Five things that are important to me, as a Leader

As part of the Leadership Colloquium course that I am doing, we have been asked to create a "vision" for our leadership. I tried to create a mood board, but I found that "blogging it" was a better

What is your vision for yourself as a leader? What are your aspirations? What do you want to achieve? How do you want to be known?

1. Supporting others, we are all on the same team.

Distributed leadership is a philosophy that my current employer engages in. We are all in it together and we are all on the same team.

2. Nemawashi

Nemawashi (根回し) in Japanese means an informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed change or project, by talking to the people concerned, gathering support and feedback, and so forth. There is also a great saying which is "You can't move the tree unless you dig around the roots". As a change management philosophy, I love this strategy. Yes there are times that you have to bite the bullet on an issue, but for most organisational changes this strategy can be applied.

3. Gratitude 

As a leader, I think that we need to go above and beyond in terms of showing gratitude. I have written a blog post on this.

4. Problems vs. Opportunities

For a brief period of my career I was at Methodist Ladies' College in Kew. Sharing an office with David Dimsey and Mark Scott. We made up the ITLC Team, we team taught Information Technology from Year 9-12. Mark had a mantra, "There are no such thing as a problem, only opportunities" and we used this in the way that we approached curriculum development and our vision.

I'm pretty sure it was a "Dilbert" thing, although the internet would make you believe that everyone from Einstein to John Lennon said it.

I guess that the mindset of "opportunity" means that you are open to exploring solutions rather than creating more problems.

5. Genchi Genbutsu and the improvement philosophy of Kaizen.

Both Japanese philosophies are an important aspect of my leadership toolkit. Whenever there is a problem I like to hit the ground and talk to the people being effected by it. If it is students, I talk to students. If it is staff, then I talk to staff. I also believe in the Kaizen Culture of Continuous improvement. That we aim to continually improve what it is that we are doing.