Host Leadership, the School, Its Principal, and the Kids
Welcome to the first of my series of postings leading to the Host Leadership Gathering in Sofia, 3-4 June 2024
I am inviting you to a brief description of how a team of teachers got started on Host Leadership. New as the approach was to them, they quickly engaged with it. Their first responses to the metaphor and the Host Leader roles filled me with hope. The kind of hope I have had when working with other people – in business, community work, academy, organisational change, agile – when they talk about the benefits of “building engagement for performance and results”.
HOST LEADERSHIP: A NEW PERSPECTIVE
At the core of this novel concept of leadership is the exploration of the metaphor of host as leader and leader as host. The idea is both practical and transformational. It is practical because the use of its framework – two steps, four positions, six roles – helps build engagement and bring out people’s good work. And, it is transformational because, by thinking about the leader as host, we are ready to act in a world of awareness and flexibility.
Host leading is about building relationship between the leader and others. It is about drawing people in to tackle tough situations, combine their energies, and create new futures. Click here for more on the approach: https://hostleadership.com/
“In my first year as school principal,
I knew that I had to act upon transforming the school,
a major calling!”
Emilia Bodurova
THE SCHOOL
A couple of weeks ago I met the team of teachers from a school in Sofia to talk about Host Leadership. By way of getting into the topic, we looked at the challenges they face these days. We also spoke about the wonders of metaphors, and about the metaphor of leader as host in particular.
Conversation flowed and as the participants got increasingly confident to share their experiences, the moment felt right to move into new territories. I drew their attention to the six posters on one of the walls of the seminar room. These showed the six roles of engagement of a Host Leader, including brief descriptions of what host leaders do when they step forward and back within each of the roles.
The teachers went through them all and each picked the role which grabbed their curiosity. In groups, they talked about their choice of role and shared recent experiences they associated with the role in question.
THE CHOICE OF THE SCHOOL PRINCIPAL
A fellow teacher and the school principal chose the role of Space Creator. As it turned out, the principal’s concern with school space goes back to the days when she came to the school as new teacher. She would be dismayed by the sight of peeling walls, the greyness, and he gloom. Definitely, not the right place for the children to come to and move around. Back then, she herself could not wait to finish her lessons and get out of the building, as soon as she could manage it.
Once she was appointed principal, she set about engaging everybody – teachers, kids and their parents, the local community, in transforming the place. She also spoke of her dream: setting up an environment where the school children are first and foremost safe and also aware of owning it; a space buzzing with activity and interactions getting better by the day.
In the middle of her account, the principal looked at the poster featuring the Space Creator role and paused for a moment.
Admitting that Space Creator was a previously unfamiliar concept, she was quick to add that the wall poster and its language were beginning to serve as a secure scaffolding, offering conceptual support to her and the teachers’ team to handle the key leadership task of making the school space purposeful and friendly.
Conversation in the other poster groups resumed. I could overhear host leadership words emerging in the teachers’ stories, a first small step in the direction of applying host leadership in the way they viewed their practice and their next steps.