You are entering a new role and want to grow into it well
You have just taken the role. Nothing has gone wrong, and the first term is where the way you lead it gets settled.
You are new in post. The job is yours, most of the people are unfamiliar, and everything you do in the first weeks is being read. Nothing has gone wrong and you are not in difficulty. The question is how to learn the setting quickly enough to act well in it, without either waiting too long or moving before you understand what you are changing.
Presenting symptoms
- You are being asked to decide things before you understand how they came about.
- People describe how things work here in ways that do not agree with each other.
- You can feel which of your early decisions are being watched as tests.
Possible causes
- The role may look like your previous one and require something different.
- What you inherited may have a history that nobody has yet told you.
- Expectations of you may be high and unstated, particularly where your predecessor was strongly liked or disliked.
- There may be pressure, from others or from yourself, to demonstrate impact before you have learned enough to choose well.
You do not yet understand how things came to be as they are.
Your most useful next step: Spend the first weeks asking rather than deciding. Put the same three questions to twenty people, including what they hope you will not change, and write the answers down before forming a view.
Lead behaviours
People are watching to see what you are like.
Your most useful next step: Choose two things you will be visibly consistent about from the first week, and be consistent about them. Credibility in a new post accumulates from small things done reliably, not from a first address to staff.
Lead behaviours
You are being pressed to change things before you understand them.
Your most useful next step: Make one improvement people have already asked for, do it properly, and say why. Then say plainly what you are not deciding yet and when you will.
Lead behaviours
You do not yet know the people well enough to rely on anybody.
Your most useful next step: Meet everyone who reports to you individually within the first half term, and ask each what they are proud of, what frustrates them and what they would want you to know. Do it before you need anything from them.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
You are joining a group of people who already know each other and do not yet know you. Almost every early decision is better for knowing who you are deciding about, and there is a short window in which asking is expected rather than odd.
A new leader who arrives certain is either lucky or wrong. The first weeks are the only period in which not knowing is an advantage, because they are the only period in which you can ask anything without it costing you.
Everything is being read, and the small things most closely: whether you are on the gate, whether you reply, whether you do this week what you said last week. Credibility in a new post is built from those rather than from anything announced.
Other people’s accounts are the quickest route into a school. Asking before deciding also settles the question staff are actually asking, which is whether you intend to understand the place before changing it.
You will be given a version of the school, usually a generous one. Establishing what is actually true, including what your predecessor could not fix, is what stops your first significant decision being made on somebody else’s account.
Secondary behaviours
Use this for the first change you make. A new leader’s first decision teaches people how decisions will be made here, and one explained properly is worth several announced.
Use this where people are working out what you stand for. Early decisions are read as evidence of your values whether or not you intend them that way, so it is worth settling in advance which ones you will not trade.
Use this where there is pressure to demonstrate impact early. Choosing one thing to do, and saying plainly what you are not deciding yet, is more convincing than a list of intentions.
A useful first action
Put the same three questions to twenty people in your first weeks, including what they hope you will not change. The pattern in the answers will tell you more than any document you were given on arrival.
Suggested approach
- Ask before deciding. Put the same three questions to a wide range of people and write the answers down.
- Meet everyone who reports to you individually within the first half term, before you need anything from them.
- Establish what is actually true about what you have inherited, rather than working from the account you were given.
- Choose two things you will be visibly consistent about from the first week, and be consistent about them.
- Make one early improvement that people have already asked for, explain why, and say plainly what you are not deciding yet.