Congratulations on your new role!

Alongside the excitement of the new term, the new year and your new responsibilities, your head will likely be spinning with all the ambitions you have for your new school.

But, first things first, your most important advocates and lieutenants will be the members of your senior team. These are the people that you need to get to know and to nurture; they will be representing you and thus your ‘mouthpiece’ in the staffroom, with the students, with the parents and the wider school community. You will need these individuals on your side, ready to support your vision and your plans and you will need to build their loyalty and empower them to deliver on your vision. Of course, I would also hope that some, if not all, of the team members will prove to be your ‘critical’ friends – we all need them! But, in order for that to happen you need to build a culture of trust and respect within the team. It won’t happen immediately, but the sooner you can build that culture the more successful you (and your team) will be.

It is important to remember that, by the time you arrive, they are likely to be an established team who have worked together over a number of years, albeit they will have had a different leader – your predecessor. You will be the catalyst for change and for a different team dynamic. The members of the senior team will be awaiting your arrival with a certain amount of trepidation. What will their new leader be like as an individual and to work for / with? What is the new leader’s vision and what are their plans?

However much we might all want to rise above the rather selfish ‘what will the impact be for me?’ question, we are all human. Human nature is such that there is often / usually a deep-rooted nervousness about change and the immediate impact on us as individuals. Your team members will not only be wondering what your plans are for the school, but whether their individual roles will change. What will you be like to work with? What changes will you want to make and what will that mean for ‘me’, the team member? What will you want them to prioritise and to do? Will you be open to listening to your senior colleagues?

Whether conscious or sub-conscious, this can result in a deep-seated ‘self-preservation’ agenda for each individual, something that you need to remember and to try and understand, in order to ensure you can build the most successful team for you and for the school.

Build Trusting Relationships

The foundation for ensuring good learning for our students, is in developing the all-important relationship between teacher and student/s. As teachers we all aim to build a classroom culture that enables students to feel confident enough to take risks with their learning and to go the extra mile and achieve even better things.

So, too, with your staff. Building relationships and trust is the foundation for developing a culture of success now and in the future, firstly for and with your senior team and, in turn, for the school. Building a trusting and inclusive culture will help you to execute any current and future change agenda that you might be planning. Inclusive leadership is fundamental to creating a culture where every team member feels valued and heard. 

Assuming that you will have had an opportunity to meet each of the members of your senior team both individually and collectively during your handover, you now want to commence your tenure demonstrating strength and purpose. You want to be able to build their confidence in you as their new leader.

What are the skills and what is the experience that you automatically bring with you to the school and what are your personal values and qualities that make you the right person to lead the school at this time?

I recall an INSET in the early days of my own headship career, during which the facilitators, both experienced heads, encouraged us all to develop four key attributes to smooth our leadership journeys. These were courage, compassion, humility and humour. This was some of the best advice that I had ever received and I have tried to model these attributes ever since. Being inclusive in your leadership will immediately enable you to demonstration empathy and fairness, further building trust within and across the team.

Building trust is critical to ensuring success. Do your team members trust each other, or is this something that you might have to help them build?

By actively seeking out diverse perspectives and encouraging open communication, you will be able to create and develop an environment where diversity of views and opinions is valued allowing all voices to be heard and, in turn, represented in the decision-making process. In this way innovation and collaboration will thrive. This approach not only strengthens trust within the team but also enhances overall team performance and morale.

Setting out your Agenda and Expectations

Meeting the team together and formally, will immediately be helpful for the team members. I would encourage you to use this opportunity to set out your ambitions for the school, your expectations as to how you like to work with your senior team and your initial plans to help you build an in-depth understanding of the school, before leaping into a change agenda. Not only will such clarity be useful, I hope it will also reassure your team members and begin to build trust. As you set out your agenda and expectations, as already shared, it’s important to prioritise inclusive leadership, valuing the diverse backgrounds and perspectives of your team members but actively promoting a culture where everyone feels empowered to contribute.

You might also want to share your wider approach with regard to your plans to meet with them as individuals, how you intend to develop your relationship with the wider staff teams of teachers and support staff, how you hope to engage with students and how you are planning to get to know and to build confidence with the parent body.

In this regard, you might want to consider outlining your 30 and / or 90 day targets and goals. You may want to have shared this with your line manager, (whether that is your Chair of the Board, proprietor, group director or equivalent), ahead of sharing with the senior team.

Be courageous in your ambitions, though know you won’t necessarily get everything right all of the time. Embrace humility, when you realise you might need to change direction.

Remember that flexibility and adaptability are essential for all leaders. Not only are they key 21st-century skills, the likelihood is that you work differently with different people and you will work differently with each individual team member and will need to fine-tune your modus operandi as you get to know the individuals and the school’s different stakeholders separately and collectively.

As I have said above, in order to ensure the success of the new team, with you as the leader, you need to develop trust. So, at the meeting with your senior team, I would encourage you to be as open as possible. Aside from sharing your professional ambitions for the school and how you like to work, tell them something about you as a person. In allowing them such insights, in turn they are likely to feel more open and warmer towards you both as their new leader and as an individual.

Trying to understand the team dynamics will be important for you. Whilst the answer to some of the following questions might have to be ascertained in your individual meetings, it is worth considering and reflecting on the answer to these questions during and after your first meeting as a team.

How have they worked together in the past? Are they able to disagree with each other, albeit respectfully? Is there broad agreement about the direction of travel for the school? Have they each got role clarity? Is there a results and an outcome focus within the team? What experience do they have working together and collectively? Have they had to manage any critical incidents, as a team, and how did that unfold? What roles did they each adopt at that time? Whilst this is likely to depend on the nature of the incident, it will also help provide you with further insights into the team subtleties.

Be mindful that each team member is likely to have a slightly different perspective. And you will need to consider how the team chemistry might change with a new leader.

Individual Meetings – the person behind the role

Once you have met as a collective with a professional focus on your agenda and ambitions for the school, I would encourage you to follow this up with focussed, individual meetings with each of your team members.

Let them know in advance what the purpose of your meetings will be, ie: wanting to get to know them professionally and their views about the school and what is next for the school, as well as wanting to know them as individuals.

Your senior team will be your advocates, or not! So, getting to know and to understand the individuals on your senior team is critical in order to help you understand how best to lead the team and how to manage them each within the team.

How do your new team members’ skills align with their individual roles? What are the motivations for each individual? What are their skills? What individual experience have they each had? Apart from their job descriptions and stated responsibilities, what role do they each play within the team? Are they ideas people, leaders, team builders, pacifiers? Do they get things done or are they more likely to come up with ideas and leave the execution to someone else? Are they ambitious? How do they manage and lead their own teams?

Do their skills mirror your own or are they complementary? Will they be a ‘yes’ person or the critical friend that we all need?

Alongside understanding their professional motivations and skills, getting to know them as individuals is critical. We all value it when people, particularly our new ‘boss’, takes an interest in us as people.

In part, from their CVs (which HR should hold and which you should be given access to) you will be able to develop a picture of each team member’s professional skills, experience and passions. Past appraisals should also be able to help you understand their strengths and weaknesses. However, my advice is not to take it as read. You need to develop a personal professional relationship with each individual and so I would encourage you to meet with each individual and ask them to outline their skills and experience, what they particularly enjoy about their role and what drives them, as well as what their future ambitions might be.

Find out from them what they consider to be the strengths and weaknesses of the school, what is working and what needs attention. Listen attentively but don’t, at this stage, commit yourself to a path of change which you might regret in the future.

Their professional lives aside, ask them gently (you don’t want to appear unnecessarily inquisitive) what they would like you to know about their lives outside school. What might they want you to know about their families? And their interests outside school? Do they have any notified healthcare issues that you should be aware of?

School culture

‘Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast’, is a well-known, and oft repeated, quote from management consultant Peter Drucker. Whilst developing the right strategy is important, Drucker recognised that building a powerful and empowering culture is absolutely fundamental to the success of an organisation.

As head, you set the tone for the organisation and have responsibility for building the culture.

A favourite book of mine, as a child, was ‘The Water Babies’ by Charles Kingsley. Mrs ‘Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By’ being one of my favourite characters. How you work with your team will cascade the culture and the tone that you want your school to embrace and emulate. The school culture might not be where you want it, quite yet, but you need to start somewhere. Role-modelling to your team members that:

  • they are important
  • you value their input, their views and their skills
  • you are a courageous leader
  • you are humble and will accept responsibility for and admit your mistakes
  • you are compassionate and set store by them as individuals
  • you can laugh at yourself and with your staff and your students

will go a long way to starting you off on a successful journey as you embrace the leadership of your new school.

You need to consider the health of your school, the health of your individual team members and, crucially, your own health.

Leadership is vitally important and a privilege. But it can be a roller-coaster of a journey, so it is critically important to have fun along the way and to build a team of trusting and critical friends around you that can help you all achieve your very best professionally and personally and for the school.

Remember to ‘do-as-you-would-be-done-by’!

Good luck and enjoy the role.

Diana Vernon,

Senior Advisor 


Reading:

There are a myriad of educational and organisation leadership books and articles that you can enjoy. I have listed below a few of my favourite books on the topic:

Dr Meredith Belbin – Management Teams – Why they Succeed or Fail

Patrick Lencioni – The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Brene Brown – Dare to Lead

David M Horton – Leading School Teams: Building Trust to Promote Student Learning