Worth a Listen, Look or Read #23 — Wait, I'm Thinking Here, OK?
Jeff Ikler here for Kirsten Richert with our weekly “Getting Unstuck” mini feature. Here in about five minutes, we extend the theme behind this week’s podcast with some related content that we feel is definitely “Worth a Listen, Look or Read.”
“Managers assert drive and control to get things done; leaders pause to discover new ways of being and achieving.”
The idea
This week I talked with Janani Pathy, Principal of the Bill Hogarth Secondary School in Markham, Ontario Canada. https://bit.ly/3EijHea Janani is one of those “unstuck” leaders that we loved profiling this summer and fall in our “unstuck” series.
“Unstuck” leaders tend to consistently demonstrate a few behaviors. They're:
• highly adaptable and innovative,
• community-minded,
• focused as much on their students' mental health as they are on their academics,
and
• they're intent on developing student agency and leadership.
Bill Hogarth, Janani’s school’s namesake, said of her leadership:
“She is a leader — an educator who is outstanding, insightful and grounded all at the same time. She truly has a deep structured understanding of leadership — why you do it, what you do, and how you do it. I visit the school often and what she described in the podcast interview is exactly what you see and experience.”
And when you listen to the episode, you’ll hear that Janani works with her team to develop those same qualities in their students.
Taking the idea deeper
Of the above four behaviors, I’m most curious about the first one — “highly adaptable and innovative” — because it’s the most personal to the leader. It speaks about an inner quality of the leader. The other three are focused on the student or their environment.
Being “highly adaptable and innovative” implies having a strong vision for what you’re trying to accomplish on behalf of those you serve. Being “highly adaptable and innovative” means you see obstacles and challenges as problems to solve, not as high concrete walls that are impossible to scale or go around.
Author Ryan Holiday takes the idea of conquering obstacles even further in his highly readable mega-bestseller, The Obstacle is the Way.
“This thing in front of you. This issue. This obstacle—this frustrating, unfortunate, problematic, unexpected problem preventing you from doing what you want to do. That thing you dread or secretly hope will never happen. What if it wasn’t so bad?
What if embedded inside it or inherent in it were benefits—benefits only for you? What would you do?”
“Embedded inside it”? “Inherent in it”?
Holiday deftly makes the case that highly adaptable leaders don’t avoid obstacles, they understand a key principle of innovation science:
The solution to a problem sits within the problem itself.
Overcoming obstacles, according to Holiday, requires that we take three steps:
1. changing our perception to the problem — our attitude and approach to it,
2. using our energy and creativity to uncover the opportunity within the problem, and
3. cultivating and maintaining an inner will to overcome set backs.
Here’s Holiday briefly describing the three steps:
Taking that first step — changing our perception of what’s in front of us — I think, totally relies on an underutilized leadership behavior: having the courage to pause long enough to think.
That behavior is underutilized for two closely-related reasons:
1. leaders allow themselves to be distracted by the pace and pressures of daily circumstances and
2. leaders are taught by training and or convention that acting right now is somehow admirable.
Bottom line, if developing Holiday’s three steps to overcome an obstacle begins to resonate with you, don’t ignore the underlying need to give yourself the time and space to think.
Put the idea to work
Let’s put the idea to work.
1. What’s an obstacle to your problem-solving efforts that you’re perceiving in your life? How might you look at it as containing a potential solution?
2. What if we were to develop this way of thinking in our students?