When I’m interviewing potential new teachers, I often ask,
“Can you share an example of where your thinking has shifted from: I used to think this, but now I think this?”
I don’t ask this because I’m seeking a dramatic conversion story. I ask it because I’m genuinely curious about how people open themselves up to learning – how they respond when their assumptions are challenged, and where that new learning takes them. Over the years, I’ve heard stories sparked by influential books, impactful courses, unexpected conversations, and life-altering moments. And always, these stories reveal much about the people I meet: their self-awareness, humility, adaptability, and their willingness to grow. All things I might be looking for in a new colleague.1
Perhaps the biggest shift in my own thinking (particularly in recent years) has been around leadership.
I Used to Think This, but Now I Think This
I trained as an officer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, over 20 years ago. There, the motto was simple: “Serve to Lead”. It’s a wonderful frame for a leadership approach that emphasises the importance of humility and compassion, and putting others’ needs before your own. I was drilled that the leader’s job is to set the standard, to take responsibility, and to inspire trust in those who follow me. I modelled what I expected. I learned to command. I carried the weight (literally sometimes) before asking others to. I made decisions under pressure, and I like to think that I earned the trust of my teams through my values and actions.
But over the years, especially when I returned to lead in schools, I began to realise that leading through command, control, and competence wasn’t always needed. In fact, more often than not, it got in the way.
So I guess I was ready to be shifted when I read a line from Ralph Nader that “the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
The idea that the role of leadership is to create more leaders has stayed with me2. It’s stayed with me as I think about how we can take on local and global challenges, but more specifically in the context of schools and how we help young people to discover what leadership looks like (for them).
I used to think that leadership was always about stepping up. Now I think leadership is often about knowing when to step aside.
I used to believe that the best leaders inspired others to follow. Now I believe the best leaders inspire others to lead.
So, in many ways, this is more than just a shift in thinking; it’s become a shift in my practice. I believe the purpose of leadership is not for me to shine but to nurture and create the conditions where it can grow in others. In schools, this means shifting from control to coaching, from clarity to curiosity, and from being in charge to being in the service of growth.
This is how I arrived at the metaphor of “unearthing leadership”.
A Three Group Model
Too often, student leadership is framed as a handful of positions given to the most confident. But if we take Nader seriously and honour the Serve to Lead mantra I first heard at Sandhurst, then the task is broader: leadership in schools should be about unearthing potential in every group of students—not just those who rush forward.
The model that follows is a crude attempt to categorise students into three broad groups3. It has no research base; it is an awkward, artificial construct which goes against my instincts to label groups of people. But sometimes a simple frame helps us see more clearly. My hope is that it stimulates reflection on how schools might widen, deepen, and humanise leadership development.
- GROUP 1 (c.20% of students) – Potentially the easiest to nurture, but who actually require the least encouragement. These students will be confident self-starters who will be well known to their teachers and the school community. They value and readily accept student leadership roles and will often (but not always) be motivated to obtain them. As such, they will volunteer for all opportunities on offer and thrive in whatever they are doing. Although this cohort may represent only c.20% of the student population, they will often occupy the greatest share of the leadership opportunities on offer within a school – think Pareto’s 80%.
- GROUP 2 (c.70% of students) – Potentially the most to gain from leadership development activity, but who require significant encouragement. This group are potentially able leaders but who do not readily volunteer for traditional leadership roles. Why? For some, the leadership opportunities on offer are simply not exciting them. For others, they have simply never been given the chance. For some others, the reasons will likely be an aggregation of low confidence, apathy or blatant disinterest in participating at school any more than they absolutely need to.
- GROUP 3 (c.10% of students) – Potentially able to benefit from leadership participation, but who often have too many other competing needs to contend with. This group will require significant and tailored support to find their voice from the leadership opportunities on offer. The challenge to develop this group will likely include behavioural, cognitive and emotional-social factors. The best approach is certain to be highly individualised, probably targeted at raising self-esteem or efficacy. However, it could also be that attempts to impose leadership development on these students will cause more harm than good; this will be a ‘wicked’ problem set for the school to work through and do the best that they can for each student.
There is a lot that could be said about this flawed model. However, my point in sharing it is to provoke us to focus more on our group 2 students. When supported and unearthed, intentional student leadership development will yield real gems.
And in our challenging times, we will need all the leaders we can find.
Leaders Produce More Leaders
Nader’s line (that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders) sharpens our challenge: Are we producing followers who execute tasks or leaders who create space for others to grow? Serve to Lead points us in the same direction—we need to see leadership as enabling, as multiplication.
We know that group 1 students are the easiest and most visible to nurture. We also know that group 2 requires the most time. But we do not have to choose between the two. We can balance them both. We should aim for depth with group 1 and breadth with group 2.
By finding roles that challenge rather than glimmer, Group 1 can be stretched into humility, resilience, and service.
Group 2 can shine if we open doors, lower barriers, and change our defaults—and then they can be supported, encouraged, and given the platforms to discover what their own leadership might look like.4
A potential breakthrough is where we can get Group 1 to become part of the solution: when leaders are asked not just to lead, but to mentor, include, and cultivate others. In doing so, they can help schools unearth leadership potential in the majority.
Leadership is Mined
I used to think leadership was something you stepped into.
Now I think it’s something you can mine, and sometimes from places no one else thought to look.
If Sandhurst taught me to serve in order to lead, then schools have taught me to serve in order to multiply, not just to carry others but to create conditions where more people step forward—not because we told them to or because we noticed them, but because we trusted them to.
We don’t need to reinvent leadership in schools. I think we just need to widen it beyond the few to the many. We need to change the narrative on school leadership from being chosen…to being invited.
And if we’re serious about shaping a generation that can take on the incredible challenges of the world – the exponential threats to peace and sustainability – then we should stop waiting for leaders to arrive, and start digging for them.
Because leadership isn’t found. It’s mined.
So get digging!
- Now that I’ve shared it so widely, I may have to consider whether to include that question in the future! ↩︎
- I saw it quoted again in Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition (2024) more recently, which inspired me to write this article. ↩︎
- I first borrowed this conceptual model from Brigadier David Wilson in c.2008, who used something similar to help frame the challenge of supporting soldier career education. ↩︎
- It is unhelpful to assume that all leadership is the same. Some leadership is highly visible, but more often, it is invisible, and we have to find ways to recognise and celebrate it all. ↩︎
Serendipities 