When I was a teacher, I also had the responsibility of giving many presentations to other teachers, like many others around me. Like many others around me, I was nurtured upwards into higher and higher positions / given more responsibilities and status.
It was always a slightly funny feeling to be raised up the career ladder to a suite that you and your colleagues used to moan / complain about.
I remember being in all those chats, complaining about the work being asked of us by the leaders three levels above us in the food chain. It felt odd to find myself three levels above several years later.
Would I make the same mistakes as them? No, I didn’t want to be a bad manager. I didn’t want to ask people to do lots of pointless busy work: I didn’t want to disrespect people / I didn’t want to waste people’s time.
But hmm.. increasingly I found myself between a rock and a hard place. Above was asking me for more concrete data. Below was getting frustrated with me asking for more. I felt sick of it. As a middle manager, I felt like a pawn. I was the fall guy announcing the nasty news that no one else wanted to own. So I remember: There was a particular presentation that I deeply regret.
I was supposed to be telling the whole school (the teachers, not the kids) our new plan for tracking children’s progress in science. Except……. I didn’t really believe in what I was presenting. I felt embarrassed by it, and I turned it into a bit of a joke instead. I made a bit of a mockery of it. I felt too ashamed to own it completely. But I had also failed to properly say No at any point up to that point.
It wasn’t just me presenting. It was two of us: Me and someone more senior than me, let’s call her Hannah (not her real name). I deeply respected Hannah and learnt lots and lots from her, even if I disagreed with her approach in this instance.
But yeah, I half-arsed the presentation. I made a bit of a mockery of the new system during the presentation where I was the one who was supposed to be presenting it, along with Hannah.
The next day, the headteacher (let’s call him Mr Tinson (not his real name)) called me into his office and asked me what that was all about. He asked me a bunch of questions and saw right through me in each and every instance. “Do you not believe in the new system?” “Do you not feel comfortable with Hannah’s presentation style?” “Did you feel like you couldn’t disagree with it before this point?” “Were you embarrassed by it?”
Then it was the biggest telling off I ever got from him. The lesson was this:
Even if you disagree with your the outcome of your team’s work, you must work as a team until the very end. Commit.
I apologised to Hannah later that week and she was totally fine and oblivious to my half-heartedness, as Mr Tinson had predicted, but I think she appreciated the apology anyway. And I learned that nothing…. NOTHING went past Mr Tinson.
Funnily enough, I made much MUCH larger mistakes than this during my career there, but this was probably the most disappointing moment for him: Failing to “go for it” / Letting down my team / Sabotaging the group effort.
I felt extremely lucky to be in an institution that valued TEAMWORK above anything else. Mr Tinson even agreed with me. He told me he agreed with me on my opinions of the work. But nothing trumped teamwork. Never let your team down. That’s a non-negotiable.
and now I look back and see that I didn’t know how lucky I was.
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