Day 3 Leadership Reflection

Leadership Reflection

As we started to deeper our learning about different decision-making models, I found a lot of new and interesting information during the session today. The participatory decision-making versus autocratic approach was very interesting for me. I would put myself more on the participatory side, however, I do believe that there are times when leaders need to be more autocratic. 

The idea that running a school is not democracy was really interesting. There is time for participatory decision making and there are times when this approach doesn't work. It was eye-opening to think about how much participation and power should be involved in decision-making. If I think about my team leader role and decision making practice, the school's management does emphasize to collaborate and take the decisions together. However, there were times last year, when I really had to stand up and say, guys this is what we are going to do and period. Either because it was really hard to agree on something or the teachers just didn't want to change something (just because it wasn't the way they were used to do it).  

We also talked about each decision having a cost. The cost of lots of participants but no decision power is that the decision will be slow and it can result in paralysis by analysis and it can also create conflicts. We need to consider how much the participants understand the problem and are experts involved in decision-making. On the other side, if there is no participation and no power then means the decision is autocratic. 

Another important discussion was about the vision and mission of the schools, and how everything we do at school should be tied to the vision. We talked about what a good vision looks like, and that it should start with the outcome: What do we want our students to be? What really matters? We said that great visions are inspiring, concise (catchy), and clear to everyone (including the students). When creating the vision of a school we should avoid vague phrases like "we want to have life-long learners". It was very interesting to think about the admission process through the lens of the vision of the school. I have never thought of this before, that the two should be connected, that vision should be the core of everything we are doing at school. I've learnt that we have to bring our vision and mission statement alive every single day.