In your view, how effective have the government’s education reforms been in terms of their implementation?
My background is within the health sector, so most of my work has been within the NHS, but I work in other sectors too and am currently coaching a primary school head. From my experience, the main challenge primary leaders face is how to bring about the changes they intend to make.
Most research into the effectiveness of change programmes shows that something like three quarters of change programmes fail to complete the objectives they set out to achieve.
Applied to the government’s academy reforms, those aims might be to achieve better and more consistent educational standards. To get there, you make a change that’s intended to lead to that outcome – but even if you’re successful in completing that change, it’s not the same thing as achieving the outcome you originally had in mind.
The challenge for school leaders is that they’re often under so much pressure to effectively implement changes they’ve been directed to make, that they take their eyes off what it was those changes were intended to accomplish. I think there’s a risk that academisation has become an intended goal in itself – achieving academisation therefore becomes the ‘success’ once it’s done, rather than result it was intended to bring about.
If that’s the case, what options are there for changing course?
It’s partly a case of continuing the change process beyond short term wins. All change processes need those short term wins, or else you risk losing people – but once you’ve secured them, there can be a temptation to fixate on the effort it took to get there, the problems overcome on the way and think, ‘Great, we’ve done it.’ Very often, this is the point where change programmes will fail.
The wheel needs to continue turning, so that the changes you’re bringing about get integrated into organisation’s culture and become simply ‘the way we do things here’. I’m admittedly basing this on a small sample, but there is a risk of academisation falling into that trap.
The short term win is gaining academy status; the potential failure is not seeing through the changes that academisation is meant to bring about.
In your book LEAD, you and your co-authors [John Greenway and Andy Blacknell] advise that leaders adopt a growth mindset – can a willingness to embrace risk and learning opportunities be squared with the current accountability system for schools?
One of the biggest challenges for headteachers is that they’re held to account in a system that’s more of fixed mindset than a growth mindset – the pressure is top down and there’s little scope for personal freedoms. But the effective leader doesn’t pass that on. The effective leader will absorb that, hold it in themselves but behave in a different way with those they’re leading.
The least effective leaders will be those who simply pass on that pressure and those demands without thinking about how they can enable, empower and develop people’s ability to achieve them, rather than simply demand that they do.
The skill in doing that is where the growth mindset comes in. Yes, you’ve got to measure outputs – but you also need to think about what inputs will lead to those outputs. You can then measure, encourage and reward those inputs and behaviours. If you only measure the outputs, and effectively turn a blind eye to how they’re achieved, that’s when you risk fostering a culture of bullying to the long-term detriment of the organisation.
Schools have been increasingly encouraged to adopt more ‘businesslike’ practices – are there any that should be part of the conversation but currently aren’t?
I believe there’s a lot of good practice in the private sector that the public sector can learn from – having more of a ‘business ethic’, focusing more on outcomes and taking a longer term approach are things I think we’re starting to see more of in the public sector, though I’ve seen it work well and I’ve seen it work badly. Very often that’ll be down to the interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence of those overseeing how they’re implemented.
However, I think there’s a tendency for the public sector to get the message from government and elsewhere that ‘You need to be more like the private sector’, which belittles public sector leadership.
How about the reverse – what can business stand to learn from the public sector?
In many ways the public sector has been much more centred around values-based leadership, which is something that’s very much in the ascendancy in all the textbooks and the broader language of business. It’s not an entirely new thing – like much else, it goes in cycles – but what’s meant by values-based leadership is a kind of core belief that if we get behaviours and attitudes right, the rest will follow.
You wouldn’t necessarily think of someone like Richard Branson as being a values-based leader, but he’s long advocated that we should put staff first rather than customers, because by doing that the customer will get what they want.
It’s an approach that’s working in the health service. A number of health organisations are now stating that their primary aim is to get the staff experience right. Patient care is their bottom line, of course, but by focusing on the staff experience, the patient care experience will follow.
How should leaders win over staff who are wary of big organisational changes?
If you have a whole group of staff who are sceptical of the change process you’re trying to bring about, you’ll need to think first about whether that change process is actually the correct course. Generally speaking, a whole group of staff going in one direction conveys a message you need to listen to.
But in other cases, the solution concerns motivation. That motivation will come through having a clear vision that you as a leader need to set, while involving staff in how to achieve that vision, rather than micromanaging or dictating how it should come about.
Again, this is where the effective leader will absorb the pressures from above, be it from government or other scrutinising organisations. Their task is to enable staff to own the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the change process for themselves. That’s where I’d start.
Career timeline
1976
Joins Downs Way School upon relocating to the UK from Peru, aged 8
1991
Graduates from University of Southampton with honours degree in philosophy and theology
1994
Joins local pay intelligence unit of a regional health authority and develops an interest in consultancy
2000
Having served as HR director in a hospital trust, sets up an NHS consultancy
2006
Founds Kairos Consultancy Ltd – named after the ancient Greek word for ‘time of opportunity, time of change’
2013
Meets friends and future colleagues and co-authors John Greenway and Andy Blacknell
LEAD: 50 Models for Success in Work & Life by John D H Greenway, Andy Blacknell and Andy Coombe is available now, published by Capstone; for more information, visit kairosconsultancy.co.uk or follow @AndyCoombe.
