TLP: Kevin Bartlett, The International School of Brussels

What comes to mind when you think of Belgium?  Chocolates, waffles, or beer? Maybe Brussels sprouts.  For someone, like myself, who has worked in SE Asia most of my career, Belgium seems like a far off exotic place where trains arrive on time, the streets are clean, and it gets cold enough to wear a sweater.  After my talk with Kevin Bartlett, Head of School at the International School of Brussels, it might be more accurate to think of leadership, at least in international schools.  While most schools realize that leadership consists of more than the three or four people that occupy the front offices, in my experience, not many schools do anything to develop the school’s less public leaders.  Recognizing this gap in development Kevin and his team at ISB, have pushed for common training and leadership development for the many various leaders in the school.

Developing leaders is valued so highly that they’ve even incorporated it into their strategic goals.  Goal number two reads, “All of our outstanding teachers are motivated, retained and developed. Middle-level leaders are fully effective in leading towards the ISB vision.  The school has re-designed its leadership and career development system, and now provides full leadership training for all faculty team leaders and mentors.  Job expectations and compensation have been re-structured to reflect the greater emphasis on the importance of faculty leadership and mentoring.”  If this seems like a big goal, it’s because it is, but I was lucky enough to hear from Mr. Bartlett about how this is being acted out, as well as what has helped in his own development and inspiration as a leader.

(If not specifically quoted, Mr. Bartlett’s responses to these questions have been paraphrased)

When and why did you decide to step into leadership?

“I was never planning on becoming anything other than a football player or rock [star], but for me it was just the right opportunity at the time.” 

I think like most leaders, what pulled me in was the opportunity to create change.  “If you’re one of those people who like to analyze systems and see ways they can be [implemented], or think they see ways to improve them…if you keep saying things like that, eventually you say, ‘oh screw it,’ I’ll have a go at it and do it myself.”

Much of my career has been asking the question, ‘why do we do it that way, and is it effective?’  “[I think] the greatest [leaders] are the ones who stand up and want to fix a problem that no one else realizes is a problem.  I think a lot of people end up [stepping into leadership] because they can see…how things can be better.”  Then once you’ve created a solution “it’s important [to take the time] to analyze whether it works.”

What’s been most fundamental in your development as a leader?

Like many, I think my career has developed and evolved from one place to another.  It’s really been a number of “slow hunches.”  “[First] I got a philosophy degree, but it didn’t seem to have any use at the time.  Then I was failing at everything until I was a student teacher at a very progressive school in London.”  As time went by all the various piece of my experience have come to fit together nicely.  Of course it always seems to make more sense in hindsight, but was less clear as it was happening.

An additional part of my development has come from “thirty years of fairly intense thinking…a lot of what we do [as school leaders] is to think about our work…As Bill Gerritz [Head at IS Bangkok] would say, ’it’s all about the learning’.”  A focus on learning has been a really important shift in my thinking and what I always push at Brussels.  It seems so basic, yet so many schools seem to have no intentional understanding of what is effective learning. “[If you asked a group of educators to] remain standing if you believe that your purpose is to improve learning, everyone stands.  Then if you ask if your institution has developed a clear common definition of learning that drives every single thing your organization does, everybody sits down.” 

What specific set of skills do you bring your position at ISB?

“My natural inclination is to see patterns, and try to make them reality.”  I think I have the ability of taking things that don’t necessarily work and making them better.

 I’m naturally philosophical and very introverted but that doesn’t always work well for a school leader so my learned skill, “is to be more proactive at approaching people…and learning how to talk to more kinds of people.”

As stated in your second strategic goal, ISB has worked to develop it’s mid-level leadership, how and why did you decide to do this?

“[We realized that] the engine room of change is not through the senior leadership [at the school], but through the next level of leadership (department heads, etc).”  Once we realized this “I said here’s an idea, [how about] we train everybody…[because] I think it would be better if we’re trained and used the same language.”

“We developed the leadership skills around simple ideas, [for instance the difference between management and leadership]…”Afterward, one of my colleagues came to me and said, ‘I just realized I’ve been doing 20 years of managing and no leading’… “Of course recognizing that we need to do both, but knowing there is a difference between the two.”

As for the compensation, we realized that “teachers are not extrinsically motivated…so we mandated the course.  We can’t have some people who have been trained and speak a common language and other’s who don’t.  So [we said] here’s the deal, you have to come back permanently a week before everybody else…we’ll double your stipend and we’ll pay for your PTC training.”  We also compensate our teacher-leaders, not on performance pay, but for participating in the training programs.  The great thing is that are teachers didn’t complain about it at all, instead they said ‘yeah, that seems to make a lot of sense.’

What inspires the work you do at Brussels?

Our mission states, everyone included, everyone challenged, and everyone successful.  Now I know that in many schools the mission statements can be pretty pointless or serve no real value, but at ISB we’ve tried to keep it really simple and line all of our actions up against it.  As an example we have very competitive sports teams that result in less people competing on varsity teams, so we revamped different sports we offered so that more people can be included.  It gives every child the opportunity to participate

“One of my favorite sayings is, have a clear sense of purpose that gives rise to complex intelligent behaviors, not complicated rules and regulations that give rise to stupid, simplistic behaviors.”  Obviously are mission is easy to say but to accomplish takes a whole lifetime..

What’s your greatest priority when choosing teachers or administrators for ISB?

“Intelligence…[we want to] hire smart people, that’s what we look for, more than experience and more then qualifications, although we value both, especially experience…[Also] people who care as much about learning as we do and who are smart and quick learners.”

Does location work against you in Brussels?  Do you feel like your missing out on a certain kind of teacher (maybe they can’t afford Europe)?

“We don’t have that much turnover, so we’re never looking for that many teachers.  Honestly what tends to happen is we have a lot of teachers who say…’we’ve done are research, we’re only looking at two schools…and we’ll stay where we are unless we are offered a position at one of those schools.”  I think because of the tax situation here and the weather, we’ve set out to attract teachers here that see what we’re doing and know they want to be a part of it.  “We get the kind of people who want to grow and learn and are pretty obsessive about the business [of education].”

What advice do you have for the next generation of international administrators?

“When you have a spare moment go and sit under a tree and ask yourself these two questions, ‘why lead, and would anybody want to be led by me?’  When you have satisfactory answers you’re probably ready for the job.”

“I think people need to know for themselves why they lead.  For me the fun is having the idea and having the power to make it happen…but if you’re not a guy who wants to make things better or doesn’t like the challenge to live up to that, then it’s really not the right job for you.”

“Have at least one other passion apart from the job…it also leads to the transfer of good ideas across disciplines.”