Category: HR + Skills

I’ve always found a weird kind of comfort in being the quiet one in the room.

There’s something nice about hanging back, soaking it all in and figuring out how I can pitch in without making a big fuss.

But sometimes that quiet vibe can hold me back and I have to give my head a wobble to speak up!

Sure, talking is part of the job and as SBLs, we’re out there chatting with parents, teachers and governors pretty regularly but deep down, we’d probably rather be at our desks, flying under the radar and getting stuff done.

And honestly, who wouldn’t prefer to be a stealth ninja rather than facing all those people and the pressure of being seen? 😈

If you’ve ever felt like this, trust me, you’re not alone – but when you need to push your ideas forward or stand your ground, it can feel like trying to climb a mountain in flip-flops!

It’s no surprise so many of us struggle with getting noticed and saying no. Total introvert struggles, right? 🤪

So, if our introversion is part of what makes us special – helping us see the big picture and get things done without the drama – how do we shake off that invisibility cloak when it’s time to step up?

Here’s how you can start making your presence felt without freaking yourself out!

⏱️ Share your ideas early in meetings. I’ve found that the sooner you speak up, the more at ease you feel, knowing your voice is in the mix. Waiting too long just makes it harder, so why not jump in at the beginning?

👋 Remember, you don’t have to take centre stage to be heard. Engaging with others’ ideas counts too! Saying something like, “Building on what Julie mentioned, I’m curious about how we could move X forward,” or “That’s a great idea! Any chance we have the dates and times agreed for that event yet?” or sharing a helpful article or update you found last week are all low-key contributions without turning the spotlight up to full beam.

📩 Not every conversation has to happen face-to-face. Emails and texts can give you the chance to think things through and the opportunity to respond on your own terms. You can take your time to craft your message and make sure you get your point across in the way you mean it rather than feeling rushed in the moment.

When we’re buried in paperwork, it’s easy to think being visible doesn’t need to be a priority.

But if we want to be heard then we need to be seen 💥

Being visible isn’t about being loud or flashy; it’s simply about letting people know we’re here and ready to contribute. When we step out and share our thoughts, we open the door to support and recognition too.

So, this week, take off that invisibility cloak (just for a little bit!) and show up for yourself ❤️ Because you are awesome!

As school leaders, risk is something that we are incredibly familiar with. We have processes in place to ensure safety on school trips, that our site is secure and that the staff who work for us are screened in accordance with safeguarding legislation.

These systems are woven into the fabric of school life, often without issue or incident.

However, there are other types of risks to our schools – beyond the operational – that require more consideration and focus to allow us to mitigate them appropriately.

By taking a strategic approach to risk management, your school can be proactive and make well-informed and timely decisions.

What does risk management involve?

The process of risk management involves six steps; identification, assessment, measurement, management response, monitoring and reporting.

As an organisation, you should have a process that outlines how you follow these steps to ensure that the management of risk is clearly articulated, understood and implemented by key stakeholders.

At a strategic level, risk management should be linked to your school development plan and its objectives; specifically the risks that will impede you from implementing your plan effectively.

What types of risk are there?

It’s easy to fall into the mindset that everything is a risk i.e. an accident on a school trip or a break-in at school. While these are all risks, as outlined above, they will likely already have comprehensive mitigation measures in place.

Unless you have reason to believe that your measures are not working or are out of date, an audit identifies areas of concern or some other variable factor has changed, then these types of risk need not feature on your strategic and ‘live’ risk register (or similar document).

Risk management does not equate to voiding risk altogether as this is often not possible. It’s about forward thinking, taking appropriate action at the right time and ensuring that you’ve done all that you can to reduce the impact of any risk.

If your management actions are effective and the risk can be deemed ‘low’ then you are managing risk effectively.

Strategic risks usually fall into five main categories; governance, educational, financial, external and compliance.

Operational risks, as outlined above, may be incorporated into your risk management process but only if there is a significant impact upon your progress towards your strategic objectives.

Chances are, serious operational risks would be covered under one of the other five types of risk. Here are some examples of risk for each category:

Governance
Constitution or structure of your LGB (numbers, attendance, committees), capacity of the LGB in terms of skillset and time, conflicts of interest.

Educational
Outcomes, Ofsted, curriculum, provision, staffing etc.

Financial
Limited income, insurances, procurement, internal controls, cash flow, inadequate information or reporting, asset management.

External
Reputational, demographic changes, pupil numbers, community, changes in government policy.

Compliance
Failure to meet legislative requirements, poor knowledge of responsibilities and regulations, audit issues.

How do we manage risk?

Where a risk has been identified, you need to be able to quantify both its probability of occurrence and the relative impact if it does occur.

When you have identified the measures you are going to put in place to mitigate the risk, you should then assess what effect these measures will have on both the likelihood and impact.

You should expect a lower probability of it happening or a lesser impact if it does after you have taken management action.

In the academy sector, this risk assessment process is documented on a risk register. In the maintained sector, you may have an LA risk register template that you use or you may record it in another way.

There are four main approaches to risk; tolerating (accepting and managing), treating (controlling or reducing), transferring (contracting out or insuring) and terminating (avoiding). The approach you choose to manage each risk will depend on your context and your resources.

To be clear on accountability and responsibility, you should determine who ‘owns’ each risk. This will likely be the person who is responsible for implementing the mitigating actions. While we know that the ‘buck’ stops with the headteacher, risk management is everyone’s responsibility. Line management and reporting to your LGB should incorporate the risk management process, ensuring that the accountability chain is robust.

How can we make sure our risk management process is fit for purpose?

When a risk has been successfully mitigated to what you determine to be an ‘acceptable’ level, there should be a point where this risk is removed from the risk register.

This means that the focus of risk management is not diluted and that priority is given to current and ‘live’ risks. In the future, it may be that some risks ‘return’ and at that point, they can be revisited.

When it comes to managing strategic risk, it’s important that the process is integrated into existing structures and systems. This ensures that it is a regular topic of discussion.

The more people that are involved in the identification, assessment and management of risk, the less likely it is that the process will become subjective or overlooked.

Risk management may appear to be an onerous administrative process but when it’s well implemented, it can help you to protect your school, staff and students as well as save money, provide stability and help you to make smart decisions about the use of time and resources.

Risk Management: Self-Evaluation

• Do we have a formal risk management process?
• Is it explicitly linked to our strategic objectives?
• How do we categorise risk?
• Is our assessment of risk robust?
• What is our approach to risk?
• Are accountability lines clear in terms of risk management?
• How do we communicate management action in terms of addressing risk?
• How does our governance structure support risk management in terms of scrutiny and challenge?
• How do we keep our risk management process objective?
• How do we determine whether a risk should be removed from the risk register?

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Written for: Primary School Management Magazine

If your staff are determined to leave, there’s ultimately little that any headteacher can do to stop them. You can, however, take steps to reduce the likelihood of staff wanting to move on due to professional misgivings. Here’s how to go about identifying staff concerns ahead of time and assemble a robust retention strategy.

When it comes to recruitment and retention, it’s easy to get lost in short-term activities instead of focusing on long-term strategy. The truth is, there are many touch-points and milestones that can create ‘deal-breakers’ for your employees resulting in resignation. Some are beyond your control but many are within it. Before we look at what you can do to create a robust retention strategy, let’s first look to our employees and what they want from us as employers. These factors, as a whole, constitute what is known as the ‘psychological contract’.

The psychological contract is the ‘silent partner’ of the employment contract but it is different in that it is unwritten and subjective. For the employee, the psychological contract is focused around their expectations of the employer and how they hold up their end of the ‘employment deal’. These expectations relate to areas such as:

• Reward
• Recognition
• Development and progression
• Security
• Management support
• Flexibility and work/life balance
• Autonomy
• Fair treatment
• Trust

The management of the psychological contract is key to positive employment relationships and the facilitation of employee choice in order to improve both recruitment and retention.

Though the psychological contract may be intangible, it is similar to the employment contract in that it can be ‘breached’. From the employee perspective, the most serious form of breach is through organisational and management behaviours which compromise one or more of the above areas. Examples include: over promising and underdelivering, a ‘do as I say not as I do’ culture, a lack of follow through, not meeting deadlines, mismatched processes and practice and moving the goalposts.

For an employee these types of breach, if unresolved, often result in disengagement. This might start out with feelings of dissatisfaction, progressing to working to rule and doing as little as they can. If this continues for a period of time, it could impact their wellbeing and even result in prolonged periods of absence or resignation.

As employers, what we have to wrestle with and be alert for are instances where the employee perceives that there has been a breach. This could be due to a lack of communication or information or simply staffs’ own interpretation of management behaviour. Real or perceived, these breaches can be avoided and addressed – thus mitigating the impact on turnover and staff engagement.

Whatever the truth or reality is, how your staff perceive you as an employer will impact their psychological contract with the organisation. From the moment that staff join your organisation, they are constantly yet often unconsciously assessing whether leaders do what they say they will, honour the promises they make, lead by example and apply policy fairly and consistently.

When you start looking at the employment relationship through the lens of the psychological contract, the levers you can pull to maintain a healthy psychological contract with your staff become much clearer.

From your perspective as an employer, the psychological contract lives in what we know more commonly as ‘how things are done around here’. In relation to the list of what our employees want from us, these ‘things’ include:

• The creation and management of staffing structures and restructures
• Recruitment processes
• Leadership and line manager behaviour
• Policies and implementation
• Appraisal and Performance Management
• CPD, career progression and succession planning

All of these things will currently exist and/or take place within your organisation but how well your organisation does these things has a significant impact on how staff view you as an employer and whether they want to continue working for you. In essence, employer behaviour in these areas determines whether an employee feels supported, treated fairly, valued, recognised, developed, allowed autonomy and trusted.

Here are some areas to focus on that will help you to both shape and maintain a healthy organisational psychological contract and improve retention:

1. Job Design & Recruitment

Turnover can create the perfect opportunity to affect organisational change with minimal disruption. If you have your finger on the pulse and your eye on the future, you can reduce the likelihood of wholesale restructures down the road. Also, take the chance to really think about not only the vacancy that needs to be filled but what type of person the role would suit. Make it an attractive role and be clear what it will be like to do this job on a daily basis; for all its quirks, make sure you highlight its perks. If you’ve nailed job design, then attracting the right candidate for your role shouldn’t be an issue. However, the ‘psychological contract’ starts here – everything that is written, spoken and communicated from the start to the end of the recruitment process sets the tone for the future working relationship. Be consistent, don’t make promises you can’t keep and deliver on everything you say you will. This rolls right through into induction and probation periods. Don’t leave them adrift, wandering around your corridors. Take charge, set expectations and set your stall out in terms of what your staff can expect to receive from you as a member of your team.

2. Line Management and Workload

How your line managers look after their staff is a critical part of maintaining the psychological contract. How managers treat people has a direct impact on how staff feel about coming to work in the morning. They are the ‘face’ of the organisation and the decisions that are made so how they communicate to staff matters. The value that you place on the quality of line management directly indicates how much you value your staff.

How well you listen to you staff is also crucial in maintaining the psychological contract; workload being a good example of this. If a task is seen as ‘worth it’, staff will be more likely to engage with it in a positive way. If they see it as a ‘waste of time’, this will affect their view of their role and how they feel about working for you. As I said before, their perception of what’s worth it and what’s not may be skewed but the sooner you address these discrepancies, the better.

3. Performance Management, CPD & Succession Planning

If job design and recruitment form the beginning of the psychological contract and line management establishes it, performance management, CPD and succession planning cement it. These processes are about identifying those who need support, supporting those who are ambitious and ready to progress, identifying specific organisational and individually beneficial CPD and having a meaningful dialogue with staff. They alone embody and facilitate several of those employee ‘wants’ we covered: reward, recognition, development, progression, support, fair treatment, autonomy and trust so it’s essential that you get them right.

How you do business defines both your culture and your identity and how you do something is just as important as what you do. Polices and processes must be designed and actively managed with your people in mind; not only to hold them accountable or to measure them but to recognise them, reward them, bring out the best in them, engage them and value them. By doing this, the right people will not only want to work for you, they will stay working for you.

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Written for: Primary School Management Magazine