Stephen Mitchell

This blog is part of my Leadership Plus submission for Dundee University.

As part of my Leadership Plus programme at Dundee University, I’ve been speaking to my mentor a lot about succession planning and recognising when the time is right to seek new professional challenges/vs when you become complacent and lose aspects of self-ambition.  These coaching sessions happened alongside my completion of the NPQH (National Professional Qualification for Headship: a desirable qualification for those seeking to be Headteachers in England).  

My, completely inspirational, mentor is in a very senior position at Dundee University and through our coaching we spoke a lot about her own journey to Senior Leadership in the School of Medicine.  As an aside, the jobs we do are so similar, in content, but so different in scale, support and resource.  She gave me a lived experience in the form of some advice she was given when moving into her current role:  “This will probably be your last move, make it count!”.  Now, I don’t agree with that advice, however, the idea that you can become too expensive, too old, or too skilled for an organisation does sound possible.  The point is important: make change truly count and consider career moves and changes carefully.

We broke this down further into the idea of a five year plan.  Where do you want to be in five years; where do you think you can be in five years; and what would be fulfilling to have achieved in five years.  From this, of course we plan and consider how we can make that happen and what training we might need in order to do so.  

Through this discussion, I was clear that I want to be a Headteacher in that time period; but through some questioning, I realised that I wanted that sooner than five years.  I will hopefully be finished my doctorate in the next year and I’d like to tie a change or role into that timeline.  Natural and endings and new beginnings.

This linked well to a previous discussion around values, ethos and culture in which we were able to see why I continued to work in my current setting; having never sought a teaching position in another institution before my promotion into my current role.  I completely live and breathe the school ethos and the Headteacher’s vision.  It’s fulfilling because these align so well.  It’s also a very happy place to work; with wonderful pupil and dedicated pupils.  And, whilst change in necessary, I go through a lot of recruitment processes where people profess to want to work in the environment which I do.  Lots of the reasons for this are around a negative ethos and tricky workload situation in their current settings.  This can make me feel resistant to unnecessary change.

Whilst I won’t go into the details of my five year plan, mainly because it is ever changing, I want to pick apart one of the key parts of the discussion that sat around this: the need for courageous conversations.  Through my coaching, we spoke a lot about the importance of honest, and transparent feedback at school, team and individual level.  Working in an environment for such a long time, in a variety of positions, means that I have strong connections with the staff.  I consider so many of them as friends as well as colleagues.  This can make it uncomfortable to hold others to account/have difficult conversations when required.  In exploring research into ways to make this work, we discussed a framework from Couageous Conversations (a book which is used heavily in initial Leadership training).  In this, the author explores why we have these conversations and what drives us to do it.  When I worked out that the positive purposes (students, providing clear expectations, a student’s right to an outstanding education) far outweight the negative barriers (friendships, upsetting others, judgement), it was much easier to frame these in my head.  Keeping the pupils at the forefront to these situations makes them both easier to receive, and deliver.

I did practice a few of the conversations using the ‘stakes are high’ framework from this book and it did help with a few situations in my professional life throughout the course.  However, the real learning was when we considered what a courageous conversation looked like with yourself.  How do you speak to yourself in order to motivate you enough to enact change?   

Again, that’s not for a blog.  But the key message is: consider your plan; consider your now; and have a difficult conversation with yourself.  If that leads to you recognising that change is required: begin to explore ways to make that change.  If not, be happy – you’re on your authentic path already.  And that might change each time you have the conversation.  And that’s okay, too.

Regardless of my thinking across the Leadership Plus programme, I now recognse the importance of professional coaching; particularly with an interdisciplinary perspective.  Leaders across similar organisations have much to offer one and other – well, at least they did in this situation.