The Three Factors of Leadership

A leader does not stand on stage alone. Three forces shape every leadership decision: the situation, the followers, and the leader herself. A leader who reads only one of these badly produces a familiar failure mode. The one who reads all three and works with all three gets the job done.

Why three sides, not one

A young head teacher takes over a difficult school and starts issuing new rules. The rules are sensible. The staff resist them. The head wonders why people are unreasonable.

The honest answer is that she read only the situation. She saw what needed to change. She did not read the followers, what they could realistically take on, or herself, what her own strengths and weaknesses brought to the job. The rules failed not because they were wrong but because the leader treated leadership as a one-sided activity.

Leadership has three sides because people, not blueprints, do the work. Three sides means three places where a leader can succeed or fail.

The situation

Defining the situation is the first job. It sounds dry but most leadership failures start here.

The Situation. Define the situation, what needs to be accomplished, and set a clear and focused vision of accomplishment. Understand what is needed, in terms of human and other resources, to achieve success, and develop the plan.

Three things a leader does to define the situation:

1. Name the goal in plain language. “Every grade-3 child will read at grade level by year end” is concrete. “Raise standards” is not.
2. Audit the resources. People, time, money, equipment, parents, government support. A leader who plans without an honest resource audit plans for failure.
3. Build the plan around the resources. Not around an ideal world. A school with one literacy specialist cannot run six reading circles; she needs to plan two and train teachers for the others.

A leader who skips this step picks the right goal and arrives at it with no resources. A leader who does this step well knows what she is asking of others before she asks.

The followers

The second side is the people who will do the work. They are not interchangeable. They are not infinite. A leader who treats followers as a generic resource produces resentment and missed deadlines.

The important point is that followers only bring their unique gifts to the situation. As leaders, we cannot ask people to do more than they are capable, but we can ask them to do all they are capable of doing.

Two principles follow:

1. Know who you have. Each teacher, each support staff member, brings particular strengths and limits. The head of English may be brilliant at curriculum but poor at meetings. The PT teacher may be socially the best person in the staffroom and poor at paperwork.
2. Ask them for all they can do. Asking for less than a person’s capacity insults her. Asking for more than her capacity breaks her. The skill is asking right at the edge.

This sounds like common sense. It is rare in practice. Most schools either ask too little of senior teachers (they coast for years) or too much of new ones (they burn out in two years).

The leader (you)

The third side is the most often skipped: the leader’s own self.

You can not lead in a way that is not natural. Followers will see right through and will not find what they need in you as a leader. Thus, aligning your leadership to your own unique gifts and choosing to lead from strength is the only way to create the optimal chance for leadership success, and the optimal opportunity for fulfilment as a leader.

Two implications follow:

1. Know your strengths. A leader who is patient and slow-to-anger will get more out of a difficult staffroom than one who tries to imitate a more aggressive style. A leader whose strength is curriculum will lead by walking classrooms and discussing lessons, not by running flashy events.
2. Stop performing. Leadership styles that are copied without internal fit are seen through. Staff will sense the performance and disengage.

The aim is to lead from strength. Not “be the same kind of leader as the head of the school down the road”. The skill is finding the kind of leader you actually can be and growing that to its full size.

Eisenhower’s line

Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded the Allied forces in the Second World War, put a famous definition in plain words:

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

The two words doing the work are “because” and “wants”. A leader who gets compliance through fear or bribery has not achieved this. A leader who gets staff to share her goal because the staff themselves now want it has. That kind of leadership is durable, because it does not depend on the leader being in the room.

Bennis on the myth

Warren Bennis, who wrote on leadership for decades, kept correcting a recurring myth:

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born; there is a genetic factor to leadership. That is nonsense; in fact the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

The myth is dangerous because it tells potential leaders not to bother trying. If leaders are born, training is pointless. If leaders are made, schools should be running training programmes and individuals should be working on themselves. The research backs Bennis. Leaders are made through experience, reflection, and growth in the three sides discussed above.

Flashcard

What are the three factors of leadership, and what can go wrong if a leader reads only one?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Situation, Followers, Leader.

1. Situation. What needs to be done and what resources exist. A leader who reads only this picks the right goal with no team.

2. Followers. The people doing the work, with their gifts and limits. A leader who reads only this becomes a people-pleaser with no plan.

3. Leader. The leader’s own strengths and natural style. A leader who reads only this becomes self-absorbed and out of touch.

A leader who reads all three works the actual job: getting people to do something they want to do, in the situation they are actually in.

Why this matters in schools

A typical school has all three problems somewhere:

1. Situation misread. Principals start ambitious reforms without checking whether the school has the teachers or the parents to back them.
2. Followers misread. Senior teachers are asked to coach younger ones with no time given for it; younger teachers are asked to take on extra projects with no break from teaching.
3. Leader misread. Heads imitate other heads’ styles, especially after a leadership workshop, and the staff disengages.

A principal who works on all three sides at once, plans around real resources, asks staff for what they can actually do, and leads in her natural style, leads with durability. Her leadership tends to hold up because it is honest about all three sides instead of pretending only one matters.