So Brian, you started your career as a teacher in a juvenile corrections facility, can you tell us a bit about that role and what it involved?

Teaching contracts usually go fall through spring and I graduated in December, so there were no real teaching contracts available. I worked in a youth shelter for about three or four months, and then I applied for a job as a teacher in a corrections facility and I didn’t know much about it. But essentially the kids are there for 24 hours, seven days a week, incarcerated six to nine months or longer.

During the day they have classes, but in the classroom you might have a 12-year-old and a 19-year-old and all points in between, and then different learning abilities and styles, obviously mental health issues, and things of that nature. But there’s a group of 13 and you give them everywhere from their general education diploma, to some of them still going to high school, you’re managing the learning, but you’re also managing their behavioural change and their program, which really, the education tends to actually take a bit of a second seat to what they call their ‘program development’, whether that’s getting off drugs, or re-entering the community.

And what was it that made you take on that role? Did you just think ‘I’ll give it a go’?

It was timing, but it was also the fact that I had worked in an at-risk youth home, so it was kids that had been in corrections that were going back out and my job there was not teaching, it was pure program, helping them process cognitive behavioural change, all of the psychology, and I actually kind of fell in love with that part.

Juvenile corrections just allowed me to kind of extend that and get really immersed into the behavioural change and psychology part of education at the time, not knowing it would be something that would be part of what I do for the rest of my life.

How would you say the role shaped your views on leadership?

It was really the idea that the potential for change is in anybody. As was in my TED talk, you can come in with the best idea, you can come up with the best solution, you can know how to solve the individual’s problem, but until they’re on board, none of that matters. And you trying to solve their problem or trying to come up with their answer is actually more about you and less about them.

For me, it was in those roles, really bringing the person out in that whole kind of ‘educo’ philosophy. Really it shaped my view on leadership today, that it isn’t about setting a direction or like I say a lot of times, it’s not about providing a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s striking a fire inside someone so that they can illuminate whatever path they’re going on, on their own.

You realise working in juvenile corrections that you can get the kid to comply in front of you, but what you’re really trying to do is prepare that child to re-enter their community. And so they need to have the skills, the strength and abilities on their own. And to do that, you have to be able to pull it from them, you have to be able to let them see their strength, let them see the things that they do well and grow the belief in themselves, and then all of the other stuff about direction and strategy have a place to become much more relevant.

You gave a TEDx talk in 2018 called ‘What a 15-year-old meth addict taught me about leadership’. It has since had more than two million views. Did you expect it to have such an impact?

No. First of all, I hope it’s had an impact. I’m not sure views and impact are the same. But we joked that there’d be somewhere between 2000 and 5000, and that would just be mostly my friends and family re-clicking on it to help me out. So no, we had no expectation of that and quite honestly, every time I remember when I got to 10,000, and then 20,000 and 100,000 and I just thought, ‘wow, this is interesting’, and all of a sudden it really took off.

For those who haven’t seen it, can you tell us a bit about the talk?

Yeah, the talk we designed as a story, the story of a kid I was working with in juvenile corrections at the time. It’s also a similar story to many instances I had in juvenile corrections. There was one kid Nathan, who sticks in my head pretty specifically, and I was there trying to tell him what to do, trying to tell him where to go, and Sal, another individual that worked with me at the time, who really brought me on to this idea of using questions and the concept of an ‘educo’, which is Latin for ‘to extract from’ or ‘draw without’, which coincidentally is the Latin root of the word ‘education’.

And so the talk is really about the process and how that changed the interaction and as much as it allowed him to say something new, it also allowed me to change my view on him. And so it was this kid’s confidence, this kid’s ability to step into those questions that made me realise my own shortcoming, that there’s a lot to be done, and a lot more that the individual in front of you brings that needs to be utilised, and a lot less of your own expertise that really makes the difference.

OK -  what kind of advice do you give?

It’s really kind of a process of clarifying the goal. So whether I’m working with a leader to help his team clarify the goal or working with the leader themselves to clarify the goal, it’s really about, what is it that we’re trying to create here? Oftentimes, what they’re actually trying to create, the explicit goal, is actually taken over by an implicit goal. So it’s having a really good conversation about what are the values? And what are the goals? And then having a very frank conversation about ‘OK, what are the actions to lead there? And what are the thoughts that will then lead to those actions?’

And in that process, essentially, helping them be a better steward of that, or rather for them to be able to say, ‘Oh, you know, this way of thinking that we have isn’t actually taking us to where we want to go’. And in that case, that’s where, while I’m the coach or the consultant, it’s actually about creating a container for them so I can take myself out of the process.

So it’s not me that’s telling them what they should do or what they should think or how they should go, but helping them create a process where they can see where their own thinking needs improvement or their own behaviour isn’t aligned with what they’re doing, or the goal that they have needs to be changed. And I think really good coaching is about creating the skillset in the individuals to be able to do that with each other. Not just by themselves but with each other on a more consistent basis.

For school leaders looking to create a culture shift among their staff, are there any ‘dos or don’ts’, from your experience?

One of my biggest don’ts, is don’t try to change people. And what I mean by that is, leaders inherently come in with this grand new idea, and say ‘we’re gonna change everything’. And all of a sudden just in that statement, you’ve overloaded the brains of the individuals on the other side, and you’ve also discounted all of the work they’ve done up until that point, you’ve invalidated all of the effort, all of the inputs, not because you did it on purpose, but because you’ve said ‘we’ve got to change everything and move here’.

Well, even if you’re doing a large scale change like big, big transformation, you’re actually generally only changing 10 to 20 per cent in the big changes. The majority of what people do on a daily basis, the majority of their interactions, the majority of even their effort, is going to either stay the same or just be a little bit modified.

And so, we want to really work with the strength that is there, work with the emotions that are there, work with the energy that is there, to then, just as I always call it, ‘find the fire and throw gasoline on the fire’, right? Instead of trying to light a new fire each time, every individual has fire within them, and our job is just to find it, to help grow it so they can see it, and work with them to direct it into the right destination. And I see over and over again, people are just trying to light new fires for other people. You can’t light a fire for somebody else, it’s really just you finding the embers and throwing gasoline on it.