At the primary school where I’m chair of governors we are planning to recruit a new headteacher.  As you might expect, governors started by clarifying where we want to take the school in the future.  With thanks to my friend and ex-colleague Jim Laing  who prompted this question, I asked: what is the greatest threat to society today?  There were many, so I asked ‘which of those can we address in school?’ I suspect, given long enough, we would have been able to tick them off one by one.  We talked about self-worth, relationships and respect, breakdown of faith, amongst other things.  We might have added critical faculty, confidence,  love of learning, commitment to values and values-based education.  As governors, we have the privilege and the responsibility of setting the strategic direction of the school. If we fulfil our role effectively, what matters to the school will matter to the children.  We talk about primary schools having a role in putting in place the foundations.  Do we know what happens when our children arrive in and leave secondary school?  Not enough, is my answer.  Governors could and should be asking that question.  As the national education agenda demands that we work more closely with other schools, we have the potential to grow that influence: we could work with other primary and secondary schools, so that children have a consistent message from the age of two to 18.

As is often pointed out, we have the children for a very short time, so we need also to work with parents and families.  More importantly, though ‘No-one spends longer with children than they spend with themselves’ was a chance remark by a friend, which has stayed with me.  The new national standards of excellence for headteachers   describe governors as ‘guardians of the nation’s schools’.  By implication then, we are guardians of the nation’s education.  As a board of governors, have you a corporate view of what education is for?

In every school there will be a different balance between the focus on academic results and the pressure to achieve them.  It’s relatively easy for me: it’s not my job on the line if our academic results are not where we expect them to be.  In holding our headteacher to account, perhaps we should also be holding ourselves to account for the impact we are having, not just on this generation of staff and students, but on their children, and their children’s children.

Last month I visited York Minster.  It took 250 years to build. Perhaps those who laid the foundation-stones feared that their work would be in vain. They could not know what their legacy would be.   All we can know today is that over five or six generations the vision was strong enough to overcome all the barriers they faced so that – despite the more recent challenges  – the building still stands.   If we as governors embrace the opportunity to shape a society based on acceptance of difference, perhaps not in my lifetime, nor in my children’s, nor possibly in their children’s, but before the end of time, love will overcome fear.

The post Terror in Paris: what can schools do? first appeared on Chrysalis Leadership Development.

‘Think of  a reservoir high in the mountains of central Wales.  At one end of the long submerged valley is a dam with the technology to control the flow of the water.  The rest of the lake is the most evocative and powerful combination of natural features – rock, trees and water  …  All around the lake are small rivers and streams flowing down from the surrounding hills.  In many ways I see this scene as a metaphor for the inner-life of transformational leaders.

Each working day school leaders have to draw on their personal reservoir – on some days a steady flow will suffice, on other days the floodgates have to be open as energy, compassion, creativity, optimism, courage and hope are called on.  The deeper the reservoir, the more can be given, but eventually even the deepest reservoir will begin to run low.  A period of drought can transform a rich reserve into something arid and barren, incapable of nurturing and sustaining growth … ‘
from Rethinking Educational Leadership, West-Burnham, 2009

I was working with a headteacher.  ‘My resilience is low’ she said.  ‘I know I haven’t been looking after myself as well as I should, but there’s just been so much on’.  I have worked with this headteacher regularly over the past year.  At the heart of all she does are the needs of her pupils and staff.  Perhaps that’s part of the difficulty: they’re in her heart rather than in her head.  We have talked about her taking time out – and to be fair, she has put aside some time to work with her coach (not myself).  In many cases, though, time out of school has been with like-minded colleagues, most of whom ‘know’ that at this stage of the term, it’s ‘normal’  to be flat on the floor with almost no energy to get through the last 2 weeks.  What a year it’s been: at least 2 Ofsted frameworks; changes to the National Curriculum; the sudden and unexpected introduction of free school meals for children in Key Stage 1 (and who saw that one coming?); changes to the special educational needs code of practice; changes to assessment; reduction in staffing in other agencies leading to increased pressure on schools; and increased pressure on school budgets with more to come.   The pressure inevitably builds on the headteacher, particularly in primary schools, where the head may be the only person not in front of a class.

For possibly the past 5 years, at this time of year, headteachers I’ve spoken to have said ‘I’ve never known a year like it; it’s just been so full on’.  How many of them, I wonder, have increased their investment in themselves?

Last week, at the University of Worcester Festival of Leadership Learning we listened to Floyd Woodrow talk about elite leadership.  Given the audience where ‘elite’ often means ‘privileged’ and ‘better resourced’ I wondered how everyone would react.  What I took from his explanation of the term, however, is that we can all work to reach elite status, given  motivation, drive and practice.  The elite perform exceptionally because they practise.   Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers tells a similar story.  Those at the top of their game, whether in the field of sport, music, or battle: all practice.  Gladwell talks about practising for 10,000 hours. Leaders are no different.  Floyd talked about training your mind: drilling it, to prepare for the unexpected.    If you want to move from the transactional to the transformational as a leader, you need to be prepared to invest in yourself.

Headteachers have it tough.  High accountability, high profile, working in a system that expects them to fix society, where (as we discussed afterwards) if you get it wrong, you can quickly forfeit your career.  Floyd held the attention of 50 headteachers for 2 hours.  In the world he referred to, it isn’t just your career you forfeit if you get it wrong, it’s your life – and potentially that of many others.  It doesn’t get tougher than that.

He talked a lot about building resilience.  In a small group conversation afterwards we confronted the reality of what that means.  It means practice.  Practice is what builds new neural pathways; it’s what moves us from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

When I was asked to run a 2-hour session which would result in headteachers recognising when they are stressed and doing something about it, I politely (I hope) pointed out that it takes more than 2 hours to effect behavioural change.  You cannot build resilience with the ‘sheep-dip’ approach.  It takes time, commitment and practice.   Next term I shall be working with a headteacher and his senior leaders on developing emotional resilience for school leadership.  It’s a year-long programme.  As a leader of learning, he recognises that embedding learning takes time.  As leaders, we need to listen and attend to our own needs.  The alternative is to project them on to others so that we can take care of them, and risk infantilising our colleagues, and exhausting ourselves at the same time.

I challenge you to finish next school year with something in reserve.  To do that, you need to plan and practise.  Do something each week which will support your resilience.  Resilience is intensely personal.  Only you know for sure what supports and undermines your resilience, so do more of the former and less of the latter.  If only it were that simple…  You have to be prepared to invest in yourself.  More about that anon.  For now, consider some of these behaviours that might help you in building resilience.

The post Topping up your resilience reservoir first appeared on Chrysalis Leadership Development.

We congratulate ourselves on being able to do fifteen things at once as though one life on its own isn’t sufficient: we need to be living two or three to get our money’s worth.   Media messages have to be instantaneous. According to statistics the average attention span in 2012 was 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000.  Seventeen percent of web users spend 4 seconds or less on a webpage.

In schools, teachers have to be more and more creative and insightful to engage the attention of their students.  If you haven’t caught them in the first 12 seconds, they’re off somewhere else – and that’s only the majority.  If you have students with a shorter-than-average attention span in your class (and who hasn’t?) even if the majority are ready to concentrate for longer than 12 seconds, their attention will be diverted if something or someone distracts them.

Isn’t it time we challenged this ‘faster and more is better’ assumption?  While technology has made it possible for google to find 28,300,000 matches for ‘go slow society’ in only 0.59 seconds, our brains do not equip us to respond to requests so quickly.  I can’t pretend I’ve got this cracked, but I am at least aware of the need to make changes to a life that’s feels as though the only way I can get to the bottom of my list of things to do is not to sleep for 72 hours.

Three things happened in the last week or so that made me question the way we are living our lives.  All of them involve schools.

I decided to take myself in hand and attend a mindfulness course in the hope of improving my concentration, learning to listen to my physical needs and stop living half my life on auto-pilot.  We were being encouraged this week to stop twice or three times during the day to spend two or three minutes just noticing what is happening ‘right here; right now’ as the saying goes.  The idea is to pause and re-centre ourselves, to be aware of everything that is happening, rather than blocking out or fighting the inconvenient thoughts, feelings or sensations.   The teacher in our group was looking uncomfortable.  She really didn’t know how she could fit that in on a work day, and when I remembered my recent visit to a school, I could completely understand her difficulty.  It was lunchtime, and while some teaching staff were in the staff room, others whooshed through the corridor, picking up coats as they went, grabbing a sandwich en route (or not even doing that) and rushing off to supervise a lunchtime club.  Not a second to ‘waste’; not a moment to take stock of their own needs before the start of afternoon school.

The second event was at a recent conference run by AMDIS.  One of the delegates commented that her headteacher had initiated something called (I think) ‘The Calm Option’ on a Wednesday afternoon, designed to give space to those who signed up for it.  What an enlightened headteacher!  Compare her with the one described to me in the third encounter that’s made me stop and think:  a friend who has recently started a new job in the office at a primary school told me ‘It’s really full on. We just don’t stop.  Lunch-hours are for wimps, apparently – that’s what the headteachers says’.

Some schools teach their students resilience.  Mindfulness is also becoming known and practised in schools.   It would be good to think that the practice extends to staff and that their need to refresh mind and body at regular intervals is taken into account, but I fear that the headteacher spoken about at the AMDIS conference is in the minority.  I suspect (and hope) that the ‘lunchtime is for wimps’ head is also in the minority.  I’m also aware how difficult headteachers find it to stop for just 5 minutes at school, rather than darting from one thing to the next, never taking breath.  The new headteacher I encountered on a resilience programme I ran,  told us that her role was not really proving nearly as challenging as she’d imagined.  Only later it emerged that she didn’t stop to  eat during the school day, and when she got home in the evening her usual dinner was a bowl of breakfast cereal.    There was apparently nothing unusual or worth questioning in that practice.

If this sort of behaviour doesn’t seem unusual or unhealthy to headteachers, what message  are they giving to their staff, who have even less opportunity to pause if they are in front of children all day?   What is this frenetic pace modelling to the next generation?  Is this the way we want to educate our children?  Teachers sometimes get frustrated when they discover that students are doing their homework while playing computer games over the internet, chatting to friends on Facebook and setting up a meeting by text.    And yet is it really so different from the way most of us live our lives, rushing from one thing to another without ever stopping to check whether our bodies feel okay about it?  When we finally notice their protest (a suspected heart attack in the case of one headteacher I worked with) how many of us keep going anyway, telling ourselves ‘we just need to get to the end of the day, week, month’ – whatever time span that promises to relieve us from the tyranny of deadlines.  The truth is, that’s never going to happen unless we take control.  We need to stop running so fast.  Running will only get us to our final destination more quickly, and what’s more, we won’t even be aware of what happened on the way.

I’m with Mary Oliver

When it’s over, I don’t want to end up wondering if I have made of my life something particular, and real … I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

The post ‘In schools, lunch-hours are for wimps’ first appeared on Chrysalis Leadership Development.

 The sun is streaming in the window at the back of the hall.  The school staff are smiling,  suntanned and relaxed,  bearing witness to the long days of summer sun.  What a different energy from the one I felt in this room 3 short months ago.  We are here to look forward to the coming year, determined to hang on to all that is special about this school, in the face of the challenges and opportunities of a new school year which includes the start of a 2-year re-build and whatever new initiatives Mr Gove identifies next.  For me, this is the culmination of 9 months’ work supporting this school to re-define its values.  I had offered the headteacher the use of the Barrett Values Centre’s School Values Assessment (SVA) as a means of helping to address some of the anxieties in the system which she defined as

• conscientious teachers worried about being observed, in case they were found wanting;
• staff feeling intimidated by some parents, so that parents’ evenings were becoming a source of anxiety;
• some negativity and rumblings among the staff behind the scenes, which the head was finding it difficult to flush out.

The Values Centre’s School Values Assessment survey is a disarmingly simple and potentially extremely powerful instrument.  We all know that work is more rewarding when our work allows us to live our values.  It asks 3 simple questions

1.  What are your top 10 personal values?
2. What are the top 10 values you experience in school?
3. What top 10 values should the school now focus on to move forward?

The results provide leaders with a systematic means of evaluating the climate of the school and providing the gateway to a powerful dialogue about things that really matter, which underpin excellence in learning and teaching – and frequently remain hidden.

The first feedback on the results of the diagnostic to the SMT was puzzling. While the leadership team congratulated themselves on the good match across the three categories closer scrutiny revealed some hard messages.  One group of staff was having a different experience of the culture from another, and it wasn’t so positive.  Later I fed back to the whole school.  There was no point in hiding the hard messages: those who experienced the culture most positively were upset to think that their experience wasn’t universal.

We kept focused, knowing that acknowledging that people had different experiences was the first step to understanding and addressing what was happening.  The unspoken negativity had risen to the surface for the first time   The ‘elephants in the room’ had been acknowledged.

In the third session I posed the question ‘what are we NOT talking about?’.  People were encouraged – anonymously – to express the inexpressible and together to talk about how – as a school – they could address such difficulties.  It was as emotionally draining as it was necessary.  While they had had to face difficult issues, they had talked about them. As an outsider,  I could see what wasn’t evident to those who were viewing the picture in close-up: that there were subliminal messages in the culture which could account for the different experience of different groups of staff.  In the SMT we talked about system changes which could help.

The ‘desired culture’ helpfully included a call for ‘shared values’.  Starting with the 10 values which had originally been identified by the whole staff as representing the desired culture (several of which they were already experiencing), we spent the day honing them down to 5 which they felt essential for the coming year.  Most importantly, they spent time agreeing definitions, identifying what that value would look like in practice, and what they individually and collectively, needed to do to grow the value.  I overheard discussions about the difference between teamwork and co-operation; there was a lively debate about what ‘open communication’ means, and evident agreement about ‘passion for learning’.

The dialogue which resulted from the headteacher’s courage in starting this journey has led to a new level of trust and confidence amongst colleagues. They have articulated shared values.  which are beginning to be understood by all.  Next time, I hope they ask children, parents, and governors, too.

The post Values, not rules first appeared on Chrysalis Leadership Development.

I’d travelled for close-on 3 hours by now, making a conscious decision to take the walk from my house to the railway station slowly, noticing the bright blue sky and wispy clouds – a breathe of Spring and new life. The service was due to start at 1.00 and I judged that I had time for a coffee in the Comfy Pew before joining the mourners. There were many of them, but Gloucester Cathedral is huge and they would undoubtedly have prepared for a crowd.

I take a seat at the window, thinking I might see someone I know as they pass. The magnetic force is strengthening as more and more and more people pass: youngsters in green and gold; young men in suits; girls in short skirts, their long hair flowing, chatting animatedly: our hope for the future; Larry’s hope for the future. Older women, couples, colleagues in dark suits and ties, families. A mother pauses to adjust her daughter’s uniform. The Comfy Pew is filling up. I’m drawn to engage in conversation with others who are obviously going to the funeral. When I do, everyone has a tale to tell of how Larry touched their lives and the lives of others they knew.

12.20pm now, and I’m wondering whether I was hasty in thinking that seating in the cathedral won’t be a problem, as I join a queue waiting to enter. There are already 1000 inside, we’re told. I meet a priest who has travelled from the Suffolk coast, who knew Larry when he was a deputy in Norfolk, 30 years before. A former science teacher who trained at Larry’s school shares her story, her broad smile stiffening occasionally as she struggles to control her emotion.

When I finally reach the cathedral there are already people standing in almost every available space. The only free seats have ‘reserved’ on the block. Someone points out to me that a seat is available. Like a driver finding the last parking space, I make a dash for it without checking whether anyone else has also identified it as theirs. then feel slightly embarrassed by my haste; only after I am seated do I look round and justify my privilege by my age in comparison to that of others sitting round me.

Thirty minutes now until the service is due to start and I discover that my neighbour is someone I have often spoken to on the telephone. She has worked closely with Larry for over twenty years. ‘He would have been amazed by this’ she tells me ‘He was always so humble. He didn’t know the impact he had on others’. I know this to be true. Ten minutes before the service, and the murmur of voices is hushed by the school choir’s rendition of the Taize chorus ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ The rise and fall of the harmony seems to lift our friend gently to the Lord as the solo flute accompaniment announces his arrival at the gate of heaven.

The mood changes as the service starts. Somehow, it seems, those waiting outside the cathedral have managed to squeeze in, despite literally thousands arriving before them. The funeral procession arrives to the joyous sounds of ‘Shine Jesus, shine!’, accompanied by the band: saxophone and drums give their all. Though there must be many who, like me, struggle to keep emotion from their voices, I can also hear the commitment described later in the service by the chair of governors, who refers to a recent occasion when Year 7s encouraged each other at a rugby tournament: ‘Come on; let’s do it for Larry’.

‘Doing it for Larry’ was a result of the loyalty and commitment he inspired. I had the great privilege of working with him on his first and several subsequent programmes when facilitating the national Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers. His passionate commitment to young people inspired me and those we worked with. He managed to combine joy, fun and laughter with a relentless drive for the best possible outcomes for students. We kept in touch, and it was typical of him that he agreed to be an interviewee for some research I was conducting recently. When I emailed to double check he was still up for it, I had the response ‘I am looking forward to it as I hope to discover more of my deficiencies’. False modesty? I don’t think so. He had a great capacity for sending himself up, even when the effects of his cancer treatment turned him into ‘a gargoyle’ as he put it to me once, commenting that it was an appropriate challenge to his vanity.

When we met he talked about the school focusing on ‘the dignity and respect of all people’ and the need for integrity in the organisation. He is the only headteacher I’ve ever heard speak of students being ‘prepared to work with us to achieve their potential’. A much more common notion is that the school works with the students. Larry knew that the school needed to gain students’ respect and never took that for granted. If a relentless drive for higher achievement did not first embrace the principle of ‘dignity and respect of all people’ he wasn’t interested.

At his funeral, his son’s moving tribute included the comment that the school ‘was never about him’. He had a high profile locally and nationally, and no doubt some people thought this was driven by a need to be noticed. He didn’t mind if people disliked him because of that; he knew it wasn’t true. His only concern was to gain the best education for all; he was so clear about his purpose, that it over-rode any concern to be popular. The only concern he expressed to me was that his making himself unpopular might have a negative impact on the school.

Possibly the last time we met, which was before his successor at St Peter’s was announced, we talked about how the school community would cope when he retired. He had already indicated that what he would miss most was being with the ‘young people’ as he always referred to them (with the accent on ‘young’) and seeing talent flourish. I suggested that the whole community would need to go through a time of mourning his departure – aware, even as I spoke – of the prophetic parallel which I was stirring. He had never made a secret of his illness. ‘Oh’, he said ’they’ll miss me for a few weeks, but they’ll soon forget me’. I persisted. ‘It’ll be hard enough for a new head coming in’ I said ‘without people feeling they’re not allowed to be real about how they’re feeling’.

As I write this, I wonder whether the unprecedented display of support, emotion and thanksgiving that was evident at Gloucester cathedral last Friday could have happened in the same way if the school had already had a new head. Perhaps, just perhaps, his decision to remain head of St Peter’s to the end allowed his death to be a gift to the school, just as his life has been.

The post Larry Montagu first appeared on Chrysalis Leadership Development.

I was around when Ofsted was invented

I gave up Ofsted inspections in 2000 to focus on something where I felt I could make a difference in the longer term.  Now I support headteachers through coaching and helping them to develop resilience to deal with the stresses of the job. We’re told that ‘good leaders will allow teachers to identify and celebrate what their strengths are’.   In my experience, too many good leaders forget to celebrate their own.    It’s as though there’s a silent conspiracy amongst school leaders: it’s not okay to take care of yourself as a leader, you have to be looking after everyone else.  Leaders absorb all the projections and insecurities of those around them – including a government and press who want to blame schools for all society’s ills. Resilient leaders know it’s important to take care of themselves – to put on their own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs.  When you’ve spent months climbing the mountain, are near the top, and the oxygen supply is thin, it’s easy to hallucinate and imagine you can manage by simply holding your breath.

Correspondence in the TES (8th March, 2013) suggests that the only organisation to be surprised that Ofsted inspections are data led is Ofsted.  As a school governor, Mr Wilshaw, I know that data is important; I also know that the latest dashboard doesn’t tell the whole story.   There can be no excuse for a school which fails its students – but there can be lots of reasons – many of them outside the school’s immediate control. A system is only as compassionate as those who implement it.  Staff in good schools understand the reasons for students’ under-achievement and consistently support them to improve.  We know that the climate created by the leader has a significant impact on the way staff perform.  Should we be surprised that compassion is largely missing from the inspection system?

The post Ofsted – requiring improvement first appeared on Chrysalis Leadership Development.

That got me thinking. How often do we as leaders miss the obvious cost-effective solution? This week I’ve been looking again at my research on emotional resilience for school leadership. Why emotional resilience? Because managing our emotions is ultimately what allows us to continue without being overwhelmed.

So is emotional resilience something leaders are born with? Does it develop over time? Can it be learned? The answer to all these questions is ‘yes’. One of the headteachers I interviewed talked about having ‘a lucky personality’. There were very few situations in which she’d felt she really couldn’t think of a way out. All interviewees felt that their emotional resilience had developed over time just by doing the job. Are we happy to leave it to chance, or can we pro-actively develop emotional resilience for leadership?

It is possible to learn to be more emotionally resilient and there are ways of behaving and thinking which will help. The difficulty is that many headteachers instinctively put their own needs at the bottom of the list. Even those who know about Stephen Covey’s time management guidance and dealing with the conflicting demands of what’s important and what’s urgent, don’t see their own needs as sufficiently significant to prioritise them. Research suggests that ways of feeding headteachers’ emotional resilience include

• Taking exercise
• Eating a healthy diet: drinking lots of water and alcohol in moderation
• Getting enough sleep
• Networking with other headteachers
• Recognising and celebrating what’s going well
• Recognising that some things are outside my influence
• Re-connecting with what gives me a buzz
• Having regular coaching to ensure the above
• Accepting that sometimes ‘good enough’ has to be good enough

Of course you know all this, but when the pressure’s on, other things seem more important. You miss the obvious: that you can deal with life’s pressures more effectively if you’re feeling more emotionally resilient.
What’s really required to facilitate all the above is deep self-awareness and a belief that it is okay to prioritise your own needs. That’s tricky.

If you’re deeply self aware, you will know why you find it difficult to put yourself first; you’ll listen to and heed your body’s warning signals; you’ll challenge unhelpful patterns of thinking; you’ll recognise that you have a choice concerning whether to absorb others’ stress; you’ll resist colluding with the expectation that you are superman/woman.
and you’ll show compassion for yourself.

Given the climate of high expectations, high public accountability and lack of compassion shown by the press or the government, that’s going to be difficult. But it is possible.

Make a start today – and by the way, it’s okay to ask for help.

The post Supporting emotional resilience first appeared on Chrysalis Leadership Development.

Whether we like it or not, however quietly we lead, as successful leaders, we are in a position of power. Sit round a board room table, have the chair express his or her opinion first, and in most cases, others will fall into line. A throw-away comment is given the status of policy, because it’s uttered by a leader. As leaders, one of our roles is to influence others. How do we maintain the balance between influencing others, and allowing them to influence us?

The difficulty is that as you climb the leadership ladder, others are less and less inclined to challenge you. And yet if they don’t, you are in danger (albeit unwittingly) of suffering from wilful blindness – described by Margaret Heffernan in her book as seeing and hearing only those things that accord with your view of the world. You may welcome robust debate, but if it always ends in you behaving in exactly the way you intended before the debate started, in time people will save their breath and stop challenging you.

I spend much of my time working with headteachers. Without exception, every one I have met took on the role because they want to make a positive difference to the lives of young people. They are ethical, driven by a strong moral purpose. I have also worked with senior leaders who are not yet headteachers; occasionally they tell me that they are managing a very difficult balancing act between their headteacher and the rest of the staff. ‘S/he upsets them’ I’m told; ‘S/he doesn’t listen’; ‘the staff are really demotivated by her/his bullying behaviour’ … etc. Generally, my response is to ask whether – when they reach headship – they would want to know if that’s how staff are feeling. ‘Of course’ they reply earnestly. ‘I’d hate to feel that people think I’m like that’ . ‘So who’s role is it to share that information with the head?’ I ask. Sometimes, they decide they will have that difficult conversation, because they believe it’s in the best interests of the school. Sometimes they tell me that they’ve tried, or that they don’t feel it would be productive, occasionally adding ‘I’m going to need a reference one day’. Every senior leader I work with who is in that position is determined that they won’t lose touch with what’s going on in their school. Sometimes, however, they do.

Something happens in and around leadership that sets leaders apart. Your followers will invest in you all sorts of motivations and responses which may be completely inaccurate as far as you’re concerned. But If it’s what they believe, it will affect how they behave. Whether you will be angry when someone tells you there was an error in the financial spreadsheet, matters not one iota. It’s how they imagine you will react that matters. Whether you smile and say ‘thanks for sharing that with me’ in response to someone telling you that most of the staff are afraid of you, or say defensively ‘that’s ridiculous: how can they possibly be afraid of me?’ is less important than how they think you’ll react. As a leader, you live not only your own reality, you live in the shadow of everyone else’s, too.
As leaders we may remain prepared to listen to others’ inconvenient truths – but how can we ensure that they will be ready to share them? What’s the key to creating a climate of trust, where you can rely on others to be honest and share what might feel like criticism? Here – in no particular order -are just a few pointers which others have found useful:

1. When you arrive, set out your stall: tell people you want to make a success of the role, and you need their help to do so. You can’t do anything about things that aren’t working unless you know about them. Invite everyone to tell you (personally or in writing) two things that they feel positive about in the organisation, and one thing they’d like to change. Pick up the trends and feed back on them. Acknowledge the trends and the isolated comments, so that people feel heard. Keep listening.
2. Know who your allies are at every level. They are not necessarily the people who tell you how wonderful everything is; they are those who are brave and skilled enough to share the good and the bad in a way that can be heard. Trust your instincts: that’s why you were given them, but know what’s driving them, too. The person who seems to want to undermine your authority may actually have a point. If you think someone might not be trustworthy, be cautious in your dealings with them, until you have evidence to back up or challenge your first impression. Keep listening.
3. Listen to all feedback, even if you think it comes from those with a personal hidden agenda. In time you will get to know how much credence to invest in each comment, but all feedback is worthy of consideration. If you’re in a position to do a complete evaluation of the workforce perspective (such as through using the Barrett Values Centre’s cultural transformation tools) so much the better. Or undertake a 360 assessment, which will at least tell you what your workforce think about your behaviour. Keep listening – and reflect on what you hear.
4. Remember that your predecessor was only human, even if memories expressed by others suggest otherwise. Allow people to mourn the loss of your predecessor; find a way to acknowledge his/her contribution, and state how you will build on it. Keep listening, reflect on what you hear and consider how it connects with what you already know.
5. Trust yourself and be open to the thought that you may be wrong. Don’t look only for evidence which confirms that you are right. Be alert to contra-evidence. If things seem too good to be true, they probably are. Keep listening, reflect on what you hear, consider how it connects with what you already know and what action you might take as a result.
6. Keep a sense of proportion. Leaders can often pick up the projections of others. If your workforce want you to be a super-hero, it’s tempting to buy into the pact. If the economic climate is bleak and times are tough, it’s easy to take out anger and frustration on the leader. Know yourself, separate your insecurities from those of your colleagues. Keep listening, reflect on what you hear, consider how it connects with what you already know and check out your intentions with a trusted colleague, or impartial observer, such as your coach. If change is necessary, share your intentions. Model the leadership behaviour you would like to see in others.

Regard power as a gift loaned by those who have invested in you. Guard it well, and it will be repaid with interest.

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