1 INTRODUCTION
Self-Determination theory has framed how I view my journey as a leader. Self Determination theory (SDT), is an approach to human motivation and personality that includes the idea that humans have intrinsic motivations which both determine their behaviour, and that doing activities that fulfil intrinsic motivations will result in more initiative. (Ryan and Deci 2000) 69 The idea that people who are motivated by themselves are more happy, creative, perform better, then people who are motivated by external forces (Deci and Ryan, 2000, p 69) has inspired the development of my leadership philosophy, and led the route for the reading that underpins it. If I can create a leadership philosophy that allows me to live and work towards my motivating factors, I will be able to sustain this. I would also like my leadership philosophy to acknowledge that those I lead will be happier and more successful if I create opportunities for them to follow their intrinsic motivators. The Reiss profile aligns with SDT, and has isolated motivation goals by completing studies to determine what are the intrinsic needs people have. (Havercamp and Reiss 2003) (p124) Havercamp and Reiss (2003, p124) also found that these needs satiate and people are motivated if not in days, hours to continue to pursue these goals. By formulating a leadership profile that aligns with my motivation profile, I can repeatedly actualise my intrinsic needs, so my leadership philosophy can contribute to an overall fulfilled personal work environment. My strongest motivators are idealism, curiosity, and vengeance, which I will make references to in the development of the leadership philosophy.
2 Reflecting on priorities
To define my leadership philosophy, I started with examples of leadership that have motivated me, which I will then interpreted through literature based around motivation theory and brain based leadership ideas. By defining what key moments I have hoped to model, I also then considered how these incidents are in line with my own motivation profile, and used these to narrow down on a clear vision for my personal leadership philosophy.
During my bachelors degree in visual art, I had an inspiring course leader. He was at no point my tutor, so the individual interactions I had were sparse, however, I strongly feel even today, that he understood my work, cared about my progress, and was somehow supporting this progression, as I feel he was for everyone else. He truly modelled the love of learning and passion for the subject. He also expected everyone to achieve wonderful things, which motivated us students to deliver on this, as someone already believed this was inevitable if we just put in the hours. He valued everyones different skills. Although you knew he cared about your progress, there were always clear professional boundaries. There were many courses in our field that trained students to work with specific styles, however, he had a vision that we would be interdisciplinary, which drove the course curriculum, and led to him hiring a wide range of lecturers from disciplines outside of our respective field. This has now resulted in my peers from my cohort to working in a wide range of related fields.
This reflection has exemplified how I want those I lead to feel. The overall environment created by a leader with integrity and vision made difficult challenges enjoyable. The behaviour of the course leader fulfilled the 5 leadership behaviours identified by Kouzes and Posner (2007), and what has stayed with me is how ‘he modelled the way’. By always acting with integrity, and modelling the behaviour, it was desirable to adopt these same traits, as is identified in the leadership challenge: ‘If we follow someone who’s universally viewed as having impeccable character and strong integrity, then we’re likely to be viewed the same.’ (Kouzes and Posner 2007) p. 33).
As part of this task, I have also reflected on what areas of my leadership I perceive I have been successful in. I have been able to support the progression of my department, and I am very proud that each member of my department has either gained qualification during my leadership, or taken on significant promotions in other areas of the school. Although this is of course due to their own ability, I am happy that I have been able to cultivate a work environment where they have developed some loyalty to the institution and stayed in the school, and been able to pursue further challenging posts with my support. I feel this has created a better school, and seeing this development appeals to my idealism motivation. In my leadership philosophy, I want to involve supporting growth or progression as an important priority, as this brings me satisfaction at work. I also think that if I can choose something to refine that I have already shown a competence in doing, that I will be able to be more effective.
It is important to me to be successful at work, I think this links to my ‘Vengeance’ motivation. During the review of my personal motivation profile, I was surprised to see ‘Vengeance’ as my strongest motivation. Understanding what this means has been supporting my understanding of myself as a leader. The idea of being too competitive was something that was discouraged when I was younger in my family, and was vilified as inappropriate in adulthood in a personal context. Now, I can view these characteristics as positive, especially when directed at achieving goals in the workplace. I enjoy overcoming challenges, as this gives a sense of ‘winning’.
3 My Leadership Philosophy
I would like my leadership philosophy to be something I can easily remember, so it can act as a guide through how I pursue goals. For this purpose, I am going to clarify 3 ‘intents, which I link to my strongest motivators, and the earlier reflections on leadership. As these have been, and will always be strong motivators, this will help me act with integrity that can be sustained.
3.1 Activating inspiration
Motivation: Curiosity
Due to my curiosity motivation, it is an intrinsic pleasure for me to think about new and challenging ideas. (Reiss 2004) 182 . In order to be in a team where people feel confident trying new ideas, and being creative, I will need to behave in a way that enables psychological safety, yet has high expectations to create a reason to stimulate reasons to try new ideas. (Edmondson 2019) p18 As a leader, I will create a working environment that allows new ideas to take root, and support change.
3.2 Supporting growth
Motivation: Idealism
Leaders interactions have an impact on the neurochemical responses in followers brains. (Jones 2021) p82 This idea that I can have an impact on the people I work with to have positive reactions, that can lead to a healthier and happier work culture, is very inspirational to me as it appeals to my idealism motivation. In ‘Activator’, Jones outlines how behaviours impact reactions in the brain, and that leaders can be decisive on applying ‘brain-based’ leadership to ‘activate’ positive reactions in the brain. This can result in employees who are “suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance” (Jones 2021) p82. Supporting the growth of my team will allow me to improv
How you want to be remembered is an important part of developing a leadership philosophy.(Deierlein 2015) 15 If I could choose one thing that people who work with me would remember, it would be that I supported them in actualising their ambitions at work, and challenged them to pursue ambitious goals. This intent is a goal that will shape my behaviour to ensure that I follow the leadership behaviours of ‘encouraging others to act’ and ‘encourage the heart’ (Kouzes and Posner 2007).
3.3 Driving success
Motivation: Vengeance
As a leader, I am not driven by power or a desire for authority, I am driven by a sense of idealism, and enjoyment of the process of learning how to improve things. I am driven by a need for competition, and if I embrace this, I can use this to motivate a strong vision for success for my team. To focus on driving success forwards, I will ensure to celebrate small victories along the way, and create achievable goals to gradually tackle larger challenges.
4 Communicating values
4.1 Sharing my personal leadership philosophy
An important part of creating a leadership philosophy is refining the process to a visual. I will first share my philosophy in a poster, which will help reinforce the behaviours I want to encourage in myself. In time, these behaviours will be more embedded and my philosophy will be communicated in my actions. I will display this poster prominently in my workspace, which will support accountability for me to live by my leadership philosophy. Leaders must be able to have a vision and have behaviours that reflect this. (Kouzes and Posner 2007) 15
Picture. A poster of my leadership philosophy.
4.2 Creating shared values
I manage a department of 5 teachers, before my leadership of the group, each had been working in separate teams, and had experienced unsuccessful leadership, as two of their previous managers had been dismissed. Since taking on the role of managing the department, I have aimed to create shared goals to support the transition of a ‘group’ of teachers, to a ‘team’ of teachers (REFERENCE). In sharing my leadership values, and in the steps on creating shared values, I wanted to keep this context in mind. As such, I did not want to start by sharing my personal leadership philosophy outlined above, as I did not want my department to mirror any of my own priorities, but to spend some time clarifying their own. We completed the leadership philosophy task from the Leadership Challenge (Kouzes and Posner 2007), where each individual spent a short amount of time reflecting and selecting their own priorities, and then completing a task in ranking priorities. I led by sharing my priorities, and explaining why some of them were important to me. This led to a discussion of each teacher going through and sharing openly what they had selected and why. We were surprised to discover that as a department, we had very different priorities. One effective conversation was that one member really valued autonomy and independence highly, (although teamwork was still a selected word,) while the rest of the team had identified groupwork and harmony as a top priority. This led to a discussion on how we can manage work tasks and keep in mind that we have very different priorities on how we work.
I then led the discussion to finding similarities, and the department had identified that words such as ‘trust, empathy, harmony, dependability and communication’ had similar meaning to all of us, and were in some way a high priority. We also identified a that we all valued creativity. In order to create a clear vision for the values of our department, we decided to use an acronym that could help us remember this activity in our day to day practice. We used chat GPT to generate the following acronym:
TEACH: Teamwork, Empathy, Artistry, Communication and Harmony.
We decided that we would expand this to:
“We TEACH ourselves, our students, and each other”
This would allow the shared values to have a role throughout the working day, and could be helpful reminder to what we hoped our workplace would embody. I had planned to share the personal leadership philosophy I had outlined, however, I could see that many elements were linked to the department credo we had collaboratively planned, and the discussion on differences for the priorities had started a new conversation on each individuals priorities. Instead of centering my personal philosophy, it seemed more effective to encourage the team to consider their personal viewpoints. While I made this choice, I had the feeling that I was already following my defined leadership philosophy.
After the meeting, a poster was created that the team can display in their work areas to remind us of our shared values.
Picture 2: Shared values poster.
The next step in creating shared values, is to share my written personal leadership philosophy, and invite my team to start developing their own.
5 Conclusion
In developing my leadership philosophy I have aimed to narrow down values that are important to me, and satisfy my motivation needs. I have been inspired by SDT, brain-based leadership and the overall psychological impact leaders have on their followers. Although these texts are relatively new to my leadership praxis, they are inline with my interests and motivations so I do not think these will be passing sources of inspiration. I wanted to create something that I could easily remember, to create accountability for my own behaviours. I chose to refine my philosophy to three points, that combined will require me to act in ways that achieve these goals. The visualisation of this will clarify my priorities to myself and my team. In communicating my leadership philosophy with my team, I have chosen to take a gradual approach, so that my team has an opportunity to build their understanding of their personal priorities.
REFERENCES
Deierlein, Tom. 2015. ‘Why You Should Have a Written Leadership Philosophy’. Leader to Leader 2015 (77): 13–18. https://doi.org/10.1002/ltl.20186.
Edmondson, Amy. 2019. The Fearless Organization. John Wiley & Sons.
Havercamp, Susan, and Steven Reiss. 2003. ‘A Comprehensive Assessment of Human Strivings: Test-Retest Reliability and Validity of the Reiss Profile’. Journal of Personality Assessment 81: 123–32.
Jones, Jason. 2021. Activator. 1st ed. Bright House Press.
Kouzes, James, and Barry Posner. 2007. The Leadership Challenge. 4th ed. Jossey Bass.
Reiss, Steven. 2004. ‘Multifaceted Nature of Intrinsic Motivation: Theory of 16 Basic Desired’. Review of General Psychology 8 (3): 179–93.
Ryan, Richard, and Edward Deci. 2000. ‘Self Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being’. American Psychologist 55 (1): 68–78.