Leadership – How to support junior colleagues amid choppy waters
Neil Jurd OBE offers his thoughts on how school leaders can remain calm and empathetic towards their junior colleagues when under intense pressure
- by Neil Jurd
Leadership is a critical aspect of any successful team. The ability to lead and guide a group towards a common goal is invaluable.
Yet leading a team can be especially challenging in high-pressure situations, where uncertainty and stress can cause individuals to falter. In such situations, effective leadership can make all the difference in maintaining a sense of direction, purpose and focus.
The way leaders present themselves and interact with their teams can have a profound impact on a department’s overall culture. Positivity is contagious; those leaders who exude kindness, optimism and empathy will in turn create a positive, productive, and supportive environment for their employees.
Too often, people in leadership positions forget that the role of a leader is to serve both their team and the mission. Serving as an officer in the British Army, and subsequently helping to train future leaders helped me understand this.
The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst has a motto, ‘Serve to Lead’. The message it seeks to convey is that by caring for the wellbeing of their team, leaders not only demonstrate empathy, but also ensure that their team is physically and mentally capable of focusing on their goals.
Empathetic relationships
To build and maintain relationships with junior colleagues, it’s necessary to first create a sense of safety. By encouraging open and honest communication, you’ll be better placed to fully understand the challenges they’re facing.
This can be done via a series of small actions. Make sure informal check-ins take place on neutral ground so that they feel less formal. Ensure your colleagues are going home on time. Set aside times for regular sit downs with a coffee so that you can catch up with them.
All this will help build trust and paint a clearer picture of those daily issues you can support them with. Leaders who succeed in building strong relationships with their team will tend to be those who can effectively motivate and inspire others. That’s why it’s so important for leaders to create opportunities to connect with their team members and understand their perspectives.
How do you fare under pressure?
Before you can effectively lead others, however, you must understand and control yourself. Effective leaders are self-aware and will work hard at boosting their strengths while addressing or compensating for their weaknesses.
A leader possessing self-awareness and self-control will understand their own emotions and feelings, pay attention to them and be able to discuss them with others.
We recently collaborated with the headteacher of a thriving sixth form college as part of a leadership development programme. He was a kind and thoughtful man, and well-liked by the college’s staff – but when under pressure, he would become irritable and tended to blame others for any mistakes.
By getting to understand his reactions in such instances, he soon learned to control the fear of failure that drove his negative responses to pressure, and through that ultimately change his behaviour. By understanding and better appreciating how you typically respond to pressure, you can better control how you react to it.
Positive leadership
If positive behaviour leads to positive results, then at the basic level, being kind, decent, patient and caring will help you develop the kind of strong and supportive relationships that any leadership role will require. I’ve previously seen several superb examples of positive leadership from Nigel William – a calm, humorous and gentle man, and one of Scotland’s most experienced mountain leaders.
He and I have spent weeks together on skis in Norway. Early one year we were with three inexperienced skiers in a mountainous area. Injury had slowed us down, and we were still out after night had fallen. Temperatures were below zero and dropping fast. We could not find the hut where we were to spend the night, and there was no other accommodation for 20 miles.
The mood in the group became uncomfortable.
The inexperienced skiers were tired, frustrated and scared at the idea of spending a night outdoors in the Norwegian wilds. The hut was close, but hidden in woodland on the other side of a deep, snow-filled river valley crossed by a single-track bridge.
Without knowing our exact position there was a strong chance we would miss the hut. Our immediate situation, which required precise navigation, could have easily become dangerous – yet amid these hugely demanding circumstances Nigel remained perfectly calm, assiduously looking after and reassuring the group.
Nigel’s attitude and calm positivity, combined with his brilliance as a navigator and experience traversing dangerous ground, is a classic example of positive leadership, and a model demonstration of how to create a sense of safety when it’s needed.
Beware negative leadership
Negative leadership can take many forms, but will often be characterised by behaviour that has a detrimental effect on other people within the team. Arrogance, rudeness and dismissiveness of others diminishes people, reducing their self-worth and willingness to engage. It undermines trust and mutual understanding in the team and makes people more status conscious.
In the Army I worked for a time under a major who would shout at me and other junior officers to make his point. On one occasion, he shouted because a tin of paint had gone missing. Another time it was because of a problem with a radio battery.
We junior officers often had no real idea as to what we’d done wrong. I can still remember the time we stood to attention under a barrage of words, trying to grasp why he was so angry before he became even more annoyed.
He in turn worked for a Lieutenant Colonel who was known for being arrogant and personally ambitious, but everything changed with the arrival of a new commander – a talented and emotionally aware leader whose presence and style transformed the Battalion’s culture. My immediate boss became more relaxed, and the effect was felt across the organisation.
Contagious leadership
Open, honest communication and a readiness to show empathy and kindness, are key elements of positive leadership. This type of leadership style not only inspires and motivates teams, but also gives rise to greater innovation, creativity and problem-solving capabilities.
The impact of a leader’s behaviour is often contagious. If you practise kindness and empathy this will radiate throughout your team, as humans naturally mimic the moods and behaviours of their peers. Understanding this impact and incorporating positive leadership practices is critical to creating a successful and productive team.
By serving their team well, and fostering relationships through open and honest communication, leaders will inspire and motivate their employees to perform at their best and ultimately achieve their collective goals.
Neil Jurd OBE (@JurdNeil) is the author of The Leadership Book and founder of the residential training and video learning platform Leader-Connect; for more information, visit leader-connect.co.uk
