Lessons in Leadership

Extract from ‘The Decisive Element – Unleashing Praise and Positivity in the Classroom’:  Gary Toward, Chris Henley and Mick Malton

 We three all come from very different backgrounds. Mick was dragged up in a Hull estate – his dad a trawler man, Gary is from a coal mining background and Chris is from a naval family. None of us followed the traditional family career routes and all of us found our way to becoming leaders in the education business. We all have our own tales to tell, but in this instance it’s Chris’s that makes the best reading. We’ve mentioned this in some of our other books, but it is worth considering it again in this context.

Chris’ father was a senior naval officer. He captained an aircraft carrier! None of us can actually imagine that – the leader of an incredible piece of machinery, built to both defend our country and to wage war. It had the capability of unleashing a huge destructive force, but of course that couldn’t happen without people – the sailors who operated the technology to help the planes take off and land, the navigators, the gunners, the cooks, the radar operators, the boiler men and stokers. Without the humans, the warship was nothing more than a vast lump of benign metal floating around the sea. It took an enormous team of people with more roles that we care to describe to make that ship into an efficient machine. If people did not do their job well, the end result could be rather more serious than simply low productivity; it was a matter of life or death. Not the case for your average organisation.

Arguably, the most important of the sailors were the last ones we mentioned – the boiler men and stokers. These were the folk who worked in the bowels of the ship. They shovelled the coal or made sure the oil that fed the boilers flowed to make the steam to power the ship’s engines. They made sure those boilers were efficient and produced the power needed to navigate thousands of tons of metal though the water. Without those folk the warship didn’t move, and it was exactly this team of men that Chris’s father was put in charge of when, at the tender age of 17, he left Naval College and took up his first commission as a new officer.

Now, before we go any further, we think it’s worth pointing out that the other thing we all have in common is that all of our fathers had a very hands off approach to parenting in our formative years. Mick’s dad was at sea for most of the time and Gary’s was a typical northern working class man who worked hard all day and spent many nights at the pub. Chris’s father, also at sea, perhaps never really got Chris – you would understand why if you met him (Chris, not his father!). He hadn’t followed the family tradition of joining the navy and, worse still, he became a teacher – in state education! However, literally on his deathbed, Chris’s father pointed out an incredible similarity in what they both did for a living: they became leaders.

Drawing him close, Chris’s father explained how when he first went to sea, he was taken to one side by the captain and told, ‘Henley, I’m putting you in charge of a team of thirty boiler men and stokers.’ These men were hard-bitten sailors, who hardly saw the waves or smelled the salt air. Many would have been in the navy for years and some would have been to war. The captain intoned, ‘You’ve got six weeks and you’ve got to make a first class team out of these men. You need to learn all of their names, something personal about each one of them, you need to know what makes every one of them tick and, above all, you need to be able to make them laugh.’ A daunting task for a young man fresh out of training college to become that weather god. Chris had a light bulb moment. He too had his crew, and his job was also to get to know each one of them inside out and to get the best out of each and every one of them.

All of these things are easy to do, with thought and effort, so think of this process as a conveyor belt of relentless and systematic positivity that is part of your everyday to-do list. Make name learning, mini-conversations and positivity part of what you do intuitively every day. It will then become seamless and your ability to engage who you want to engage will be far more effective. Viewing it as a tactic to be used sporadically is both perilous and energy sapping, as you will have to think about it constantly rather than simply assume it will make a difference in your relationships with your pupils.

Systematic and relentless

We are now going to add another step to the process: boosting your relationship building with praise. Praise itself is covered in a more theoretical way later in the book, but for now we’d like you to bear with us and trust us when we say that praise is one of the most important tools you can use when developing positive relationships. In fact, we’d also like to convince you that when you praise you should link it to effort, and not talent or getting the right answer. We will explain more about this soon, but for now, as we want you to have the full set of tools to engage your pupils, we will assume you understand this.

We now travel internationally making presentations (it’s not as glamorous as you might think) and sometimes our journeys involve long stays in various car parks, otherwise known as the M6 and M1. We have learned from experience that we need positivity to get us through, and one of the most effective approaches we’ve come up with is to create a ‘sweet shop’ in the car. It’s not complicated, but we’d recommend it to you because while at face value it may sound like an excuse for munching sugary delicacies, we have added an extra spin to it.

The idea arose from a lesson Gary used to teach around the sweet shop scene in Roald Dahl’s autobiography of his early life, Boy. The passage describes the cornucopia of different sweets on offer in the local sweet shop. Gary used to take a selection of different sweets into his class and use them as stimulus for creative descriptive writing. Obviously, the kids left his lesson on a sugar high and probably gave the next teacher a hard time, but that’s another story. The twist in our case is a challenge to the person who picks a different type of sweet from the tin (cunningly marked ‘The Sweet Shop’) in the car. The eater can’t put the sweetie in his mouth without starting a new topic of discussion – and it has to be a really juicy one (the topic, not the sweet) so we can pass the time with a good debate and put the world to rights. We recommend it, especially if you like a sweet or two.

No doubt you’re wondering what on earth this has to do with praise. Well, in our tin currently we have exactly sixteen different types of sweetie. (Chris counted them specifically, although Gary accused him of using it as an excuse to snaffle one without him being there!) We could easily add further sweets to our tin to boost the choice and temptation, and consequently add to the likelihood of further stimulating discussion.

Now let’s turn this around. Imagine you have a ‘praise tin’ containing all of the different types of praise you use in your daily life – at work, at home and elsewhere. In fact, don’t imagine it, write them down and create your own imaginary tin.

 The secret is to keep adding to your contents list so, like our car sweet shop discussions, you constantly have new ways of creating praise – except here you are filling the tin as opposed to emptying it. The key is to have a wide range of strategies up your sleeve and not always using the same ones. Just like a top class sports player, you need to vary your game and keep adding new strategies and options. So, think of the tin you have just created as a piggy bank of praise and continually add to it with new and amazing ideas.