Revisiting some traditional leadership techniques could help ease the burden on business leaders when their time is under ever-increasing pressure, says Val Andrew.

Back to basic principles

We are currently experiencing what is described as a ‘re-engineering’ of educational leadership. 

As more schools become academies, form multi-academy trusts (MATs) or join one, changes to staffing structures emerge and leadership roles are changing. 

Add to this mix the fact that many experienced school leaders are retiring or find themselves ‘victims’ of restructuring. 

The relentless quest for more efficiencies and economies of scale has focused the attention on leadership models and structures. The result is different structures, different (often slimmed down) leadership models, some school leaders with less experience and a growing number of leadership challenges: funding, teacher recruitment and supply, curriculum and assessment changes and, not least, increasing workloads. Quite a toxic combination. 

Time pressure 

Most school leaders complain that their time is increasingly pressured. My business leadership colleagues are experiencing additional challenges, especially within MATs that are growing and there is a new focus on what business functionality will look like in various different MAT models. We are publishing a new guidance paper on this later in the year.

The focus on health and wellbeing, both physical and mental, for students, staff, stakeholders and the wider school communities has made me reflect on what can be done to address leadership workload pressures. 

I started my career in the banking sector (back in the days when it was a reputable profession). Fresh out of school, fired up with enthusiasm and determined to achieve the dizzy heights of bank management, I was horrified to be allocated the menial task of printing (personalising) cheque books, delivering the local ‘clearing’ and processing (on a very old computer) the cheques and credits that came over the counter. At the end of every day everything had to balance – if not, we all stayed to help seek out the errors. 

It was very much a culture of team spirit and everyone (including the managers) would roll up sleeves and manually tick items back to resolve an end-of-day balance. This was in effect a very natural culture of delegation that pervaded the organisation in those days. 

While most school leaders engage with the concept of delegation or distributing responsibility, many find it difficult to put into practice. At a very basic level, the barriers are often in the form of: 

• a fear that this will involve additional time and effort in an already time-pressured environment
• reluctance to hand over control to someone else
• concerns that perceptions about your own ability to cope may change
• concerns that someone else will take the credit for something l a fear of losing something you enjoy doing
• A feeling that no-one else can do this as well as you

There’s an interesting concept in Delegation (Management Pocketbooks) by Jon Warner, which suggests that you should think of workload in layers, like those of an onion. At the core are the things that you must do yourself – some aspects of leadership are just not possible to delegate, such as leadership decision-making, strategy and aspects of communication. The outer layers of the ‘onion’ include:

• things you can do, but others could help with
• things others can do and you could help with
• things others actually can do

Distinguishing between these three can often help the process. It doesn’t matter how efficient or accomplished we are, we all have the same amount of time during the working day (and many are working much longer hours). It’s well known that those who are best at their work are often the ‘go-to’ people who end up with unmanageable workloads. 

Build capacity 

The key purpose of delegation or distributing responsibility is to build capacity within our teams and create space to allow individuals to develop their own professional competencies. This links closely to the concepts of succession planning and talent management that are also based on the premise that a school’s most important and valuable resource are the people it employs. 

School business leaders, especially, have a responsibility for succession planning for their profession. Effective delegation can be a powerful way of growing the next generation of school business leaders, which was the theme at this year’s ASCL Conference for Business Leaders (see speeches and presentations, where available, from the conference online at www.ascl.org.uk/bldownloads). 

I know it’s not easy to put into practice and the one thing I learned was that success doesn’t happen by just delegating individual tasks: it’s achieved over a longer period of time by establishing a shared culture within an organisation. 

Admittedly, this has to be based on high levels of trust, where relationships are positive and transparent and discretionary effort is valued. 

The challenges we face in terms of change management in the current environment mean that the odds are stacked against us achieving this but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth trying to re-establish some old methodology that actually works.

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