You are NOT a leader

Title: You are NOT a leader…

00:00:02

Daniel: There’s a cost to everything. I sometimes wonder what’s the cost of schools too narrowly identifying a subset of their student body as, quote unquote, leaders, because they fit some kind of mold or definition or ideal that we hold folks to that a leader is. And that is the basis of today’s conversation, because Mark Herbert, who wrote a book I suggest you check out, called I’m Not a Leader, but the Not is Crossed Off for You. He really thinks about this leadership experience deeply. It was that experience he had as a student where he was identified as a leader, but the majority of his peers were not. That set his life into motion down this leadership path and how he shows up and serves schools and their students around this topic of leadership. Enjoy the conversation. Check out his book and I hope this podcast inspires you to reconsider some of the ways that you can invite many more participants to the leadership table. Hey, it’s Danny, and welcome to the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast. This is a show for Ruckus Makers, those out of the box leaders making change happen in education.

00:01:24

Daniel: We’ll be right back after a few short messages from today’s show sponsors. Learn how to successfully navigate, change, shape your school’s success, and lead your teams with Harvard’s Certificate in School Management and Leadership. Get a world class Harvard faculty research specifically adapted for pre-K through 12 schools self-paced online professional development that fits your schedule. For our upcoming cohort go to BetterLeadersBetterSchools.com/Harvard. During COVID. Every teacher is a new teacher. That’s why innovative school leaders are turning to Teach FX whose virtual PD is equipping thousands of teachers with the skills they need to create engaging, equitable and rigorous virtual or blended classes. To learn more about Teach FX and get a special offer, visit teachfs.com/BLBS. All students have an opportunity to succeed with Organized Binder, which equips educators with a resource to provide stable and consistent learning, whether that’s in a distance, hybrid or traditional educational setting. Learn more at organizedbinder.com.

00:02:58

Daniel: Hello, Ruckus Maker today I’m joined by Mark Herbert. Mark ‘s passion is to release untapped leadership potential in people. So much leadership is wasted when the world defines leadership too narrowly. Mark ‘s work helps people to better understand themselves and grow to be comfortable leading out of who they are. Mark has worked as a high school teacher, chairman of a youth charity and youth pastor, and now runs a leadership consultancy called Leader Full. You can check out his work Leader-full.co.uk. Focuses most of his time on school and colleges. He lives in the UK with his wife and young family and loves to explore the great outdoors. Mark , welcome to the show.

00:03:43

Mark: Thanks, Danny. It’s really great to be with you.

00:03:48

Daniel: I remember from a pre chat, you talked about l20 years ago, you had a private school experience. You did well and experienced a lot of success. Love the experience. And then 20 years later, you sort of reflect that you were recognized as a leader at the age of 18, but then you started thinking, what about everybody else? Can you bring us to that moment when you had this light bulb and reflecting on that school experience?

00:04:18

Mark: It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, hindsight? You look back. I had a great education. I loved it in the U.K. we call it school, which is high school up to 18. That’s great friends, great opportunities and it was a good school. It was a really good education, probably my best years of my life and I look back and just loved it. There’s so much that’s positive. I wouldn’t want to be negative about it except that when I look back now, I realize that an awful lot of attention was given to the few of us who were recognised leaders. In our school it was the kind of prefects who were the student body representatives and leaders. It was the sports captains, people on scholarships and, and all those three things is something that I achieved. And therefore I was a leader and it was a wonderful place for me to flourish, which was great. I do look back now and have reconnected with various people who weren’t those things. I look back thinking, why was leadership defined so narrowly in those years? Why was it the sort of domain of the exclusive few? I guess it’s created a bit of sort of holy discontent and gentle baseline frustration in me that meant me. I wanted to sort of join this Ruckus Making community and just say, “Let’s think about leadership more broadly than that. Let’s not think that there are leaders and there’s everybody else, but let’s really think about what it means to be a leader.” I hope that will just release the leadership potential that rests in people that often lies untapped. And that’s my real passion. It’s just sort of untapped.

00:05:46

Daniel: A great passion to have in uncorking the potential that’s inside every human being. What a great way to invest your time and talent. Tell us about leadership. When you think about it, how do you define it in your view?

00:06:04

Mark: It’s definitely not about a position because I’ve seen like we all have many people in positions of leadership who are not very good leaders or don’t do much leading, and other people who are not in recognised leadership positions who do an awful lot of leading. I prefer to use the word influence. I think leaders are influencers. So typically in a school I go in and I’ll speak to some young people and I say, Stick your hand up in the air if you’re a leader. And I got a tiny number of hands going up and it’s always the same. We talk about leadership. We talk about wanting to have a positive influence on others. We talk about serving other people rather than talking. At the end of the 45 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever I’ve had with them, I ask the same question, “Hey, raise your hand if you think you’re a leader or want to be an effective leader.” And typically, 85, 90% of the hands go up. I hope that what they’ve seen in that little moment is that leadership is about influence, not about position, that we can all have a positive influence on other people and that leadership is inherently relational. So I really define leadership as having a positive influence on other people through relationships.

00:07:08

Daniel: I like that because the key is with relationships and that kind of thing. I’m curious, in your years on this earth, what have you learned about forming strong relationships so you can have that kind of influence that you want to have with people?

00:07:25

Mark: I think if I was to go back 20 something years to my last year in school, but then I probably would have formed relationships just through general charisma and in a right sense, in a good sense, a kind of force of personality. I’ve come to realize more, more recently that I build much better relationships with people when I understand them and I understand them when I listen really carefully. As a leader now, compared to 20 something years ago, I try to be a leader who listens more carefully now and speaks less when I understand someone, then I can enter into their world. I understand their hopes and dreams, their strengths, their struggles. I feel I’m in a much better position to try and have a positive influence over them. And inevitably I end up learning loads myself. I’ve had some great role models in my life who’ve been the most brilliant leaders for me, and often they’re quite unassuming, not always the most public, not always the most confident people. Again, been fuel for the fire. You don’t have to be really self confident. You don’t have to lead from the front to be an effective leader. Interestingly now, I coach people on how to build good, healthy relationships is often a focus in schools. One of the big areas I focus on is learning to listen, because when you really listen, you can understand and when you really understand, then you can start relating.

00:08:48

Daniel: That’s fantastic advice. The more they say, right, you’ve got two years, one month for a reason type of thing. The wisdom should just be there looking at your face. No, but when it comes to listening, has there been like a mentor in a moment that helped you really level this up? Or is there like a book or resource you would point people towards? The Ruckus Maker listening to this show wants to be more influential. What would you tell us?

00:09:20

Mark: It’s been a combination of things. When you’ve been in the presence of someone who’s listened and not just sort of like pseudo listened, but really listened, and their attention to you and the eye contact and the fact that they’re fully present in the moment is brilliant. To be honest, the person I’ve learned most from is my wife, Steph. She’s a brilliant listener. I get irritated because she’s such a good listener because if she’s listening to somebody else on the phone and I want to quickly get an answer out of her, I’ll get nothing because she’s fully in the moment with that person. If I was to name one person who really helped me and I’m a natural communicator but not a natural listener, I’ve come to realize that actually I won’t be a good communicator without listening. She’s probably been the biggest influence. I remember reading a book not too long ago, Kate Murphy called You’re Not Listening. The title of the book was provocative enough, and it really challenged me to think it through. We live in a world of broadcasting and of speaking and telling. We don’t live in a world of listening. So that book was really helpful. It’s more a kind of journey than a light bulb moment. I’ve just come to realize how important it is and that’s probably come through deeper self reflection. I was interested to read in the Harvard Business Review October 2021, I think it was, and there was an article run where some of the top CEOs across America were asked, What’s the number one skill you’re now looking for? Replacement CEOs. The one that came out on top was listening. I was kind of surprised, but also delighted to hear that big companies are recognizing the importance of listening. I don’t think it’s any different in schools.

00:11:04

Daniel: I’d have to check out the article, but to me it’s talking about being responsive and being aware of the issues, the challenges an organization faces and helping people navigate around those. At the end of the day, folks, it feels good to be seen and heard. If you’re not listening, you can’t you can’t give people that gift. Thank you for sharing that. Mark. So moving from listening back to this idea of leadership and being identified. Back in the day, what do you think when you hear somebody say, “I’m not a leader”, What goes through your head when somebody says that?

00:11:48

Mark: I smile and I always want to prove them wrong because I hear that loads, particularly with younger students in schools. I’m not a leader because I’m not confident. I’m not a leader because I’m not as good as him or her. The comparison piece. I’m not a leader because I haven’t got the position. I keep getting overlooked. I’m not a leader because I can’t speak in public. I often hear I’m not very good in front of people, so I do hear it a lot. I try to help people view leadership more broadly than often, I find people are initially thinking about it. It’s something I love to talk about and I love to sort of ask questions to pry into that whole philosophy of, I’m not a leader because I just don’t think it’s true. And I’ve seen some amazing leadership that’s come out of in school contexts that’s come out of people who just needed someone to encourage them, and suddenly they’re having the most amazing influence on other people. And they might have said at the start, Well, I’m not a leader, and they’ve suddenly started leading. So yeah, I find it a very provocative sort of thing that I hear commonly, and I certainly want to try and challenge it if I can.

00:12:53

Daniel: Yes, that’s funny. It pulls you into your calling and helps people see themselves as a leader. Another thing is for you to be able to encourage somebody in that back to connecting some doubt, you have to fully see and hear them right and back to the act of listening and really creating that space for people to to understand how they’ve been created and what their gifts are and to encourage them down that path. So if anyone can lead. Maybe they have those scripts in their head, oh, I’m not comfortable speaking yet or I don’t have the confidence and so on and so forth. How do folks start like what’s an easy win or a first small step for somebody who’s struggling with that?

00:13:39

Mark: I’ve noticed a couple of things that the first would be. I think a lot of the conversation is around who are the leaders and who aren’t the leaders rather than what is leadership. Rather than sticking people into two camps, which is very binary, you’re in or you’re out, let’s talk about what leadership is. If leadership is about having a positive influence, stick your hand up if you want in for that. And that’s the kind of thing I get at school. The other thing is I so often see it’s the small things that make the most effective leaders, not always the grand gestures. I kind of say to someone who says, look, I really want to be a leader or I want to be a better leader. Well, let’s start small. Let’s start somewhere. For me, that starts with knowing yourself, because if you don’t really know yourself, you can’t really take responsibility to lead yourself well and then you’re never going to have a good foundation for leading others. I always say to people, Well, let’s explore, first of all, who you are, who, who you’re wired to be, who you’re created to be, what are your strengths? What are your fears? What are your blindspots? And then let’s lead out of that. And I think that’s a much more authentic leader, because you’re not trying to copy someone, you’re not trying to fulfill a particular leadership stereotype. In a sense, your leadership will be as unique as you are. So let’s celebrate that, and let’s not endlessly compare one leader to another.

00:14:53

Daniel: Think of when you compare yourself to others or you try to mimic them. And I think in the early days it might be okay, right, to mimic people you look up to and that kind of thing. But if you try to fully be them, that’s just a recipe for failure. I remember as a first year teacher seeing this eighth and sixth grade and this eighth grade teacher, he was a former military guy. So had a lot of structure right around this class and students would line up single file before they entered the room. He had these even little, little X’s taped on the ground and they would stand there, silent before coming into the classroom as if they were soldiers. And then I saw them in the classroom and they were all quiet and doing their work. And it’s funny because I didn’t want to be that kind of teacher. I never was like a worksheet guy in rows quiet at your desk. But I couldn’t believe how much order there was within the classroom. I kind of equated that to some like peace and calm to and I exist in this sort of crazy, chaotic, creative type of space. It was always my classroom. So long story short, I tried to be like this guy and taped the Xs and tried to get my sixth grade students, not his eighth grade students like to do the single file in marching and sit in rows. It blew up in my face. It did not work at all. I abandoned that within a week. But my biggest lesson was, don’t try to be somebody else. You’ve got to be who you are and amplify that and really try to find the strengths there instead of being somebody else.

00:16:35

Mark: So absolutely, be like a magpie. Always steal good practice from other people, always watch. Why are they good? How are people responding? Well, I’m always reading. I’m always watching other people in a whole range of industries. How can I keep getting better? That’s very different to trying to be someone you’re not. And I think there’s loads we can learn from other people without having to feel we have to be them. And that’s the sort of delicate balance. If we can strike it, then we’re going to have a really healthy growth mentality founded on a really secure personal identity. And I think that makes for really effective leaders.

00:17:10

Daniel: Absolutely. Well, Mark, I’m enjoying our conversation. We’re going to take a moment to pause here to get a message from our sponsors. When we come back, I want to talk to you about your book.

00:17:23

Mark: Fantastic.

00:17:25

Daniel: Learn how to successfully navigate, change, shape your school success and empower your teams with Harvard Certificate and School Management and Leadership. Get online professional development that fits your schedule. For our upcoming cohort go to BetterLeadersBetterSchools.com/Harvard. courses include leading change, leading schools, strategy and Innovation.

00:18:04

Daniel: Better leaders, better schools are brought to you by school leaders like Principal Gutierrez using Teach FX. Special populations benefit the most from verbally engaging in class, but get far fewer opportunities to do so than their peers, especially in virtual classes. Teach effects measures, verbal engagement automatically in virtual or in-person classes to help schools and teachers address these issues of equity during COVID. Learn more and get a special offer from better leaders, better schools, listeners, and teachfx.com/BLBS. Today’s show is brought to you by Organized Binder. Organized binder develops the skills and habits all students need for success during these uncertain times of distance learning and hybrid education settings. Organized binder equips educators with a resource to provide stable and consistent learning routines so that all students have an opportunity to succeed, whether at home or in the classroom. Learn more at organizedbinder.Com.

00:19:14

Daniel: We’re back with Mark Herbert. We’ve been having a conversation on leadership, which, by the way, is my favorite topic to discuss. Thank you, Mark, for being here, talking leadership with me. I mentioned before the break that we would bring up your book. I’m curious why you wrote a book during the pandemic. I’m right, that’s when you started, I’m Not a Leader. And you said with a big fat red pen, the Not crossed off. It is that everybody is a leader. Why don’t you feel inspired to write a book during the pandemic?

00:19:52

Mark: I don’t really consider myself a writer, and I never set out to write a book. I mean, the short of it is I was laid up on a sofa. I had had ankle surgery from an old sporting injury, and I couldn’t really go anywhere for six weeks. I’m not a writer per se, but at least I didn’t think I was. But I do process by writing, so I started writing down everything I had learned to that point in my life about leadership, and I just really enjoyed it. As it started coming together, some sort of themes emerged and that ultimately became the sections in my book. But I sort of started writing stuff and passed it to a few trusted friends who really encouraged me with it. So I thought, Well, let’s just keep going. Maybe one day this will be useful and I can use it as material and kind of one thing leads to another. What’s really exciting is I’m not a leader and as you say, a big red pen for you. The word not. I was playing on what we discussed earlier that I met a lot of people who say, well, I’m not a leader and I wanted to challenge that assumption. And I don’t think it’s so much about who’s a leader, who’s not, or indeed that everyone is a leader or can be a leader. It’s more there’s leadership opportunity for everyone. And let’s just think about what it means to be really effective in leadership in any particular moment. Know, typically you find a leader who feels because I’m the leader or a leader, I must therefore lead in every moment. And that’s just really unwise because sometimes the best thing a leader needs to do is get out of the way by getting out of the way. Maybe that’s the moment where someone who’s sitting in the background who’s saying, Well, I’m not a leader, can step up and be the leader and actually be more effective because their style is exactly what the moment needed. So I try to write something that really captures that, but write in a style that is really accessible. So the book’s short. The chapters are never more than four pages. There’s lots of pictures and diagrams that really act as punchy little chapters. You can jump in to pick one. It’s like a good dipping book, but also there’s a common thread that hangs through it through six sections that really enable you to kind of get into the book if you want to. It’s great for the person who doesn’t see themselves as a leader because they can find a chapter and say, Hey, look, I need to grow as a listener and read a chapter on listening, or I’m not very good at having that uncomfortable conversation. It’s quite effective for more seasoned leaders who want to equip other leaders, but perhaps don’t have the time to prepare resources. They’re doing it on the job. They can pick a book up. There’s 48 punchy little chapters and they say, well, let me just read one of these with you. What are your reflections? What are your thoughts? That’s the philosophy behind it. I’m really enjoying using it and I hope people will enjoy reading it.

00:22:33

Daniel: I like that moment that you’re painting the picture of, especially because everybody that’s listening to the show time is the biggest constraint and the greatest resource they have. Instead of potentially going out there and finding how am I going to use this to build the capacity of my team, grab your book, punchy chapters. Let’s read this section on listening. Have a quick dialogue about that and it’s going to spark a spark. A flame is what we want and. I also want to highlight what you said, too, that sometimes the greatest thing a leader can do is actually get out of the way. If you haven’t figured this out yet in your Ruckus Maker listening to the show. These learn from my experience as well within better leaders, better schools. I am the chief bottleneck. Ideas come to me and projects come to me to die. Not because I don’t like them or squash them. It’s about optimizing the value I can create and building a team that could support the vision. The more I do on my own, the less we can accomplish as a group and that’s just a lesson I continually get taught on a daily basis.

00:23:51

Mark: Let me tell you, I really agree with that. A little example. Some of the schools I work with in the UK here, we do a lot of sort of experiential learning where I go into a school and we’ll take them to an outdoor activity center and we’ll talk about leadership in the context of I’m actually doing stuff. So yeah, good example. Inner city Birmingham in the center of the UK, a very urban area. We took some of these young people out into the rural, rural places where they did a two day expedition camping, cooking, canoeing. I set them leadership tasks along the way and we did lots of little coaching moments, but this whole thing was highlighted brilliantly where in the planning for this whole two day expedition, the staff and I staff from the school and I was sitting down and I said, So what’s going to happen when they get back from their walk? Then one of the staff said, Well, they’d be quite tired from their walk, won’t they? Let’s make sure we’ve got a nice hot meal ready for them. And they’re thinking about almost spoon feeding these young people. And I was thinking, that’s exactly what we’re not going to do, because if you want to grow leaders, what you need to do is grow people who come back from a long walk and they’re tired and they don’t want to cook an evening meal. Who are the people who are going to step up and serve? Who are the people who are going to go the extra mile to look out for everybody else? And if we constantly take away those moments from young people because we’re spoon feeding them in the classroom or lowering the bar of what we feel we expect of them, then they’re never going to rise to it. Obviously self perpetuating. It’s creating a culture of dependency, a culture of spoon feeding. I challenged these staff and said, We’re not going to do all these things. We’re going to let the young people do it. And interestingly, they’re going to cook dinner for us. And it wasn’t because we wanted to be lazy, it was because we wanted to teach them that leadership requires serving and hard work. And that’s just a little example where there’s been a mindset shift, I hope, in the school of stopping, trying to give everything on a plate. And I think sometimes education does that too readily.

00:25:46

Daniel: The hand-holding or the spoon feed. As you say, that just removes the discomfort and the tension and the challenge where people figure it out and step up and rise to the challenge, which is what leadership is all about. So really, really great points, Mark, in how they encourage the ruckus maker listening to pick up your book. I am not a leader with a big red red dash through the not because you are a leader. I think before I get to my last two questions, you know, we were riffing on the pre-chat about fame and technique and you know, just being able to distill complex ideas into the simplest form. I think that’s a great leadership skill set to have because we’re a chief storyteller within our organizations and we have to influence. One great way to influence people is to tell compelling stories that touch not only the heads, which is nice but the hearts. That’s really where the magic happens and it’s hard to do that if you’re complex and convoluted and all over the place. But if you could get simple in your messaging, the message can land. So is there anything you’d like to add to that, or what’s Mark’s approach to getting a message distilled down to the simplest essence?

00:27:04

Mark: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great point. I think communicating simply and clearly is a real gift. And also it takes real hard work. I always say if you can’t explain something simply and clearly, you haven’t really understood it. Yeah, you know, when I’m working with adults, I often say, imagine speaking that to a nine year old. Would they understand it? There’s no reason to use long, convoluted words and ideas. Just say it in a very simple way that a nine year old will understand. That’s usually a good test, and often I think clarity in communication is as much about what you don’t say as what you do say. So you’ve got all this stuff to say you’ve prepared really hard. Now the discipline is what you strip out to distill it down to the really key points, because when you say too much, you’re really good stuff gets drowned. So it’s best to stay less, but be really on point with what you do. And for me, that’s just real discipline and hard work. You leave 90% of your learning and your thinking on the table and just serve up the very best for that particular moment. You don’t have to give everything you’ve got on the subject, and I think that’s often a common problem for more experienced leaders is the danger of giving too much advice and wisdom because there’s loads to draw on, rather than being really discerning and saying, What does this person do? In this moment I need it. And then I’m just going to say it and shut up and there’s always room for more. So yeah, clarity just comes from simplicity. Say it to a nine year old. Clarity comes from stripping away all the fluff and just focusing on the really key things. And it’s definitely a skill and something we’ve all got to keep working.

00:28:37

Daniel: There’s some I think it quotes from Jessica Jackley who co-founded Kiva, like the microloan organization where I was teaching this delegation master class. The essence of what she said is like choosing what not to do is just as important or maybe more important than choosing the right stuff to work on. And that can be translated to a message as well. Amplifying what you said, right? Choosing not what to say. Right. What to edit out is just as important as what you actually will say. So thank you. Thank you for all of that.  Speaking of simple messages, if you could put a single message on every school marquee around the world for a single day, what would your message read?

00:29:21

Mark: I love this question. It really got me thinking, to be honest. I was thinking I want a different message depending on the context. But you very carefully said one message for every market around the world, and I think for me it would be something like growing leaders for Tomorrow’s World.

00:29:36

Mark: I like it because it’s dynamic. It’s the sense of we’re growing together and it’s ongoing. I look around the world today and we’ve got a few examples of brilliant leaders and lots of examples of terrible leaders, but so much leadership development starts in adulthood, and yet leaders don’t start developing in adulthood. If we can use our time and education to really develop people who will be brilliant leaders for tomorrow’s world, that’s what our world needs. I think if I was to sort of tear up the rulebook in schools, leadership would be right up there as one of the key things I’d like to focus on globally, because I think it’s one of the most influential things for the world at the time we’re living.

00:30:18

Daniel: Brilliant. Let’s say you’re building your dream school, Mark, and in this thought experiment, you have no constraints in terms of resources. You’re only limiting your imagination. So how would you build your dream school and what would be the top three guiding principles?

00:30:36

Mark: Again, I’d like this one. Hey, not having any financial constraints, given that most schools I work in, that’s one of the big things. That’s a struggle. It’s almost impossible for me personally. A few components. I’d love to see more experiential learning, and personally for me that’s more outdoor learning, but not exclusively, but really experiencing stuff and moving from the textbook into real kind of experiencing of the things we’re talking about. I think we can be way more creative in that space. Interestingly, the whole move to during COVID to online learning made me really think and I’ve spent loads of educators on this, that we’re living in a kind of Google age with information at fingertips, and so much teaching is regurgitating what’s in a textbook, what can be Googled. So I’d love to see education be way more flexible, where the information can be gained at an individual’s pace in a style and format that works for them. Is it reading, is it video, is it dialogue, whatever? But the insight to really come through kind of tutorial time and time with the teacher, where can you read your content? Let’s have a discussion about this that’s really developed creativity and thinking.  I’d separate out information and insight and the information from multiple channels for learning stuff. The insight moment is the moment where we really talk and learn to relate around stuff and do some thinking. And I think tied to that would be, you know, let’s rethink how we layout classrooms because the traditional model and you touched on it earlier by sitting in rows with the teacher at the top doing a lot of the talking, it isn’t facilitating everything we want education to be. And yet it’s a model that we’ve persisted with for, you know, for decades, for hundreds of years, really.  I think the third thing, so the experiential, more outdoor learning, differentiating between information and insight. And the third thing I think is more flexible curriculums. My heart sinks when I go into schools, and particularly for certain young people, they’re being pushed into very narrow curricula that have been decided by other people. It’s just not their own interest or a way that they learn and it’s just killing them.  I’d love to think that there could be way more flexibility in pursuing the interests of individuals within a framework of applying what they’re learning and sharing what they’re learning and thinking it through for later in life. If we’re going to grow leaders for tomorrow’s world, for me, these three things would be absolutely vital components, which I’d like to see.  I kind of don’t think that they’re too difficult. They shouldn’t be too difficult. We’re not talking about major changes. Well, they’re major in some sense, but they’re not difficult to change. But for some reason they’re not changing much. So we need more ruckus makers and the work that you and your team are. Doing is brilliant because it’s really enthusing a generation of people who want to make a difference. I commend you for that and want to keep supporting you in it.

00:33:25

Daniel: Thank you. That means a lot. Well, Mark, we’ve had an awesome discussion for sure. And we’ve covered a lot of ground based on everything we talked about today. What’s the one thing you want a Ruckus Maker listening to remember?

00:33:39

Mark: I want to encourage every listener in every young person that you work with or see. There’s those seeds of leadership. And we’ve just got to water those seeds and see what happens. So let’s not write anybody off in a leadership sense because they don’t fit the typical leadership stereotype. There’s so much potential that’s untapped. And, you know, we’d do really well if we can dig into it and really release the potential that lies within so many of our wonderful young people all over the world.

00:34:09

Daniel: Thanks for listening to the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast, Ruckus Maker. If you have a question or would like to connect my email Daniel at better leaders better schools . com or hit me up on Twitter at. @Alienearbud if the better leader is better schools podcasts are helping you grow as a school leader then please help us serve more Ruckus Makers like you. You can subscribe, leave an honest rating and review or share on social media with your biggest takeaway from the episode. Extra credit for tagging me on Twitter and @AlienEarbud and using the hashtag #BLBS. Level up your leadership. BetterleadersBetterschools.com and talk to you next time. Until then, class dismissed.