How The Doctor Got Me My Job

As a Doctor Who fan, I am resigned to the idea that the Doctor will pop up in my life when I least expect it. He's there when I'm not looking for him, always on my shoulder, helping.

When I went for my job in a primary school leading English, I was asked to put together a presentation about Good Leadership, discussing a leader I looked up to and how they might help me in the teaching of English and managing staff. Who could I turn to. Fortunately.

After seeking permission from the Headmaster, I am thrilled to be able to share the following presentation. This is the story of how the Doctor helped me get a job.

A good leader spends a considerable amount of time thinking. We don’t often see a good leader thinking but we do know it is happening. Because when a good leader begins to lead actively, when they greet the masses and put forward their ideas they have done several things:

·       considered the viewpoints of the people they are leading which are often conflicting and made appropriate judgement calls

·       created effective, robust, easy-to-use systems which can be easily explained and generate excitement and anticipation

·       made bold decisions

Leaders make bold decisions. They make bold decisions because they believe in what they are doing. And with their strength of character and enthusiasm - and the strength of their principles and ideas - they can bring others on board; they can engage them in their new ideas and ensure everybody is singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were.

So I have made a bold decision. The leader I have chosen to talk about today is my absolutely genuine hero: Doctor Who. 

Yes, he is fictional. No, there is no such person as Doctor Who. But I have always followed him, since I was three years old, for many, many reasons:

Firstly: The Doctor has no agenda. All he is interested in is doing the best he can, helping people to help themselves and making the morally right, and often difficult choices. When Matt Smith’s Doctor regenerated a few Christmases ago, he gave up three hundred years of his life to save a small village because to leave it would be the wrong thing to do. As Peter Capaldi’s Doctor leaves us this Christmas, he has just given up his life to buy his friends an extra fortnight of theirs. Because he is morally indomitable. Doing the right thing is difficult for a leader given pressures from elsewhere but those who do can be judged, in my opinion, as among the very best.

Secondly: The Doctor solves problems. Not in a knee-jerk, gung-ho manner but with consideration and brains. He can land on a planet where people are oppressed and defeat the oppressors peacefully using his imagination, contagious optimism and a screwdriver. This is a leader who does not pull rank, use weapons or brute force to get what he wants; he is a leader who solves problems with people skills, compassion, invention and shrewdness. 

Thirdly: The Doctor does not work within a framework. If the framework is wrong, he changes the framework. By that token, one could say he was a maverick, and one could argue that schools are not the place for mavericks. But they should aspire to the same philosophies as the Doctor: About treating the children as individuals. About doing what is right by them. About celebrating difference, individuality and imagination. And some frameworks can block those aspirations, reduce the children to numbers. So we can use the framework: to generate information; to find those children who need help. But sometimes, to change the framework, although it may be frightening, is the only thing to do.

In fact, all the things we hope to achieve as teachers, the Doctor hopes to achieve wherever he goes. So much so that I would follow him anywhere. And that ultimately is the mark of a good leader. Someone we want to follow. Someone with a vision that can be embarked on, shared and celebrated.

What is perhaps the most important aspect of the Doctor’s character to me though is the fact that he does not take himself seriously. He takes what he does completely seriously but never himself. And this allows several things to happen: As a leader, he is egoless, he is able to change his mind if a plan isn’t working and allows people to laugh at him when they need to or when, occasionally, even he can make a disastrous decision. But his faith is always placed in the ideas and morals he believes in and he can find the strength to get behind them and enforce them if necessary without ever making it “about him."

Often, as teacher I find myself thinking, “What would the Doctor do?” And he often leads me in the right direction.

JH