4.2 Being a strategic leader and change manager

Strategic leadership whilst not a model of leadership per se is a key dimension of any leadership activity and there has been a great deal written about what strategic leaders do, and the characteristics that strategic leaders display (Davies and Davies, 2006). Davies and Davies, (2006) writing in 2006 described five key activities of strategic leaders:

• Direction setters -setting
• Translating strategy into action
• Enabling staff to develop and deliver the strategy
• Determining effective intervention points
• Developing strategic capabilities

These 5 activities mirror many models of change management and align well with John Kotter’s 8 step change model, (Figure 5), which has been very influential in the field since it was published in 1995 (Kotter, 1995, 1996).

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Figure 9: Kotters 8 Step Change model (adapted from Kotter, 1995, 1996).

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An image of eight boxes, with arrows going from the bottom to the top. From the bottom, up, they are labelled: 1. Create a sense of urgency. 2. Create a guiding coalition. 3. Develop a vision for the change. 4. Communicate the vision for buy in. 5. Empower broad based action. 6. Generate short-term wins. 7. Never let up - pursue the goal until completion. 8. Embed the change into the culture of the organisation.

Figure 9: Kotters 8 Step Change model (adapted from Kotter, 1995, 1996).

1. The first priority according to the model, is to create a sense of urgency; on the basis that nothing will be implemented unless there is a need for it. This was very evident during lockdowns, when schools had to implement a digital strategy almost overnight.
2. Create a guiding coalition – it is important to create support for your strategy, both material and cultural. Any change project includes a substantial element of culture change, and this can be very difficult and time consuming to achieve. Analysing your stakeholders and ascertaining which will be ‘blockers’ and which ‘facilitators’ of your change, is an important element within any change management project.
3. Develop a vision for the change – if you don’t have a vision of what you would like to happen, it is unlikely that it ever will. You will also fail to convince others of the ‘big picture.’ Your vision may be a blended learning environment, or a fully digital school, either way it is important you are able to set this out from the outset.
4. Communicate the vision for buy in – As important as the vision is, without an effective communication strategy it is likely to fail.
5. Empower broad based action – Pockets of innovation are good but in order for a vision to succeed you will need to enable action across the whole school.
6. Generate short term wins – Pockets of good practice can be used to generate interest, small scale low risk ‘pilot projects’ can do a great deal to get staff onside. Particularly if those staff evaluate them and adapt them for ‘business as usual.’
7. Never let up – change is difficult, it will take some time to achieve your goals, but persistence and resilience in the face of obstacles go a long way.
8. Embed the change into the culture of the organisation. This is a key element to achieving any strategic change. Embedding change into projects prepares the school/s for the transition from “how we do things now” to “how we will do things in the future.” Engaging people in the process of change is critical to ensuring a successful outcome

However, Kotter’s model is not without its critics. O’Keefe and O’Riordan (2011), identify 2 primary flaws of Kotter’s model:

1. The model positions change as a one-off event with a defined beginning and a successful end, reached via the 8 steps. O'Keefe makes the very valid point that in the current environment of global uncertainty continuous change is now the order of the day.
2. Excludes the informal leaders and distributed models of leadership- O’Keefe challenges Kotter's view that significant change can only come from organisational leaders and says that employees become disillusioned if the change only happens from the top. (O'Keefe and O'Riordan, 2011).

Much of the literature on change prompted by crisis discusses the opportunities that inadvertently arise during a crisis, which can actually advance changes which would otherwise have taken years (Maitlis and Sonenshein, 2010). Crisis can also act as key learning events for leaders, particularly in relation to strategy and vision (Weick, 1988; Thürmer et al., 2020).

Listen again to Audio 1 with headteacher Ms Nichols Mackay. This time, consider which elements of Figure 5 were enacted during lockdown, which may have furthered the strategy in the longer term even though it was officially paused during this period.

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Transcript: Audio 1 (repeated)

JACQUELINE BAXTER

Hi, my name is Jacqueline Baxter. And today, I'm interviewing Kirsty Nichols-Mackay, who is the headteacher of Monkseaton Middle School. Welcome Kirsty.

KIRSTY NICHOLS-MACKAY

Thank you.

JACQUELINE BAXTER

Thank you for talking to me. And today, Kirsty is going to be telling us a little bit about how she set up a digital strategy and what the starting point was. So do you want to tell me a little bit about when you set it up and how you began this whole thing?

KIRSTY NICHOLS-MACKAY

OK, so I became headteacher in 2018. I've been here for a couple of years prior to that. And within those first two years, quickly identified from baseline and across the school that there were a lot of ineffective IT resources across the school. And we needed to very urgently rectify that, so that the school was brought up to appropriate standard for the time.

I worked with the senior leadership team at the time. And I worked with the support of the governors. I also worked with the local authority, who were quite heavily involved with the school because we were graded as RI at that point. And so they had some experts that I could access to get some sort of guidance about what was needed, what was no longer fit for purpose and what was needed.

JACQUELINE BAXTER

So you were in the category, requires improvement, at the time, which is the English Inspectorate's category that says that the school needs to improve. So it was an important time for you to set this up. And who was involved in the planning?

KIRSTY NICHOLS-MACKAY

It was led by myself. And I worked with the school improvement team. I worked with the SLT in our school. I worked with our governors, largely from a finance point of view, nigh, a bit required. A little bit of a leap of faith because it was a very significant financial investment. I worked very closely with the business manager at the time to find the right provision of the resources and so on. Because we weren't at the point where we could train staff because we didn't have the resources to do that.

And so we needed to do fundamental reform of what was in school. And that took a lot of, I guess, back office, you might call it, back office work. So there was a lot of that went on, sort of 2017, just before I became head, when I was working as head of school. And then we did a lot of the work, 2018 moving forward.

JACQUELINE BAXTER

OK, so there was a fair bit in place then, structurally, before COVID hit.

KIRSTY NICHOLS-MACKAY

Yes there was. There was brand new servers. There was new IT provision, in terms of the computer resources in school. We'd resourced staff so that they all had their own IT. They had a laptop or Surface Go, which we got from the lecturers funding from the government. That's what we chose to spend that on. Because part of the digital strategy was very much about upskilling staff. You can't upskill staff without what's meant to work on. So that was very much a key part of that.

We replaced all the PCs across the school. We replaced all the whiteboards. We replaced, as I said, Surface. The entire network was basically refreshed and replaced, huge expense for the school, which we had to take out over a sort of an HP agreement. Because we couldn't afford to make the initial outlay. I don't know many schools that could. We purchased a lot of small tablets for children to use in lessons.

And actually, by the time COVID hit, we had also run a pilot program, where parents were offered a significantly discounted monthly rate to pay towards purchasing their own device. That was the Surface Go's, which we knew were effective within school and at home. That was a pilot program that started, ironically, December 29, 2019, just before 2020. So yeah, it was well timed. But it actually didn't get off the ground, partly as a result of COVID. So we've had to look again at that and how we're going to roll that out for parents and children.

JACQUELINE BAXTER

OK, and how, thinking about teachers at that point, I mean, COVID came along and you had this infrastructure in place, you'd made a good inroad into your digital plan. So how did COVID affect all that then?

KIRSTY NICHOLS-MACKAY

We had to, very quickly, accelerate our teachers' skills. We've done some very soft approach, I guess, to provide them with the right resources, to do some-- almost, you have some nice ideas, you might like to try-- with the idea that without COVID, by the end of the three year plan, which we had in place, the intention was that they would all be having what would be effectively a digital pencil case in the classroom. That was how I envisaged it. That was the vision we had across the school.

With COVID coming, we had to very quickly address the staff needs. The children and the staff had to have the same understanding of the software that was going to be used in lockdown, should we need to use it. So this was September 20-what, sorry, September '20. I've lost track of years, September '20. So obviously, we'd had the lockdown in the January through to the Easter. And obviously, our children came back before the summer, it was a year, six.

So we had some children in the school. And we'd been providing work through one form, through Office 365, through Word. And it just wasn't effective. So we knew from the September-- and obviously, we'd planned it over the summer already, and then start in September-- that every child needed be completely trained in the use of Teams. And all of the resources that would be on Teams were the same with the staff. So the September to Christmas of 2020, we did very intensive training with children and staff to make sure that, should we go into that situation again, we were completely able to just switch over to remote learning.

Obviously, we were providing remote learning at that time as well. Because the children were at home and COVID rates were, probably like every school in the country, quite high. So we were learning as we went. But we were improving the skills of the staff, through very specific and targeted training, over that period of time, and the children.

JACQUELINE BAXTER

And I mean, how were the teachers feeling about this rapid move to the digital? Because in other realms, for example, in higher education, there's an awful lot of research that says that actually moving into a digital space really hits teacher identity, in relation to job satisfaction, et cetera.

KIRSTY NICHOLS-MACKAY

I can't comment on that side. What I can say is, we worked very, very hard to balance workload for staff. Because we were acutely aware that, to all intents and purposes, colleagues were planning twice. If they had five children off in their lesson and they were remote learning, they were still delivering their lesson to the majority of the children. So we had to make sure that we were very careful to work with colleagues, to look at how we could make that achievable.

So whatever went online needs to be what was being delivered in the class. But there had to be some tweaks rather than fundamental changes because we had to mirror the curriculum, wherever possible. That was more challenging when it was something, a practical science lesson, for example. The best pupil in the world watching a video is not the same as doing their practical.

Because of our close working relationships with the in-school unions, we were able to-- and I don't think any schools got it perfect, we certainly didn't. But we were able to provide a situation where colleagues didn't feel overwhelmed by all the other things that were going on. And one of the key things with our school, and from the way that we run our school, is keep the main thing, the main thing. That is very much our mantra.

So we weren't focusing on 37 different things. We were just focusing on this, within our staff training. And that meant that there was opportunity for staff to have bespoke training as well. So it was more about building confidence. I can't comment on identity. It's not something that I ever really thought about. We kept very much abreast of what, certainly, when we were in the lockdown, in the 2021 lockdown, we kept very much on top of what was National Research telling us. What did we need to tweak as a result? That was very much the focus between January and the Easter.

I’ve completely lost track of years now. That must have been '21, January and Easter, where we were very much focused on what can we learn from this. But the colleagues' feedback, we did a lot of staff feedback at the time, was more than just wanting to get it right for the children. I didn't hear about, I'm losing the sense of myself. And I don't know, maybe that's something I missed and didn't pick up from the staff.

One of the strengths of a classroom teacher is their own autonomy. We're never prescriptive. We try to encourage colleagues to go off and do what worked for them in the classroom. Because the research, particularly once we got to, I think it was for every time. What went on in the classroom, if that was mirrored, was much more successful than trying to do something different and new. And if that's what works, that's what works, irrespective of the format

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Audio 1 (repeated)

• Lockdown created a sense of urgency for the school to ensure that pupils continued learning throughout the pandemic. This meant that the head and staff discovered the true extent of the lack of both hardware and connectivity of pupils and their families.
• The school’s vision that every pupil should be able to access digital learning, was furthered due to the measures that were put in place during lockdown. If lockdown had not occurred, the development of the strategy would have stalled due to lack of essential devices and bandwidth. Although this issue is not fully resolved, the crisis meant that it was recognised and acted upon much earlier than it would have been otherwise.
• Highlighting the digital divide to governors and other stakeholders, will be key to moving forward with the strategy in future.