Leadership - Ahead of your class?

If developing leadership is important to you, then we recommend ordering yourself the film "Ahead of the Class". It's great drama, it's based on a true story (try also the book of the same name) and it's full of rich pickings about leadership. It's set in a school in London and, of course, it's therefore a different context from your own, whether you are in another school, a large corporate organisation, a small business, the public sector or a charity. The challenge of leading people however remains the same across each of these organisations.

So what is at the heart of good leadership? We call it Functional Fluency and we think it's about being able to channel energy between three fundamental categories of human functioning in a way that is most appropriate to the given situation.

The first category is social responsibility which is about using energy on behalf of others and involves being in charge and carrying authority. It seems obvious that this would be a critical component of good leadership but there are, of course, helpful and less helpful ways of being in charge and carrying authority! For example a helpful mode of behaviour would be structuring. A less helpful mode of behaviour would be dominating.

The second category is using energy to assess the reality of a situation, moment by moment. Take the metaphor of driving your car. It is a blessing to be able to get into one's car, get onto the motorway, put on the music, put one's mind into 'auto-pilot' and relax. We unconciously take this energy saving approach to much of our journey through our day and through our life - very useful too. But there are times when the journey we make is more risky or takes us and others we are responsible for into unchartered or uncertain territory (and this is what leaders do) and as leaders we then need to be able to weigh up what is going on around us and respond to the stimuli instant by instant in the most realistic and appropriate way possible. At the heart of this category of behaviour is fundamentally an issue of our survival. Our survival may be affected by hazardous weather on the motorway or by a toxic envrionment in which we live or work.

Finally, good leadership also relies on the third category of human functioning which we describe as 'self actualisation'. Are leaders more open to learning? Possibly! Learning certainly pushes our boundaries and is often richest when we are out of our comfort zone. And leaders are the ones most likely to be pushing the boundaries. Rather than comply or resist, we think good leaders invest energy in learning how to relate to and get along with other people. They also put energy into expressing who they are and into doing their own unique thing in a way that is appropriate to their age (take Mandela for example)...which tends to make them conspicuous in a crowd.

Marc Braddock runs a workshop with a colleague using the film "Ahead of the Class" to explore Functionally Fluent Leadership. He is a licensed provider of the TIFF psychometric tool which supports the developent of Functional Fluency and offers one-to-one coaching and action learning set facilitation. Contact marc.braddock@prdpartnership.com. For more information on Functional Fluency visit http://www.functionalfluency.com/