Seeing Things Through and Legacy
During my last PeerSphere Peer Learning Community meeting for New Middle Leaders, a member shared that her greatest success this year was leading her Early Years team to be more collaborative. Previously, this team wasn’t formally organized, so she was working from a completely clean slate.
Upon being appointed to the role she quickly went to work organizing the team and as she put it, ‘cutting through all the administration to ensure greater clarity for what was expected in the classroom’. Unfortunately, the year level leader positions are being removed for budgetary reasons, which left our community with a dilemma to debate:
Without any incentive, why should anyone assume the administrative responsibilities and facilitate collaborative work?
Is it acceptable to return to the prior state where teachers had no collective efficacy or incentive to collaborate?
Would she or a colleague continue to invest the time to ensure teachers feel supported and promote collaboration?
Could the teachers’ stomach ‘quietly quitting’ knowing it is the student’s that suffer?
For anyone that would argue you don’t need a leader, read my book. Getting adults to work together interdependently to achieve a shared task is a lot of work. Not just because of the disparate experience and needs of team members, but also the conflict that surfaces when teachers challenge practices and pedagogy. Very few teams can function without a leader, especially when we consider how transient international school teaching teams are.
Conversely, this past weekend was an emotional roller coaster for me. After 12 years of serving as ACAMIS’s Contracted PD Coordinator and Leadership Facilitator I was brought on stage at the ACAMIS Spring Leadership Conference and given a Long Service award.
ACAMIS doesn’t pay me. For 12 years I was only remunerated if schools registered for the programs I coordinated or facilitated. Fortunately, during those 12 years, I successfully coordinated 110 programs for over 5100 teachers and non-teaching staff. We only cancelled 3 programs during that whole period, which were in-person programs scheduled during Covid.
For 12 years I worked hard to consult member schools, conceptualize programs, coordinate logistics and promote programs without the promise of any reward. That’s not true, there was always a reward, regardless if my programs succeeded. This is what I wanted to share with my community member last night, but the time and place wasn’t appropriate.
The reward is not the remuneration, release time or title. The reward is being seen. Ultimately, being seen can translate into monetary rewards or promotion opportunities. Being seen, though, often requires an accumulation of the work we have done in service of others. For me, I always trusted that if I put our member schools first, in return I would develop rapport and trust that would lead to other opportunities. If it wasn’t for ACAMIS, I never would have established myself in the Middle Leadership space.
This said, I never entered the relationship with ACAMIS with this plan in mind. Over a period of 6 years and after a lot of frustration and disappointment, I began to assert myself in a space no one else filled. I created a narrative for the great work being done in that space and I learned how to share the narrative with a broader audience. That narrative became my book and eventually middleleader.com.
At times, there were parts of the work I did for ACAMIS that I didn’t particularly feel passion for, but the relationship afforded me the opportunity to build something awesome, greater than my work in the Middle Leadership space. ACAMIS gave me a sandbox to create PeerSphere. PeerSphere’s success, and ACAMIS’s support in launching PeerSphere, was the result of 12 years of building trust and working in the service of others. AND, I got to be onstage last weekend with a very dear friend and mentor, who handed me the Long Service Award.
I hope that my story can underscore the importance of never letting the absence of recognition or incentive be the obstacle to filling a void that others will benefit from. If those you serve take your work for granted, then double down and make yourself so invaluable that if your school or colleagues don’t recognize your work, I assure you others will. This said, the work you do still needs to serve a greater purpose. You need to lean into it selflessly and co-create a narrative with those you are serving that reinforces the value of your work.
