Poor Proxies for Leadership | A Conversation with Chris Baker

What if the way we've been judging leadership is actually getting it completely wrong? Today, my guest has a provocative idea that leaders just like teachers before them have been chasing the wrong signals entirely. Hey, I'm Shane Leaning. Welcome to Education Leaders, the chat-topping international podcast for leaders in schools around the world.

I'm an author and organizational coach, and in this show, I bring you the practical ideas and honest conversations to help you lead with confidence and clarity. This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association and Teaching Walkthrough. Stay tuned to learn more. My guest today is Chris Baker.

Chris has been on the show before and leads professional development and teaching and learning across quite a few schools in the southwest of England. He's got a doctorate in leadership development and is author of the brilliant leadership launch pads book series. And he's also the host of the Pick and Mix podcast and a great speaker to boot. He's brought an idea to this conversation that I think is going to genuinely challenge how you see your own leadership.

Ready for it? Let's jump in. For me, I taught the way I taught, you know, I mean, I've been teaching 25 years now and I grew up, so to speak, in education, teaching when kind of external scrutiny was really strong and the idea of graded lesson observations and tick sheets of what lessons should include and constant scrutiny and people coming around with checklists and, you know, you've got a score and all those things. And I am a sportsman, I guess, by trade as a PE teacher, but also a long history.

And that idea of, you know, being competitive and wanting to win and understanding that things are games came to me and, you know, quite quickly in that, hang on a minute, this is a bit of a game. They have told me what they want to see and so therefore I will give them what they want to see. And back then, it was all about engagement and, you know, we now call it like kind of edutainment, this idea that you had to kind of entertain the students and, you know, whiz bang things were good and if you were prancing around in some sort of like an act, you know, then that was a good thing, you know, and that was what people sadly took from observations. Do you know, like, you had the kids like standing on tables and they were running around and wow, what an amazing lesson.

And so that was how I taught really. And then I tripped over some work which lots of people then obviously became aware of by Professor Rob Coe who now works for evidence-based education where he had written an article, I think it might have been an article or a bigger piece of work called Poor Proxies for Learning. And now then I speak to Rob, I tell him that he pretty much ruined my career or certainly my confidence about being a teacher when he published that because for those people who aren't aware, he sort of was thinking around, if learning is invisible and you can't be in a room and say, oh, that person is learning, like if you can't say that because it's hard to judge, we have to use alternative indicators or proxies. And so he was saying that a bit like what I was doing, when someone comes around to watch your lesson, they are obviously looking for are the kids learning.

But his suggestion was that they might be looking at the wrong proxies. So on his list was the sort of standard things like silence, like is the class quiet? Are the kids focused? Is there levels of engagement?

Are people getting attention? Have students completed tasks? Has the teacher got through everything they wanted to get through? And of course I'm reading down this list and thinking, oh, that's what I do.

That's how I judge the quality of my teaching. Did I get through my lesson? Me too. Were the kids excited?

Did they enjoy it? Was it calm? And I thought, oh God. And of course, like also people, it made sense that these things are important.

They're definitely correlated to learning. You need to be engaged. You probably need a calm, distraction-free environment. You do need to complete the work.

There's lots of things that are correlated with learning. And he was never saying these aren't important. He was just being provocative and saying, maybe they're not the thing that we should be using to measure it. Of course, people then pushed him and said, all right then, Rob, what is a good proxy?

What could be used as an indicator for learning happening? And whether his opinions changed or not now, and it'd be interesting to talk to him about it, but at the time he said, the one that seems to stack up is, are the kids thinking hard? That would be probably the way to do it. Yeah, for sure.

Like that piece of work and the idea of poor proxies, I had the same reaction. It was really quite revolutionary to me. And I think to many, and it has really challenged us as a sector. And I think has been quite seminal in a lot of work that has followed of good deep work by educators, especially in the UK, unpacking what those poor proxies are.

And I don't know if we've successfully created a set of good proxies that work, but certainly I think there is an awareness of falling into biases or falling into looking at poor proxies. And I think this is a really wonderful thing for education. So I'm interested, Chris, and what this conversation is about is when we last taught, you told me, you said, well, what if leadership has the same poor proxies? And I am super curious.

So tell me, what are you thinking in this space? I mean, it was probably five years after that, when I started thinking, oh God, leadership's probably quite tricky to nail down. How do you measure leadership? What do you say, well, that's great leadership?

Because effectively we need to do that in order to do a couple of things. We need to have an understanding of what excellence looks like to A, decide whether someone's meeting it or not. So there's a kind of QA situation. But more importantly for me, and my role as kind of PD lead in leadership development is we probably build our leadership development programs based on what we understand to be excellence in leadership.

We put that goal out way in front and say, look, that's what great leadership is. Okay, well, then the training program needs to obviously prepare people and equip people to be able to do that. I then started thinking, wow, have we got the right idea of what excellence is in leadership? What messages are we sending and what are people preparing each for?

And hopefully it's not around anymore, but probably it is like lots of kind of edgy myths or things like that. But I remember being told as a young leader, you can't be in your office. If you're not doing 15,000 steps per day, you're not a decent leader. Visibility is everything.

And I thought, okay, right, that's what I'll do then. And so from then on, I thought like to be a good leader, I've got to be visible and I've got to be doing 15,000 steps. And off I went. I've done terrible today.

Terrible leadership day. Exactly. You know, I'm thinking, oh God, I've got another 2,000 quick piece of laps in school. And similarly to the poor proxies for education, I'm not suggesting, and no one's suggesting that visibility is not important, but a bit like what Rob Coe said, they're correlated, but maybe not causal.

There's definitely a link between them, but let's not hang everything on it anyway. So then of course I thought, this will be an interesting thought experiment for me to do. What would be some other things that might be correlated to good leadership, but might not be causal? And so usability was one that came to mind.

Some others that came to mind, and this one is particularly personal to me, is busyness. So I have got it in my head that in order for me to be effective, I have to be busy. For a day to be successful, I have to have done lots of things. And again, that's really damaging and quite dangerous because that's what's playing in my head.

And it's more frequency than quality, which is where the danger comes in. I try and do as much as I can without a focus on the quality of it. So yeah, visibility and busyness came up quite quickly. And then lots of other ones, there's things like confidence, which we could talk about.

Knowledge is another one. Which I don't know whether we want to leave it to the end, but it was probably one of the most funny ones. So I'll take a pause and just see if you want to kind of dip in there at one point. Oh, well, now you've made me super curious about that.

This is great. So the visibility one really sits with me because one of the best leaders I ever had was probably one of the most invisible leaders. And I know for some people that rubbed them up the wrong way, but at the time I was working in a setting where there were a lot of challenges and where staff needed really advocating for at a senior level. And the leader who I worked for at that time was just constantly having behind the scenes conversations to make staff's life better and achieved an incredible amount.

But of course, sadly, he wasn't very visible in classrooms. Wasn't really kind of doing the walk every day. And I think for some, they would say, well, you know, poor leader, but I knew what was happening and what had changed. And I was like, crikey, visibility is not everything, you know, because I've also seen leaders who are super visible constantly and nothing seems to get done.

It's a real challenge because I was thinking with leadership, the proxies is a tricky one, isn't it? Because leadership is measured in much the same way teaching is measured based on the action of someone else. So teaching, you're measuring the learning of the student, not of the teacher, like that's the ultimate action. And leadership is the same, right?

A good leader, it's not what they do, it's what the other people are doing now. Exactly. Which makes it so complex. Yeah, really tricky.

And I think that's probably where we'll go, you know, towards the end of this around, okay, well, Chris, well, what is a good proxy for leadership? But I think it's worth just pausing on the visibility and busyness ones because I think there's a direct link to sadly, wellbeing and retention of leaders, if that is the message that you're sending. So if we go back to the visibility one, I was spending so much time being visible that I wasn't doing my job really, because I was walking to school all day, it meant that all my strategic work had to be pushed into my home life. And so suddenly I'm creating the teaching and learning framework, I'm doing all these things, but in additional time, because in my head, I'm thinking when I'm in school, I need to be visible.

And then the same thing with busyness, I'm thinking if I've not done a hundred things today, I haven't been successful, so keep going. So I think that's a danger as well. But it's worth mentioning, I think what you just said then that to keep telling people this idea that it's not either or, we're not suggesting don't be visible, be everywhere all the time. There is a sweet spot on that continuum for every one of these poor proxies.

And there's a rationale behind it, staff want to feel like they can see their senior leaders, that they are supported by their senior leaders, that senior leaders understand what's happening on the ground because they are around. So go on then, because I'd love to jump into what we might be looking at instead, but go on, give me a few others, because we've talked about a few of these and give me a few others. The final one, which is hilarious, so these are on a list, I've got a list of these which people can catch up on online or through the Launchpad book. What can link to that?

Effectively, the way that the Launchpad images work is I don't force them, so I might start one, even just with a title, and then it might be a couple of months until I come back to it. And so this list kind of evolved over time. And there was a gap at the bottom of the slide, I had one more to get. And I thought, don't rush it, don't push it, just leave it for, and it'll come back to you.

And then I was in one of our schools, so I work across, as you know, 36 schools, and I'm in and out of all these schools all the time. And some people know me and some people don't, and obviously the students, some people do, some people don't. And I was in this school, and one of these kids just stopped me, and if you're not from the UK, my accent won't mean much to you, but if you're from the UK, you'll know that this is a very kind of West Country accent, and this kid who spoke to me had even a deeper West Country accent, and he said, ear, sir. He said, are you our new head teacher?

And I said, no, no, I'm not. And they were recruiting at that time. I said, out of interest, why would you say that? He said, you've got one of those coats, you know, those long trench coat things.

He said, all the senior leaders got those coats. I love that so much. I kind of laugh, but that's funny. So what he was saying was, you look like a leader.

You look like a head teacher. And I thought, that's it, that's the final proxy. It's appearance. Appearance is the final one on my list.

A poor proxy for leadership would be someone who looks like a leader. You know, you can imagine all kinds of things are tied up in that. So that was the last one, but like all of them on the list, and I usually say this when I kind of present about these things, is that I think I was demonstrating all of the poor proxies that I wrote. Like when I looked at Rob's list, I thought, oh my God, that's how I teach.

When I look at my own list, I think, oh God, that's how I lead. And then I started getting all very meta thinking, did I buy that coat to try and look like a leader? And I thought, well, I think I probably did. How embarrassing.

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or grab the link in the show notes. This is fascinating to me. Yes, the leadership copes. And you're right, it brings up very concerning feelings of, you know, gender bias in leadership and all these kinds of things that then what does a leader look like?

So yeah, dangerous proxies. And while they might be funny on the surface because you think, oh gosh, that's a bit daft and we can joke about it. And it might seem obvious that they're not actual proxies for good leadership. Do we unconsciously make decisions based on these proxies all the time?

Probably. Absolutely. Well, why don't we get into the kind of, all right, Chris, well, what might be a good proxy then? Good question.

Tricky. And I would imagine that Rob felt the same way. I felt a lot of pressure and I don't know whether I've got anything right, of course. But a bit like what you talked about, I think we need to shift from judging leadership on our perceptions and shift it to the impact.

Like you mentioned, it's less about our perceptions of good teaching and it's more about the learning of the student. For me, the way to measure leadership or a better way to measure leadership, I suppose, is the impact that the leader has on, whether you want to call them followers or team members or whatever, stakeholders. And that makes it, I think, a lot more objective, a lot less kind of subjective. And the ones that kind of I've landed on are a couple of things.

I've kind of split them into two categories, really. I think I'm interested more and more in how leaders make others feel and what they enable others to do. So I've kind of flipped it a little bit in that if you asked me to come into your school to judge leadership, I probably wouldn't go and even look at the leader. In fact, it would be fascinating, wouldn't it, to not ever meet the leader so that you wouldn't be biased by appearance or I'd go to the people that they lead and I'd probably ask them a couple of questions.

The first ones being, how does your leader make you feel? And when I've tried to unpack that, and again, other people could do an equally or even better job, it's things like, I feel trusted, I feel safe, I feel empowered, I feel protected, I feel valued. You'd want them to say those sorts of things. And of course, in order to get people to feel that way, you have to do good leadership.

Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense. And now I'm quite excited about the idea that now I want to go into my next school because I work with a lot of leaders, Chris, and go, okay, why don't leaders leave for the day? Leave me with your team to kind of order how things are going without you there.

What would that say? What would that tell us? That's brilliant. Yeah, it would be fascinating.

And the other one, I suppose, is again, firstly about how they make people feel. That for some people will great because it'll be too woolly. But the other one is what do they enable people to do? And again, you play around with that in your head and it's things like, I've been able to innovate.

You know, they allow me to innovate. They enable me to innovate. And of course, it seems like an easy thing, but actually, to get people to innovate, you have to make them safe. You have to give them skills.

You have to give them responsibility. You have to delegate. You have to get out of their way. There's all these things that probably are good leadership behaviors that enable someone to innovate.

I mean, in teaching, a classic one would be, they allow me to adapt my teaching or they allow me to meet the needs of my students. Now, that might seem, well, that's easy, isn't it? Well, if you work in a school where you are told how to teach, if you work in a school where the evaluation sort of scrutiny is so high that you don't feel you can go away from the script, then yeah, maybe it's not as easy to adapt and to meet the needs of your students because there's so much kind of rigor. And ultimately that comes from a leadership decision at some point.

A lot of people who are listening to this, well, nearly everyone is a leader who is listening to this podcast. And so they will be thinking, oh, Crikey, how do I reflect this on my own leadership? Like, do you have any ideas on where leaders might start for themselves to kind of get a sense of that impact on how they make others feel and what they enable others to do? What we can do, of course, is we can put a list of the proxies in some sort of link that comes with this.

And for me, it starts with awareness, you know? So if you're listening to this, you've already started that journey of being more aware that there are these things called poor proxies and that there's a list of potential ones that you can look through. And I think the first thing is self-assessment, you know, have a look and maybe draw a line, like a continuum and think, where am I on that? Am I too far over on visibility and busyness and appearance and confidence?

Or where am I on that sweet spot and have I got it quite right? I think that's the first step is thinking about where are you at the moment. I mean, if you're really brave, it would be fascinating and you've got enough psychological safety to speak to the people you lead and ask them about whether you've got that right. But on a bigger scale, I think as I joked about at the very beginning, the danger comes between what poor proxies exist in your leadership evaluation process, you know, QA.

Do you have any poor proxies in your, if you've got a framework for, you know, maybe there's leadership expectations or competencies, or if you've got a framework that you use, which you hold up as kind of, this is excellence in our organization, have a look through that and if there's any language around proxies. I think another place to look is in your recruitment. So have a look at the recruitment information you send out and the job descriptions and the way you assess on kind of interview days. Are you looking for any poor proxies and are you privileging them and are you kind of reinforcing them, I suppose?

And then the last bit would be your leadership development either as modules or can you hear yourself or can you hear others reinforcing things like, we don't want you in your offices. In fact, we want you out and about and all these sorts of things or welcome to the team, here's your leadership coat. Are you giving out free coats when people join your organization? That would be hilarious.

If you have that school, if you have worked in a school, please, please send us a message to let you know if you're one of those coat schools. I just know it sounds wacky. There is gonna be somebody out there who goes, oh my goodness, my school bought us coats. And again, it's worth mentioning, it's not cured.

As I said before, I'm still stuck in this business proxy. It's a daily battle for me to rein it back and say, okay, impact, not frequency. It's about not doing lots of stuff. Are you doing the right stuff?

Yes. So that was incredibly practical. So I think a really useful place to start is to review some of your key documentation in your school and look at those policies, QA, policies, recruitment things, leadership development. These are all places where you can start and have a look and start reflecting on are there any proxies coming through there?

It's a wonderful conversation to have with your leadership team to kind of think about these things. You mentioned at the end there, leadership development, and I've got to be curious about this because this is the space where both of us work in as well. And like I do a lot of work in leadership development. Now I'm terrified that my programs that I have are just filled with proxies.

So what's your view? Do you feel we've been training leaders wrong? It's fascinating, isn't it? It feels a bit like if you look back to the kind of history, I suppose, of leadership theory or leadership development, there seems to be a bit of almost like a pendulum that we started off way, way, way back with that idea of, I mean, they even called it the great man theory, which tells you how far back that is, this concept that there was a single individual that could save an organization that at the top of any great organization, there was one single person who was driving it.

And that was very much, it's about the person. And you used to hear silly things like, great leaders are born, not made, and all this sort of silly stuff. And then we've kind of pendulum back over to probably another extreme, where it's now about what you do, what you do, what you do, what you do, competencies, behaviors, measurables, objectives. And I think some people have started to find a bit of a balance between what I usually call it kind of leader versus leadership.

You know, it's almost the person versus the process. And I think that's an interesting reflection about leadership development programs, how much are you developing the person? And then how much are you developing the process of leadership? But that's tricky, because of course, changing people is a lot harder than changing process.

It's much easier to teach somebody how to write a vision or a strategic plan or a theory of change, than it is to help them be more empathetic or to be more emotionally kind of resilient. And it's probably why we shy away from that, because it's not as easy, it's not as measurable, it's not as easily kind of developable. So I think if you were gonna push me on it, I'd say that we need to swing back a little bit more into helping leaders be good people as well as good at the process. I think that makes a lot of sense.

And you know, to be honest, not so sure in the UK, Chris, you'll be able to tell me on this, but certainly around the world, we do have challenges with leaders getting into positions because they fill a set of proxies. And even leaders who I've known who are not even good with people at all. How can you be a leader if you're not good with people? But it happens a lot because of the ways we have codified leadership into these proxies.

So I think it is really important that we take a step back a little bit. And as you said, the implications are huge if we do that. The problem is, it's a vulnerable step back, isn't it? Because you step into the gray.

And the gray, we struggle with, we struggle with. The world is struggling with the gray at the minute, my goodness, like. And it's tricky with anything to do with professional development at scale. It's almost in opposition to the development of people.

You know, once you've tried to scale something up, because you have to, when fidelity becomes the driving factor, then you struggle because then you lose some of the ability to be personalized and to focus more on people rather than process. He's not in education. There's a guy on LinkedIn called David McLean. He works in business, but he put a quote up on that a while back which said, I'm going to read it.

It says, organizations should hire and promote for attitude and then train for expertise. That resonates with what you just said. Then I think that idea that let's get good people and then let's make them good at the process. Now I told you this episode was going to be a good one.

I love that idea of all proxies for leadership. It really got me thinking, because if we're honest, I think most of us have been playing the game at some point. Visibility, busyness, appearance, confidence, we've all chased them at some point. So here's what I want you to take away from today.

First, grab Chris's list of all proxies. Honestly ask yourself where you sit on each one. There is a sweet spot and it's worth finding. And second, perhaps have a look through some of your school's key documents, your QA frameworks, those job descriptions.

Your leadership development programs and ask whether you are accidentally baking those proxies in. And third, well, maybe try flipping the question entirely. Don't ask how good your leaders look. Ask how their people feel and what their people are able to do.

That's where the real signal is. You can find Chris and his brilliant work using all the links in the show notes. Go check them out. Education Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leeming, thanks to the show editor, Pete McGill, production assistant, Skylar Rose-Sturman and the original music by Guillermo Silva.

And thank you so, so much for tuning in today. If we don't speak before, I'll see you here next week. If you're interested in learning more about teaching walkthroughs or the International Curriculum Association, check out the links in the show notes.