Relational Relationships

The other evening, I was being interviewed for someone’s doctoral research, a hugely important area: Values-based Leadership. He asked some great questions which caused me to reflect in depth about some of the times when I have been fortunate to be a values-based leader in education. For some of his questions, I didn’t have a ready reply and had to think before answering.

How about this great question:

Q: How did being a values-led leader help to create trust between you and your colleagues?

Well, I didn’t know at first. How did it?

So I told him all about how being a values-led school was strengthened by being relational in all things. I told him how our values journey had been strengthened with relational practice. I told him how reading When the Adults Change Everything Changes as a staff reading group and carefully implementing the relational approaches improved all relationships in the school and that trust seemed to be a natural outcome of that.  

I told him how my fabulous Deputy Head, Rachel, was also our Inclusion Lead and about how she championed the role of support staff alongside her championing of all things inclusion.

I told him about how Rachel ensured that we were all well trained in neurodiversity and that helped us all, as a staff, to understand one another and to understand our pupils and our parents better. He asked for examples.

So I told him that in the darker days when we, as the new leadership team, first arrived at the school, one of our support staff struggled with relationships with some of the teachers, due to autism, and so I told my interviewer how we responded by all being trained by the Autism Society so that we could better understand the person behind the diagnosis.

I also told him how we built a strong relationship with one of our support staff’s husband, so that when we realised a manic episode was building, we could call him to come and take care of her.

And then I told him how we sheltered a parent from domestic abuse, not only by calling it into the MASH team, but also by offering her a volunteer placement in the school during the hours when he was a home, to keep her safe.

I told him about how restorative practices helped to build trust between adults and children and how, when we explained this to parents, they listened and understood that we were not being soft on behaviour, we were being relational and trauma-informed.

And of course, everyone thrived in that school.

And so I reflected to my interviewer that when we are deliberately relational as leaders, we often don’t really think about what we are doing, it just comes naturally. Sometimes it takes effort to model this and help others understand the importance of being relational, because sometimes the adults do need to change. Having a Rachel helps. But if you don’t have a Rachel, that’s what we are here for.