Deep Change Leadership by Reeves Douglas;

Author:Reeves, Douglas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solution Tree
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CONSTRUCTIVE ANGER

The meaning of our lives can sometimes be measured in what makes us angry. Petty people get angry about petty things—inattentive drivers and pedestrians, inconsiderate shoppers, slow service in restaurants, and a host of other irritants that most people find annoying but that lead others into deep paroxysms of rage. Serious people reserve their anger for serious things, such as injustice, threats to children, and violations of values, to name a few. Change leaders in particular reserve their anger for things they want to change, while ineffective leaders direct their anger at things that cannot be changed. Psychologist Marcia Reynolds (2011) notes that the things we wish to change, from personal habits to organizational culture, did not come to be by accident. Teaching and leadership practices that we now wish to change were the result not of carelessness but of deliberation. While it may seem obvious to some that hour-long lectures without checks for understanding are ineffective pedagogy in 2021, the purveyors of those lectures deliver them not out of malice or laziness but because that very method of instruction worked well for them as students. The leaders who bring lofty but vacuous inspirational quotes to faculty meetings are not dunces; they are replicating the leaders they have admired. Every behavior is deliberate, established because it provides comfort, convenience, and some sort of pleasure. This is even true of addictive behaviors that, however destructive, began with deliberate choices that relieved some sort of discomfort. Reynolds (2011) argues that in order for change to take place, our level of anger must exceed the level of comfort, convenience, and pleasure provided by the factors we wish to change. In sum, it’s not enough to provide a cost-benefit analysis to generate deep change. We need a change in perspective that will make us sufficiently uncomfortable, even angry, to change our ingrained patterns of behavior. The late Grant Wiggins gave me one of the best examples of this (Reeves, 2016).

Wiggins’s daughter, Alexis, was a veteran instructional coach in a very high-performing school and shadowed a student for two days. The context was that teachers were elite professionals, at the top of their game, and the high performance of their students validated their success. And in this context, there would seem to be little reason to change. Yet a mere two days of walking in the footsteps of students demonstrated to Alexis, among other things, that students were leading lives of crushing boredom, sullenly complying with teachers’ demands, and not nearly as engaged as the faculty and administration thought (Reeves, 2016). If you want to engender constructive anger among faculty and administrators that will lead them to imagine a better future for a school or district, ask them to replicate this exercise; students’ perspectives are dramatically different from what an observer—always standing rather than sitting at an uncomfortable desk—might see and feel.

There are, however, extensive social inhibitions to anger, and this is particularly true of women in leadership positions. Men who express anger are

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