Leadership is in the midst of a generational shift, from top-down to bottom-up, as traditional, static hierarchies are being eroded and the days of a small, cloistered band of leaders steering the ship where and how they see fit are drifting away. 

Scour the pages of leadership tomes and you will see words and phrases such as “humility”, “the ability to actively listen” and “fluidity” replacing “decisiveness”, “self-confidence” and “natural authority” as enviable leadership traits. 

One daring step that school leaders can make when transitioning to this brave new world is to use staff surveys as a way of gauging staff feeling and opinions about recent school decisions. They can offer up compelling insights to act on or reveal issues you may have been previously unaware of.

At St Joseph’s Institution International, in Malaysia, we have been sending out a survey platform to staff every fortnight, with responses visible only to the senior leadership team. It’s a process that can yield major changes but one you need to approach with the right mindset.

‘Put on your tin hat’

Receiving feedback is tough, and when you open yourself up to more than a hundred colleagues, sheltered by anonymity, you need to be robust and resilient enough to handle what may come your way. 

Initially, you may stew over one negative comment about that meticulously planned CPD, or go the other way and swagger with a newfound pride at the 8 out of 10 you received for a recent decision that seemed to go down well. 

Neither of those responses is appropriate. In time, you’ll begin to read the 9/10 and the 2/10 comments with detachment and an air of calm. If, for example, a constructive criticism about the school’s email policy is affecting your sleep, maybe you are not ready for the role. 

Be humble

When your ego is attached to the project, you are in trouble. 

Some of the best feedback I have received has come from our staff surveys and is often striking in its simplicity: could you email us ASAP when a student leaves the school? Can we have an overview of what is discussed in senior leadership meetings? More information on new students, please. 

All of these requests, and more, can be implemented in minutes. The key is to be able to listen, and not just react emotionally, to perceived criticism. 

Know when it’s OK to say, ‘thanks for the feedback’.

And then there is the opposite, when school leaders need to find the strength to disagree with a suggestion or challenge a point that is factually incorrect.

For example, “you only promote people over 30” may actually be statistically wrong - and letting the person who made the comment know that is important. 

The challenge is to balance an understanding of the classroom teacher’s life on a full timetable with an awareness that you are working under constraints and narratives that cannot always be explained fully to staff. You need a birdseye view that gives your decision making a wider, if less detailed, understanding of how divergent situations fit together or don’t. 

At times, you need to back yourself, know why you made that decision and politely type back “thanks for the feedback”. 

Remember the limitations

All qualitative data is rife with issues and using your results as if they are the product of hard science is a dangerous game. 

Most survey programmes do their best to design their products with the best that social science can offer, but do not forget the inherent flaws in the data you are receiving.

“Clustered thinking” is one, whereby disappointment in one decision (say, a pay cut or extension to weekend working hours) can influence responses in other sections. Suddenly, an 8/10 for pastoral care becomes a 5/10, and so on. 

Another issue is “survey fatigue”, a byproduct of a culture where polls are undertaken too frequently and therefore attract limited engagement. 

We have had teachers write back, at points, asking to resubmit their responses as they were “having a bad day”. 

If someone has just taught a tough lesson and then sees the survey in their inbox minutes later, who knows what the impact of one upon the other is? Surveys are a poor scientific method, so be aware of your data’s limits.

Remember the man or woman in the arena

Frequent staff surveys will provide you with a hugely helpful drip-feed of feedback and, at times, you will read a comment and think “why didn’t I think of that?”. 

However, it is important to remember that school leadership is hard, complex and multifaceted; what looks to be an easy, one-size-fits-all decision to one colleague can appear very different through another lens. 

Covid has further intensified the pressures on school leaders, who are now often making decisions - regarding, say, mask wearing, quarantines or staff mental health - that you will not find on their job description or in any school leadership guidebook. 

So, if survey feedback has you questioning your decisions, remember the words of Theodore Roosevelt, who knew full well that feedback is always easier to give without the attached responsibility of making the big calls: ”It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”

Andy Bayfield is the teaching and learning leader at St Joseph’s Institution International, in Malaysia