Teachers touch eternity through their students.
Freeman Hrabowski
Every leadership problem is a teaching problem.
In other words, the same skills one uses to teach are precisely the ones an effective leader needs. Now, when I talk about teaching, I am drawing on my background as a college professor and administrator, but please don’t picture a sepia-toned image of some tweed-clad egghead behind a podium perched on a platform droning on as students attempt to capture his (yes, his) pearls of wisdom in their notes.
That outdated model is what we derisively call “the sage on the stage” mode of lecturing. It and its variants may work for a few students, who are usually the types who could still learn if you locked them in a room with only a book and a lamp, which is to say a very special few. The most effective instructors rely on modes of dynamic interaction over lectures.
But this is an essay about leadership, not teaching, or, more precisely, it is about the nexus of effective teaching and effective leadership. The sort of problems that beset leaders in just about any field are just versions of the problems teachers face in class. They may vary in the particulars, their scope, and the stakes, but — and this is important — the ways of coping are remarkably similar.
In no particular order, here are a few (not all) basic necessities to being an effective college teacher and how they pertain to leadership.
1. Setting Goals
Good teachers need good goals. I am not talking about measures, such as students earning certain grades. On the confusion of goals and measures, see my essay on Goodhart’s Law.
Good teachers know where they are directing their students and what they intend their students to leave with. Yes, there are assignments and tests, but a superior teacher will understand that those are mostly crude instruments for assessing what a student has learned. The true goal is the learning. Oh, and rigorous goals (not simply difficult goals) are more motivating than insipid goals. I will address the difference between rigor and rigmarole in a future essay.
The same for leaders. You want your people to complete their tasks and behave in certain ways — in other words, do their jobs. But what do you ultimately want from them or, more compellingly, for them? Keep in mind, it may not be easily gaged or measurable at all. The measure is less important than the achievement.
2. Planning
Related to goal setting is planning. And the first rule of planning is “know thy stuff.”
In grad school I had a fabulous professor named Linda Hutcheon. She told this horrifying/hilarious story about the first time she had to give a lecture. She was extremely busy and never got around to reading the novel she was to teach, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, which is, as they say, a bear. She found herself behind a podium with a room full of impatient students and an hour to fill, so she proceeded to give her entire lecture on just the first paragraph of the book.
Now, Linda is brilliant and charismatic, so she can pull off such a stunt. I certainly could not. But while she was no doubt engaging and even remarkably insightful, the lecture was probably not particularly edifying for the students. She knew her stuff in that she knew how to belabor the reading of a single paragraph, but she did not know the novel itself and could offer nothing of worth on that score.
Once you fully know your stuff, though, there are two things to look out for in planning. The first is overplanning, laying everything out minutely, the opposite of Linda’s predicament. You have heard the proverb “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” The line is from the poet Robert Burns. He knows what he is talking about because he’s from Scotland.
When I first started teaching, I was advised to have a lesson plan broken down into ten-minute increments, and I stupidly took this advice with predictable results. Instead of focusing on the students, their needs, their pacing, and their learning, I found myself focused on staying on track.
Which indicates the other concern with planning: sticking to the plan no matter what. One of the paradoxes of planning well is that you then can adapt or abandon your plan when it is not working or because something else will work better.
My best classes were the ones where I threw out my lesson plan and winged it. In fact, I had great semesters when fifteen minutes or so into just about every class, I would dramatically crumple my lesson plan into a ball and toss it into a trash can. The students would howl with delight because they knew we were off the races. And here’s the thing. Although we got there via an unexpected route, by the end of the semester we always covered all the necessary material while assuring that the students were truly engaged in learning it.
How could I do this? Because I was so prepared, and that preparation gave me the understanding and confidence to try something different, to explode the status quo.
Good leaders know how, know when, and are willing to — even are enthusiastic to — explode the status quo to get to better results. Bad leaders stick to their guns no matter what.
3. Communicating
This one should be a no-brainer, but it escapes so many leaders. Good teachers make it their mission to communicate clearly to their students, but they are equally as keen to listen to their students — not just what they say but also the nuances and inflections of how they say it. Much of the communication from students, by the way, is non-verbal. Good teachers can tell when students have something on their minds but are silent. Really good teachers can do so on Zoom.
Communication is about conversation. How did I know when to abandon a lesson plan? Because my students told me when. Of course, never once did they say, “hey, Dr. Sal, why don’t you throw away that lesson plan.” They told me by how they responded to the material — the answers they gave, the questions they asked, and their unspoken reactions or non-reactions, even utter silence. In other words, we had conversations going even when I was doing most or all of the talking. I was open to them, which helped them open to me and to each other.
As I have said elsewhere, in communication, clarity trumps everything.
How does this differ from effective leadership? Not one jot.
4. Guiding
The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.
Herbert A. Simon
To my claim that “every leadership problem is a teaching problem,” I sometimes add, “and every teaching problem is a teaching-of-composition problem.” Those who have taught college composition or another skills-based course usually know what I mean. I discussed the peculiarities and particularities of teaching and learning skills in my recent essay entitled “What If You Really Could Learn to Fly through a Hole in the Back of Your Head.”
The simple fact is, you can give people information and guide them toward understanding and practice, but they have to come fully into learning on their own. One of my friends and colleagues, Jerry Van Aken, used to say, “you can lead a student to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.” Quite.
Same for leaders. Unless a process is just rote steps, if it involves any degree of comprehension, a leader can only guide people to fully grasp what is needed — even more so when adaptation is required. Good leaders take on the role of careful teacher. The worst bosses always have “to do everything myself because everyone else is incompetent.” Can you guess who in that scenario is definitely incompetent? Think of a teacher who complains about their students being too stupid to learn. Can you guess who is the stupidest one in that scenario?
I’ll go one further. A really good leader invites people to explore ideas and processes and guides them, walks with them, as they do so. John Amaechi says that leaders should engage others in a way that tells them, “Not only does your path to success exist, but I am going to walk it with you.”
Such a leader allows people to get to their goals in their own way as much as possible. You can often tell an organization that has a lot of bosses and no true leadership by the number of locked-down bureaucratic rules and procedures that are in place. Yes, some of these are vital, particularly in certain settings, but when they exist for their own sake, not much leading is or even can be going on.
This essay is already growing a bit long, so here are a few other places where good teaching and leading overlap:
5. Patient Repetition 6. Cutting Some Slack 7. Not Being a Jerk 8. Following Through
You probably get the idea, but if you want to hear more on those items, just let me know.
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Great leaders are, in fact, great teachers (and vice versa), and engaged followers can be much like students who are eager to learn and excel. The more you are aware of these facts and adopt the mindset of an effective teacher, the better you can lead.
Do you think of yourself as a teacher when you lead? How can you more actively include teaching skills in your leadership practice?
You can be the great teacher-leader you were meant to be, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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