you overlooking some key priorities? Identify the two or three most relevant lenses.
• If the priorities you selected for one of the lenses appear on both sides, that often means that you’re already aware of the ongoing interdependency the lens presents. Or, as one leader said, whose priority sort for an ongoing initiative revealed this pattern, “No wonder we haven’t made much progress!”
3. For your chosen lenses, are you naturally drawn more to one pole or the other as being of higher priority? The chapter for each lens begins with a chart that provides a little more information that might help you identify such biases. Remember, each lens is made up of two equally valuable sets of priorities, but it’s easy to over-focus on one side and create an unbalanced situation that will not bring long-term success.
4. The priorities on the left-hand side of each lens and those on the right-hand side of each lens correlate with the natural priorities of leaders with different sets of strengths. In other words, for each lens, some leaders more naturally choose priorities on the left and others choose those on the right. With this in mind, consider the following.
• Read the definitions of the priorities opposite the ones you chose. Do you find any distasteful or not very valuable? For example, one leader whose goal involved deepening community connections did not choose networking. When I asked about this, she said, “Networking is just selling snake oil.” Of course, it was a key priority to her goal, but her past experiences had created a blind spot around its importance. Ponder what you didn’t choose to flag any such hidden mindsets.
• Of the priorities you chose, are any so much a part of your leadership style that you will focus on them no matter what? If this is the case, consider substituting for something that is less automatic to your leadership style.
5. Think about which of the ten priorities are probably your top three. Eventually, these will form the structure for your development work.
Remember, this is a repeatable process. Your priorities will change with each goal—that’s what makes this different from a values clarification. This process is not about deciding what your values are. Here, you are thinking contextually about forty different focuses you might use as a leader, depending on what you are trying to accomplish.
Once you’ve narrowed from forty to ten to three, you’re ready to delve into the meat of this book. However, if you like to begin with the end in mind, turn to chapter 16 (page 209) for a preview of how you’ll turn those three priorities into a useful tool for personalized leadership development.
Reflection and Next Steps
Chapter 2 (page 23) provides a deeper explanation of polarity thinking, a method for working with the ongoing interdependencies in the Twelve Lenses of Leadership. Chapter 3 (page 33) will help you understand the importance of these varied, hard-to-measure, core leadership competencies (the lenses) and how the ongoing interdependencies between them often result in either their underuse or overuse, both of which impede effective leadership. You’ll learn how they fit with the Twelve Lenses of Leadership and identify which ones may require more focus from you. Then, you’ll have what you need to use chapters 4–15 as a reference guide for your personal development around your current focus. Although you can read these chapters in order, you can also begin with the three to four lenses that are most relevant to your goal. In each chapter, you’ll find the following.
♦ Information on the interdependencies inherent in the lens and examples of how they affect school leadership
♦ Stories showing leaders working with the lens—their experiences, struggles, successes, and wisdom
♦ Which emotional intelligence competencies support effective use of the lens
♦ Tips for developing your ability to employ both–and thinking with the lens that you can adopt or modify for your own development
Finally, chapter 16 guides you through forming a development plan and provides the reflection tools to ensure that you can continue to reflect to find what is working, adjust your focus, and truly continue the leadership development journey.
CHAPTER 2
Thinking in Terms of Both and And: A Core Leadership Competency
“We’ve seen this before.”
“If we wait it out, the pendulum will swing back to what we’re doing now.”
“These reforms aren’t actually reforms.”
You’ve heard these comments about new initiatives, right?
For example, the longer you’ve been in education, the more labels you’ll recognize for frameworks designed to create collaborative teams. Teachers spend too much time working in isolation, right? So, we need to bring them together. But then, something goes wrong, and things swing back to isolated practice again, until the pendulum swings yet again with another reincarnation of teamwork.
What’s missing? Collaboration isn’t actually a solution, but an interdependent set of values that coexists with values associated with working as individuals. Individual and team. We can’t spend all our time with others, or we’d neglect the particular needs of our own students or fail to make the most of our own strengths. Yet if we spend all our planning time alone, we miss the wisdom and experiences of others, the chance to learn from dialogue, opportunities to share workloads, and the pursuit of shared goals. You’ll read more about this ongoing interdependency between individuals and their communities in chapter 6 (page 75).
In fact, each of the interdependencies we explore within the Twelve Lenses of Leadership consists of paradigms that require looking two ways at once to work with two equally important sets of values. Another way of saying this is that the lenses consist of polarities—systems of interdependent sets of values and priorities that, over time, need each other.
In this chapter, we explore the concept of polarities and how those in this book connect to a core leadership competency—thinking in terms of both and and. You’ll learn how to identify polarities instead of trying to solve unsolvable problems and see how they connect with leadership priorities and emotional intelligence. We’ll wrap up with a reflection of what you’ve learned about polarities.
Polarities
Here’s a quick illustration of a polarity: Take a deep breath, and inhale slowly. Now exhale, and ask yourself, “Which is better, inhaling or exhaling?”
It’s a silly question, isn’t it? Our bodies require both. The energy system that is reality for the breathing cycle is best illustrated with an infinity loop, as shown in
