Now, I’d not really want to serve in Nelson’s navy or occupy
a gun turret on a World War I dreadnought, but the Royal Navy has had a certain
luster for a long, long time, and its greatest leaders—Nelson and Jellicoe,
for example—have something to teach us. The McKinsey piece, by Andrew St. George,
explores a few aspects of the culture that has made the British naval forces a
formidable and stories fighting force since the sixteenth century.
One factor in creating the Royal Navy’s positive culture
with strong values around authentic communication is the encouragement of
banter—easy conversational give-and-take, often humorous or teasing, a game of
verbal badminton that often weaves together the superficial and the essential.
The British style of banter has long crossed frontiers of class and rank, not
transgressively but rather in a way that creates a path for the transmission of
important information when needed. Writes St. George, in the Royal Navy “the practice of “banter”… is … openly encouraged
as an upbeat and informal way to regulate relationships and break down
hierarchy. Banter occurs at all ranks and quite often between them. A Royal
Navy driver will talk more readily to a second sea lord than the average
corporate employee will engage his or her CEO in an elevator.”
Banter of one sort or another tends to characterize life in
schools. As adults we probably don’t hear about 90 percent of student banter,
and of course we know that student banter can escalate into or sometimes
mask—in an ugly and perniciously subtle way—teasing that is truly unkind, and
even outright bullying.
But we can model and encourage “good” banter—the kind that eases the
strains in relationships and helps students learn the critical skill of talking
to adults—by practicing and nurturing it in our classrooms, lunch tables, hallways, and
dormitories and indeed making it the hallmark of our most effective
relationships with students. Banter can be used to gently redirect or focus a
student whose actions have taken a wrong turn, and it can be used to reinforce
and praise without quite awkwardly laying on laurels. Banter can be used to jolly students toward new understandings and insight—and students bantering with
us can push us in all these same directions.
In the summers of my younger days I worked on the food
service and buildings and grounds crews of a number of different
institutions—schools, colleges, and youth service agencies. A somewhat shy kid,
I had grown up around adults who were by and large intellectual and awfully serious,
but in these less academic environments I learned about banter, the joshing and
cajoling and occasional flashes of purposeful sarcasm used by the grown-ups on
these crews to process and occasionally defuse aspects of their workday lives.
Often enough, the endless and often clever banter just made more interesting,
bearable, and even fun the repetitive and not always super-stimulating work
of, say, preparing two hundred servings
of baked chicken, building a new sidewalk, or edging eighteen holes’ worth of sand
traps. The banter made work enjoyable, lightening tasks and
building relationships among the crewmembers that really did cross boundaries
of age, race, and social class.
I remember one young and stern boss, whose seriousness and
idiosyncrasies quickly became fodder for a great deal of banter among us behind his back. At
some point one of the veterans ventured to direct right at him a gentle tease; we all froze, waiting for a harsh response. Instead, the boss teased back, acknowledging his own quirkiness on
this particular subject, and from that point forward the whole crew became more
relaxed and productive—and the boss, having acknowledged a certain
vulnerability but now engaging with the crew as peers on a shared mission (just
in different roles), became much more confident and even easy-going.
As I play back the mental tapes of impressions and memory from
my years in schools, I can attest to the fact that many of the most effective
teachers I have ever had or worked with were inveterate banterers, whose easy
and yet gently and positively provocative conversations with students were the
locus of much of their best work.
These teachers also made great colleagues, whose humor and
generally upbeat approach to life invited colleagues into a positive space,
sometimes working subtexts that nudged the rest of us toward exploring new
perspectives and approaches to our practice or helped build consensus around particular
points of view on school policy.
School culture, then, is every bit as subject to and in need
of the effects of vigorous, openhearted banter as the British Navy. As small
communities striving to knit themselves into a cohesive unit, except in purpose
not so unlike a naval vessel, schools need to foster just the kinds of easy,
open, and positive cultures that St. George claims banter helps create in the
Royal Navy.
If any of Admiral Horatio Nelson’s cadre of young
captains—the Band of Brothers whose victory at Trafalgar the Royal Navy views
as its finest hour—would happily have
taken the bullet that killed their commander in that battle, the record
suggests that their open and easy relationships with one another—at meals, off
duty, and sometimes on deck—were a part of the reason. The love they bore for
Nelson was greatly inspired by his own willingness to be himself among them,
not unlike the good attitude that made my own young boss so successful in the
end. One suspects that this openness was paradoxically not a small source of
the confidence that made Nelson such a decisive, clear-headed leader; he knew
he didn’t have to impress anyone, just organize and inspire them.
This also makes me reflect on how the benefits of banter may
be transferred to digital environments, where the nuances of tone and pitch that so often characterize face-to-face banter may be lost, or reduced to the
paltry explanatory power of emoticons. In my experience banter moves faster
than my fingers can type. But I guess I do engage in banter-esque discourse via
text and even email, and I can imagine that for digital natives e-banter is
probably as easy and common as it was at the dinner table in Nelson’s cabin
aboard HMS Victory.
So, as you wander the halls of your school and poke your
head into its classrooms, be alert for banter, and consider its power. If
you’re a leader, consider how your own willingness to engage in banter—with
everyone in your school—might support not just your relationships but the
strategic work you must organize and inspire. It might not be Trafalgar, but it
is about improving the lives of the children in your care.
