In her video, “What it takes to be a great leader,” (Torres, 2014) Roselinde Torres said, “A great leader is a person who is aware of modern trends and incorporates them into their work to form a better bond with their team….They dare to be different and are emotionally and mentally stable enough to leave traditions behind to improve. They understand that having a more diverse network in their team will help achieve greater levels of understanding because it provides a more diverse mindset.”
Torres notes that to be a good leader you have to be able to answer three questions:
Where are you looking to anticipate change?
What is the diversity measure of your network?
Are you courageous enough to abandon the past?
Being a good leader requires seeking advice from a variety of sources, including sources who can give you advice on how to lead.
Where do I look to anticipate change?
As I noted in a previous blog post (Tompkins, 2021), the only constant in the world is change. At the pace our world is changing, it’s hard to know what the future will look like. The only way to anticipate change is to stay educated and to listen to a diverse group of people. Being in education 40 years ago, I would listen to my admin for a prediction of what the future of education would look like. Now, administrators seem to be the least likely people to know about the next big thing. If you want to learn about new innovations you need to listen to sources such as your students, other teachers from around the world, IT professionals, and sources in the corporate world. I have learned more from these sources about new ways to bring learning to my students than I have from “sit and get” professional developments and administrative goal-setting sessions.
Diversity of my networks.
I admit I’m more comfortable with networks based around education, mathematics, and geology than I am around those of the corporate world. Prior to being a teacher, I spent 16 years in the corporate world in professional services marketing. In my corporate life, I felt as though I was playing a part that wasn’t authentic to me. I could do my job well and I loved branding and design, but I never saw the point for much of the marketing propaganda that was created. I felt most of it was disingenuous and fluff that didn’t actually make a difference in whether a client chose my firm (lawyers and accountants) or not. Most of the decisions to hire a firm came from political/social ties and networking.
In my current role as a teacher, I feel as though I truly belong to the professional and personal networks in which I engage. I understand the role and importance of education to our society, which allows me to be authentic in my conversations with my peers and opens my mind to learning from them. I feel comfortable asking questions and getting responses. I also feel confident responding to others’ questions so I can share my knowledge. They are great sources of information!
Am I courageous enough to abandon the past?
This is the toughest of the three questions to answer. I would love to be able to say yes, but abandoning a tried and true technique to test something new is hard! Abandoning something that doesn’t work is easy and can lead to great innovations when you go back to the drawing board. But, ditching something that has proven to work for something unproven is like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane with a backpack and not knowing whether there’s a parachute in it or not. It is how some of the best innovations get made, though. Fire was a tried and true way to cook food, then someone created an oven, and later ovens were replaced by microwaves. If everyone had said ovens are good enough, we’d never have gotten the microwave. Sometimes it’s necessary to fix something that’s not broken.
References:
Tompkins, R. (2021). The Adaptable Innovation Project. My Learning Journey. https://rtompkins7.wixsite.com/eportfolio/post/the-adaptable-innovation-project
Torres, R. (2014). YouTube. Youtu.be. https://youtu.be/aUYSDEYdmzw
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