- Social leadership is an approach that empowers everyone to lead
- In early years, social leadership can enable organisations to be more responsive to social change and therefore more successful
- This can in turn help generate changes in wider society
Social leadership is an approach that empowers everyone to lead, no matter what their formal position in an organisation. As a researcher of leadership in early years education, I have looked at how social leadership can help EY organisations to respond to the many challenges of the sector.
Social leadership has been defined as a democratic and collaborative way of leading organisations. In The Social Leader Handbook, Julian Stodd suggests that social leadership has two related aspects: it builds a strong sense of community within an organisation, and it brings about positive and concrete social change, such as better and more equal working conditions. We can see how one leads to the other: when everyone is invested in an organisation, we are more likely to ensure that others are treated fairly.
Others suggest social leadership is not only a ‘nice’ way to be; it is in fact the only way for organisations to survive in today’s world. Frank Guglielmo and Sudhanshu Palsule have suggested that when businesses enable every single employee to step up and drive change, they can be truly responsive to the rapid pace of change in the world around them. We can see many examples of this around us: with Covid lockdowns, educational organisations have had to adapt rapidly, often bringing much of their activity online. The most effective responses have been those that draw on the creativity of staff right across the organisation, rather than expecting a single leader in the organisation to offer up a single solution to the issue.
This means everybody in an organisation must think and behave like leaders. Staff need to understand what it is to be a leader, says June O’Sullivan, CEO of the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF) and author of Successful Leadership in the Early Years. When staff see themselves as leaders, they are more prepared to step up and take on the organisation’s challenges as if they were their own.
She explains, ‘When I decided that we needed to do something for the national emergency and keep some of our nurseries open to support the children of key workers and vulnerable children, I didn’t have to ask anybody. I had a number of people already emailing me saying, “I’ll do it, June, I’ll do it, I’ll step in, I don’t mind. I’ll open the nursery. You can have my nursery. I don’t mind moving: I’ll go to them.”’
Social leaders as advocates
Old societal norms are shifting all the time – think of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has prompted deep reflection from some organisations on equality, diversity and inclusion, often driven by a collective community, rather than top-down management, agenda.
Covid and the reality checks posed by Black Lives Matter are just as urgent in the early years sector as in wider society. Many nurseries are currently sitting on a financial cliff edge. The current pay, conditions and status of professionals across the sector is widely recognised as unacceptable. Linked to this, poor recruitment and retention are prompting a workforce crisis, which could be alleviated if the talent pool were more representative of society. In my research, I’m working to understand what this might look and feel like on the ground and how organisations can make it happen.
Growing social leadership
Social leadership can be an approach taken by any organisation. Similarly, small acts of leadership don’t depend on role: an apprentice is as capable of showing leadership as a nursery manager. We can all show leadership in small day-to-day ways. It could be responding to the anxiety of a parent by giving them a bit of extra time at the end of the day, or noticing a way to improve the learning environment and pointing this out in a team meeting.
The question is: how can we empower all staff in an organisation to embrace this kind of leadership and begin to see themselves as leaders?
In my observations at LEYF nurseries, and discussions with Ms O’Sullivan, I’ve identified five key ways through which they promote leadership among all their staff:
- trust
- openness
- reflection
- positive language
- concrete understanding
Trust
When staff feel trusted, they are more likely to show professional judgement and take a necessary risk, whether it’s allowing a child to climb a tall tree or starting a support group for the male staff in a setting. When staff feel that they are not trusted, they will shy away from sharing their ideas, making their own judgements and taking the initiative.
An LEYF practitioner told me, ‘I feel like I’ve got a lot of autonomy here. LEYF are very open to staff leading the way with what happens in the classroom.’ In the most recent Ofsted report for this practitioner’s nursery, rated Outstanding in all respects, the inspector comments that the ‘staff are extremely proactive and successful in engaging parents’. Taking a proactive approach depends on professional autonomy, which in turn depends on trust. Organisations show that they trust their staff by distributing responsibilities widely and by building a culture in which people do not feel micro-managed.
Openness
When staff are able to openly communicate with others in the organisation, they are more likely to find their leadership voice. How team meetings are run, how working groups come together from across the organisation, the opportunities for peers to reflect and collaborate together – all of these are important for openness. And it’s not just about making time and space for opportunities. True openness comes about through inclusive communication styles.
The most inclusive way to communicate across an organisation is through storytelling, since stories are the way we all make sense of the world. In LEYF team meetings, staff are asked to regularly share stories from their practice that make them proud or reconnect with the organisation’s values by showing the values in action. A manager described the impact of an email sent by a colleague, ‘She wrote this passionate email about work they’ve been doing with a particular child. And that resonated back again with what our standpoint was and the impact we have. It was such a moving account of the day.’
Reflection
Leadership development doesn’t happen through tickbox exercises. To build authentic leadership, everyone in the organisation needs regular opportunities to engage in in-depth reflection on their own behaviours, including their leadership. Enabling supervisions and staff meetings to be genuinely reflective can be a struggle that depends on investing time and energy. But when you get it right, it can help to shift practitioners into leadership ways of thinking and behaving.
A relatively new LEYF practitioner explained how her manager’s reflective stance as part of day-to-day practice had enabled her to become a pedagogical leader, ‘Everything you do, you’re thinking about the LEYF pedagogy, so it becomes something you’re constantly working with.’
Positive language
If you want staff to take risks, they need to feel they are in an environment that supports risk-taking. If the language that surrounds us is negative, we are more likely to close down our risk-taking behaviours. If the language around us reminds us to be brave, positive and proactive, we will change the way we do things to match this.
Think about the difference between these two terms: ‘appraisal’ versus ‘talent enrichment’. At LEYF, they opted for the term ‘talent enrichment’ to try to encourage more open and authentic professional development conversations, operating on a basis of warmth, care and empathy.
Concrete understanding
To reflect on leadership development, everyone needs to have an understanding of what leadership is and what it looks like. It’s not about defining leadership in a sentence, but rather about being able to recognise leadership when it happens in yourself or around you. When people can see leadership in day-to-day responses and actions, they are better able to build their own leadership capabilities. When leadership feels like something abstract and removed from everyday experience, we struggle to know how to grow our own leadership. Organisations can help staff to have a concrete understanding of leadership by pointing out small acts of leadership and naming these as leadership.
‘When you describe things as leadership, or when you talk about leadership in a way that seems meaningful to people, you have more chance of them understanding their place in it,’ says Ms O’Sullivan. ‘They begin to realise that leadership isn’t a role: it’s a behaviour.’