similar even if they are set in diverse contexts. I think it is a good example of how people who think of themselves as leaders in countries like Britain, and think they have very stressful lives, need to understand that it is much tougher for many leaders in other parts of the world. If you take the example of some tribal leaders, in many situations leadership decisions for them really are a matter of life or death. Within these tribes, if the leaders fail then their family and the tribe could die of starvation. So I think this is an extreme reminder, when you lead an organisation, that there are more difficult forms of leadership out there than we have to deal with.
What are some of the qualities that make a good leader that might surprise people?
One of the lessons I took from the book which might surprise people is that there is no universal leadership model. People look for the perfect leader but there is no such thing. I think the right leader is right for his or her context. So someone who can lead a tribe in the deserts of Africa would not be successful leading the same tribe in the snows of northern Norway. Everyone has to find their own leadership model and adapt it to their context.
But the one quality that I think does unite all leaders is the importance of strong values, which is discussed in all my book choices. All the successful leaders in the different tribes build strong values within their tribes. Another lesson that I took was that the best leaders avoid direct conflict if there is another way to achieve their goals. Then, if you do need to fight, make sure you have as much of an unfair advantage as possible.
And presumably it is a good idea not to fight within the tribe as well.
Yes, and one way to do that is to create an esprit de corps and really strong values within the group.
Next up is The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, which looks at how little changes can have big effects.
This was a book that I read when I was starting Teach First, and it had a big influence on me. I had all my early staff read it. I think the leadership lesson here is that big change can happen through little things. For example, at Teach First when we began, people thought that it was impossible and that exceptional graduates would never be interested in teaching in challenging schools. It meant completely tipping people’s perception of it, to do something that no one would dream of doing. We were aiming for it to be the absolutely most prestigious thing that people would want to do – even more so than being employed by the top employer out there.
Brett Wigdortz is the founder and CEO of UK-based independent charity Teach First, which places graduates to teach in schools in challenging circumstances across England, to raise the attainment, access to opportunity and aspiration of its pupils. He also serves as a trustee of PEAS (Promoting Equality in African Schools), Future Leaders – which recruits and trains the next generation of head teachers for urban secondary schools – and is co-founder and a trustee of Teach For All, a network which supports Teach First sister programmes in 20 countries. Wigdortz is a former UK Ernst & Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year and won the 2010 CASE European Leadership Award
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