What Does Leadership Look Like?

Over the summer I've been invited to speak with a lot of groups. Generally, they leave the content of the message up to me and when they do, I almost always choose to talk about leadership. As a principal, I am often looked to as the leader in the building and the majority of my talks have been with other building and district leaders, so they get the formality of that position. But this week, I was asked to speak with a different audience. My task was to speak to all undergraduates at the University of Mt. Olive in teaching majors. My first thought was to find a different topic, but I caught myself. This is exactly who needs to hear about leadership the most. Within a short time, each of those students will be in their first year as a classroom teacher and some administrator will walk into their room to do their very first observation. The very first standard on that observation covers leadership. 

I think we confuse leadership and authority too much, so I needed a way to explain how a first-year teacher can and should be a leader in their classroom and in their building. Being a leader does not mean being in charge. Instead, I focused on the traits of a leader that involve inspiring others, collaborating to remove barriers, and meeting expectations so that the people that they collaborate with can meet theirs. In reality, leadership is more about a dance with others than a set of directions to them.  So how do you break that down so that a 19-year-old pre-service teacher can understand it? You tell a story. And in my stories to them about teacher leaders throughout our building, I realized a common theme. Each of these stories involved leadership that became contagious. While the traits that were demonstrated were never taught in a classroom lesson or in a PLC, in every instance you can find a student or a colleague that saw leadership in action and copied it. Good leaders build more leaders. That's what leadership looks like.