Talk prepared for The Education and Training Foundation Middle Managers’ Network, 29th June 2023. Keynote speaker was the wonderful Gabriella Braun, author of ‘All That We Are’.
I am delighted to be here and how can I follow Gabriella? I’ll do my very best, because although we are coming from different genealogies of learning and experience, there are shared golden threads - indeed, golden unicorns - running right through our work.
Firstly, I want to unpack that title. I chose it, but there’s a lot in there. Head, Hands and Heart is the soundbite :-)
Middle leaders - let’s deal with that word, ‘middle’. It sounds a bit boring doesn’t it? Neither here nor there. Middle aged spread! In fact, you - and your quality teams - are the engine room of change in the organisation, whether it feels like that or not. I regard every one of you as being part of FE’s leadership pipeline. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been doing it for three months or thirty years, I see each and every one of you as a leader. You wouldn’t be here today if you weren’t. And a leader is a changemaker. There’s no such thing as being ‘just’ a manager.
Joyful - bit of a big ask in FE, you may say. And yet joy is seeping into all the corners of FE like the sweet sticky squidgy bit of a lemon drizzle cake. Joy as a practice, as a thing that does. Tiny persistent, consistent, microjoys that transform our working environment and make us more likely to change the big stuff. Listen in and I hope you’ll be convinced.
And Systems Thinking. Sometimes people make that sound very tricky and there’s certainly a lot of research behind it. But it really just means the interconnectedness of all things. Including, as it happens, head, hands and heart. What you think, what you feel (including in your body) and what you do.
You are at the very heart of the organisation, you human being with feelings. You, and your quality teams - who get everywhere - are hands on, with opportunities to work across the organisation as a whole. So where does the head come in? It’s in the opportunities you have to notice, listen, appreciate and use your wisdom to spot places where the system isn’t working as it should. Then use your influence to put it right.
We know now that head, hands and heart work in balance together, and should work in balance with the organisation and in balance with the world outside, including the living non-human world. 400 years ago we went down the wrong leg of the trousers philosophically, dazzled by thinkers of the ‘Enlightenment’ who separated the world out into binaries: body/soul, nature/culture, black/white, head and heart. All socially constructed as being the opposite of one another (and, all too often, one less than the another, don’t get me started). Indeed René Descartes, the guy who decided that head, heart and hands had little to do with one another, wrote that,
“Through science we can render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.”
That ended well!
Around the same time there was another philosopher who thought quite differently, another line that humanity could have taken. Baruch Spinoza was a lens grinder in what’s now known as The Netherlands. He made himself very unpopular with the power people of the time because of his belief that God didn’t sit remotely on a cloud, he was in fact an energy that animated all of us - and not just humans but non-human living forms too. God, in his words, was embodied in us - head, heart and hands together in balance.
Spinoza identified this energy as joy and he believed that it is relational - when we recognise that joyful energy in one another (or in nature), the energy increases. And it’s not a fleeting or consumerised happiness; it’s deeper than that.
Joy is baked into everything from the start and we use it to channel the frustrations, sorrows and pain of life into affirmative action. He called this action potentia - the power to change things.
That’s a different kind of power to the one we usually mean when we use the word in English. Spinoza was writing in Latin and he had two different words, two different meanings, at his disposal.
Potestas is power-as-usual, role and rank. As you enter the leadership pipeline, you can *usually* expect to have a little more power at every step (it doesn’t always work out quite that neatly).
Potentia is your joyful energy, your changemaking power. It’s a collective force that builds trust and brings people along with you.
So hold onto that word, potentia. Because it’s going to take you places.
It seems wild in this day and age that what’s around us could be influenced by philosophy, yet the Enlightenment guys have reached right down into history, dividing heart from hand from head, nature from culture and all the rest. Spinoza’s interconnectedness of everything is only just beginning to be recognised as being key to a healthy organisation - indeed, key to a healthy world. It’s been taken on board by environmentalists, people concerned with sustainable practices - and some of the most incisive business development thinkers in the world.
Which brings us back to systems thinking. You are right at the heart of this organisational engine, where each loop or cog is dependent on the others around it. Your quality teams are boots on the ground feeding back intelligence from the rest of the system. As a middle manager, you have some clout in the organisation, you also have the potentia to know how to influence change. Wow, that’s a powerful place to be…
…except that it doesn’t always feel like that. It often feels like you’re being pressured from the top and pushed from below, that your main job is to tell people what to do - no matter how impossible it is - and then clear up the mess when they are not able to do it. Go up and down the lines, up and down the lines. It doesn’t feel very joyful, does it?
Lines drag, as my Romani friend Richard O’Neill says and nomadic people have always know. Circles move. And circles move in loops in an organisational system. David Russell, former CEO of the ETF calls balanced or affirmative loops, ‘joy loops’ (which always makes me smile). He calls negative loops, ‘doom loops’.
It often falls to you, to spot the doom loops and reverse them. Occasionally with one hand tied behind your back! It takes a lot of energy to get a loop back in balance. Bear with me, but I know this from Antenatal Aquarobics. An unforgettable experience. We had to all stomp round the pool one way until the water was swirling, then turn round and try to walk against the flow. It’s very hard work! That’s why you need a joyful community around you, other changemakers to think with you as equals and give your energy a boost to help you share the load. It’s a tough role, but my goodness it’s rewarding.
My work is with FE’s changemakers, who can work at any level of the hierarchy but who are often also ‘in the middle’. I do this through the social enterprise FE Constellations which I run with Joss Kang, a membership community (with training modules) for changemakers. And through the joyful educators’ collective #JoyFE💛 which a few of us started in lockdown and which is rippling out through the sector.
Sometimes #JoyFE💛 is more fleet of foot than a whole SMT. Ideas have rippled out of our Ideas Rooms and created significant systems and culture change. Sometimes you do that too. Lines drag, circles move.
The trick to systems change for managers and other changemakers is finding the right leverage point and the right lever. Imagine your system as a train-set. You want to change direction, so you pull the lever, right? Suddenly, you’re going in another direction or - to use systems language - your doom loop is turning into a joy loop. (Sometimes we feel like Gromit, too, hastily laying down the tracks while the train goes over them). There are some really tempting leverage points in FE at the minute:
Meetings. How we gather. So much work to do here about how we encounter one another and how we use the time.
Wellbeing. Head, heart and hands in balance. In particular, Radical Rest which is something I’ve been working on for the past year.
Sustainability. An opportunity to focus on something more than the financial bottom line, bigger than all of us - the planet, the interconnectedness of everything.
College Values. Doesn’t work if they are just stuck on the wall, immense change-making potential if you put them to work. Lived, not laminated.
I have stories for all of these, from FE Constellations and from #JoyFE💛 and from the work Joss and I did before all of that with advanced practitioners - what began as an ETF quality improvement programme became somewhere where people started leading change, which of course drove up quality. You’ll notice that the leverage points I mentioned are all cross-college initiatives - or they ought to be. A way of bringing people together and gathering energy around something important. A campaign. Time limited, cross-boundaried, focused momentum.
I’ve talked a lot about change, but there’s beauty in the people stuff too. Many of you would say that your job is to manage people, not projects or curricula. A good manager creates the conditions for people to step into their own potentia - which in turn makes your job easier, of course. But there are dangers. From that squeezed position in the middle, it’s sometimes easier to keep things tight and under control.
This squishes their potentia and yours.
Hierarchies are seductive. They tell us “you are more important” even if we don’t believe it and don’t want to hear it. We are held responsible for others’ mistakes, sometimes in risk-averse cultures where mistakes are punished. We are expected to deliver the ‘shit-list’ in supervision once a month. We are given forms and processes to log data, when we know there’s amazing evidence that doesn’t fit the mould. We get ground down.
Or we are fixers. This was definitely me when I was a middle manager, a big smile on my face and my arms outstretched: “Let me help you.” Of course, what happened was that some people stopped helping themselves. Result: overwhelm for me and if I put my hand on my heart maybe a little resentment set in over time. I had been generous - with my time, with my help. And I’d been punished for it - less staff energy, more work on my shoulders, a sort of ‘passion tax’ as organisational development guy Adam Grant calls it. As middle managers, we often find ourselves in this position.
Brené Brown helped me out. At a really tough time in my career, I read her book ‘Dare to Lead’ and I felt reborn, like a new chick. I can’t remember if it was in ‘Dare to Lead’ or another of her books where I read a quote from the writer Anne Lamott:
“Help is the sunny side of control.”
I can still remember the moment. I felt a great big blush creep up from somewhere around my knees. I’d thought of myself as a generous, caring manager, when in fact I was desperately trying to keep control.
As middle managers, the work we need to do for ourselves is on our boundaries. Even if we can hold them for ourselves, we are sometimes not great at holding others’ boundaries, especially with crap-list in hand. Brené writes about boundaries being, “What’s OK and what’s not OK.” Simple, isn’t it, but we sometimes forget to say what’s OK and that doesn’t help the other person.
Prentis Hemphill writes,
“A boundary is a place where I can care for you and also care for myself.”
So how can middle management be a practice of mutual care, whilst at the same time keeping the joy loops spinning? I talked about leverage points a few moments ago. Well, we also have levers.
Appreciation is one. Does that sound fluffy to you? In fact it’s a fine tool in the middle manager’s toolkit. Appreciation is defined in a Thinking Environment as “noticing what is good and saying it.” Don’t wait for supervision to do this. Noticing what is good and saying it takes moments and it powerfully builds trust. People feel recognised and valued - and they are more likely to make generous assumptions about you (and appreciate you back!) When trust builds in this way - and boundaries are in place - when you do have to do something that may threaten trust, because it’s your job to do it, you’ll find there’s a trust resilience there that will benefit all. For more on trust and mistrust in FE, please check out Christina Donovan’s work.
And I mentioned the Thinking Environment. More about that in my workshop later, but enough for now to say that it is a disciplined and easeful set of processes which allow us to gather differently, think better, make more effective decisions and save time.
And a third is Questions. Specifically, values-line questions to guide planning (and systems change). We have KPIs to meet, of course, but that doesn’t preclude us from also baking the values of the organisation into all our decision making. The values-line runs alongside the KPI line (and it’s possible to identify where they can meet). Some real life examples:
What could appraisal look like, as a practice of equality?
What could curriculum planning look like, as a practice of sustainability?
What could student induction look like, as a practice of care?
As a middle manager, you’ve joined a leadership pipeline which is putting head, heart and hands front and centre in its professional development. Systems thinking - the interconnectedness of everything - is running through all ETF’s leadership programmes like a golden thread. Leadership is changing, because the world is changing around us and if we’re to find any momentum for that, we need to repair that schism between head, heart and hands: what we think, what we feel and what we do.
I’ll leave the final word to Simon Sinek, whose work on finding purpose I’m sure is familiar to many of you. He’s worked with many of the world’s leading organisations and discovered that you don’t just need high-performing people in your leadership roles. You need people you can trust. Indeed, given a choice of a high-performing leader with low trust capital and a medium to even low-performing leader with high trust capital, they’d go for the high trust capital every time.
That’s you, changemakers, middle managers. Build relationships, notice and appreciate, gather discerningly, trust your quality team and get people involved in affirmative cross-college initiatives that bring joyful energy to the day-to-day.
So brilliant to read this. Wonderfully nourishing - bringing together so much great thinking and thinkers too. Love your work and how you apply it and write about it.