Leadership Lessons

Title Page of Samuel Clarke's Latin Iliad (published 1729)

What does it say about an organization or business, a school or a church, a team or a group, when its best people start leaving?  

My second-year Latin students have been reading selections from Samuel Clarke's 1720 Latin translation of the Iliad.  They had previously learned some of the rudiments of Greek and had just finished reading parts of Julius Caesar's account of his war in Gaul.  By diving into a Latin translation of the Iliad, a war poem originally written in Greek, they were able to bring both of those strands together.  Among the many themes and ideas that can be drawn from this roaring adventure story are lessons in leadership.  In fact, the entire epic could be read as a case study in leadership styles, but one key thing leapt out recently as we discussed the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles in Book 1.

Upon learning that the plague in the Greek camp outside Troy had been caused by Agamemnon's capture of a Trojan girl who was the daughter of a priest of Apollo, Agamemnon was persuaded to return her to her father.  He demanded, however, that one of the other Greek soldiers replace his lost war prize with one of their own captured Trojan women.  Achilles found this intolerable, arguing that each warrior had won his spoils of war fairly and should not be forced to give up anything.  Set aside for a moment the moral issue of taking human slaves as war prizes and notice what happened next.  When Agamemnon retaliated against Achilles and his defense of the soldiers' spoils by threatening to taking Achilles's own slave woman, Achilles replied,

νῦν δ᾽ εἶμι Φθίην δ᾽, ἐπεὶ ἦ πολὺ φέρτερόν ἐστιν

οἴκαδ᾽ ἴμεν σὺν νηυσὶ κορωνίσιν....

Nunc itaque abeo in Phthiam: quoniam multo melius est,

Domum ire cum navibus rostratis....

Now, therefore, I leave for Phthia, since it is much better

To go home with my beaked ships....

Achilles was far and away the greatest of the Greek warriors in the Trojan War.  No warrior worthy of the name would leave the fight, but here was Achilles himself willing to pack up and head for home.  It was a question Agamemnon would have to deal with over the course of the Iliad, but it brings up a point that my students and I discussed.  When good, qualified people start to leave, leadership needs to start asking the hard questions of itself.

The most recent in an endless series of articles about teachers leaving education is one in The Wall Street Journal, which talks about companies that are snatching up educators who are, like Achilles, leaving the fight.  Unfortunately, the article makes only one brief reference to "dealing with challenging...administrators" as a cause for the teacher exodus, yet I would argue that it is one of the primary reasons for it.  Several years ago I wrote a piece titled "Bad Administrators Are Killing Education," and little has changed.

To give you an idea of how the leaders of an organization set the tone and influence their employees, consider the following email from my current principal to his staff regarding the cancellation of school for inclement weather.  After laying out the details and discussing what we needed to do with our students, he concluded, "Last, but not least, enjoy your time at home.  God must have thought we needed a break."

You do not need to be a person of any faith at all to recognize the generous humanity in his comment.  And what did that inspire in me?  It made me want to share that generosity of spirit with my students, so when I messaged them about assignments to be completed during our time away from school, I added, "Most importantly, call to mind these words from Roman poet Horace in Ode I.9.1-6.

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum

Soracte nec iam sustineant onus

silvae laborantes geluque

flumina constiterint acuto?

Dissolve frigus ligna super foco

large reponens...

Do you see how Mt. Soracte stands gleaming

With deep snow and the struggling forests

Do not sustain their burden and

The rivers are frozen with sharp ice?

Melt the cold as you place upon the hearth

A large stack of wood...

As I work on other school matters during this snow day and drink a cup of Earl Grey, I cannot help but think that if Agamemnon had been more like my principal, Achilles would have stayed.  I am quite certain that if more building and district level leaders in education followed his model, we would not be facing quite so sharp a crisis in education.