Leading and Motivating Archives - ThenSomehow

The gap at the heart of leadership development in Higher Education

Howard — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:36:31 +0000

This is what is wrong with leadership programmes

If you work in Higher Education, you will probably recognise this pattern. Universities invest significant time and money in leadership development. Programmes are commissioned. Cohorts attend workshops. Participants often enjoy them and report positive experiences. And yet, when people return to work, many institutions see little shift in how decisions are made, how teams collaborate, or how change actually happens.

This is not because leadership development is pointless. But there is a growing gap between how leadership is developed and how universities actually function.

The context matters here. UK Higher Education is operating under sustained pressure and uncertainty. The Office for Students reports that around 45% of universities are forecasting deficits.

In England, universities now receive roughly two-thirds of the real-terms funding per student that they did a decade ago – a gap of around £6.4bn across the sector – forcing institutions to do more with less while navigating digital change, workload concerns and organisational restructuring

In this context, leadership has become harder, not easier. Many of the challenges leaders face today are not technical problems with clear solutions, but relational, behavioural and organisational challenges: leading through uncertainty, working across boundaries, and helping teams function well under pressure.

And yet much leadership development still assumes organisations are stable, predictable places where leadership is primarily about knowledge, models and individual capability.

And a faculty leader said something to me last year that might sound familiar:
“We estimate around 150 people across the institution could benefit from leadership and management development. But we’ve only been offered two places on the existing programme.”

Across HE, there is a genuine hunger to develop current and future leaders and managers. But programme places are limited. Costs are high. Access can feel rationed. Even where participation is strong, institutions are not always seeing the shift they hoped for.

The myth of leadership with a big ‘L’

One of the quiet assumptions still shaping much leadership development is the idea of Leadership with a capital L – something located in a role and often heroic in nature. Leadership that knows the answers, can predict the future and provide the comforting certainty we all crave.

There are some examples of that on the left of this table:

So when people come away from leadership programmes believing title + course certificate = everything you need to do the job well, discovering none of that works in the real world is discomforting for the individual and even more so for the people they hope to lead.

Instead real leadership comes with a small ‘l’ and shows up in micro-bursts:

In a corridor conversation that unblocks a project
In how people in a meeting handle disagreement
In whether a colleague feels able to name what is not working, or ask a question<

It’s the difference between leadership as a noun and leadership as a verb. Small ‘l’ leading is all about what you do, not what you are.

Because leading is a behaviour, not a job title.

Leadership in HE is profoundly behavioural and relational, and it’s happening everywhere in every interaction that builds trust, confidence, clarity, safety.

And yet so many programmes still implicitly treat leadership as something that can be installed through the right combination of frameworks, 360s and intensive workshops.

There is useful learning in all of those things. But the gap between theory and practice is wide.

For example a client of mine who had completed an L5 leadership apprenticeship programme shared their disquiet at some of the course content:
“I loved the stuff about difficult conversations, communication styles and personality types. Some of it just seemed like common sense, but in some modules there was an implicit treatment of human beings as ‘resources’ or cogs in the machine that seemed off to me.”

It is a bit like learning to drive. Passing the theory test is not the same as driving in traffic. Capability only develops through practice, feedback, and growing confidence over time.

Leadership development that doesn’t connect to the real work and experiences of participants risks stopping at the equivalent of the driving theory test.

To explain this further, I love these two models of organisations. The one on the left is what much theory pretends is real. The one of the right hints at the actual reality. Leadership development needs to embrace that complexity.

Organisations: the messy reality. Thanks to Chris Rodgers

A desire to reduce things to simple ‘truths’ fails us because life, and work, it turns out, is messy, chaotic and unpredictable.

Why the assumption persists

If this mismatch is reasonably well understood, why do traditional models of leadership development persist?

Partly because they offer emotional and organisational comfort.

Structured programmes feel rigorous. They are defensible. They are controllable. A seven-step framework gives the reassuring sense that leadership capability can be built methodically and safely.

By contrast, approaches that emphasise feelings, needs, identity, experimentation and iteration can feel – especially in complex institutions – challenging.

Steve Hearsum captured this dynamic well in No Silver Bullet: organisations can, sometimes unintentionally, collude in the myth that the right model will unlock the change they need.

But leadership in universities is rarely that linear.

Leadership doesn’t live in a classroom

Another of the quiet assumptions behind many programmes is that leadership can be meaningfully developed away from the work itself.

But when participants return to their institutions, they step straight back into the same meetings, the same pressures, the same informal norms about what is and isn’t safe to say.

What made sense in the classroom is multidimensionally more complicated in the real world.

What we should be emphasising in development programmes is practising the relational skills and behavioural habits that have the most impact. Then taking that into the field.

Because leading is not easy. It is shaped by identity, confidence and — crucially — context. When development happens in isolation from the relational realities of the workplace, its impact has limits.

We need to equip people to deal with stuff that’s real like:

Rewiring committee processes that slow decisions
Flipping the quiet ‘waiting for approval’ culture that stalls initiative
Flushing out bureaucracy slop where the process has become more important than the outcome
Calling out poor behaviours in peers and leaders

We all recognise these leadership challenges. It’s not a knowledge or visibility issue. Most people involved understand perfectly well what’s wanted. Making it happen is considerably harder.

Shifting the relational patterns and risk calculations that shape behaviour in the moment. That’s what leaders could usefully learn how to do.

Leadership development that does not engage with these lived dynamics risks missing the point – however well designed it is.

A different approach

Over the past few years, we have been exploring a different approach.

Not a replacement for all formal development, and certainly not a silver bullet. More a living experiment grounding leadership learning in real work and real relationships.

Two design principles have mattered most.

First, scalability and accessibility.
If leadership capability truly lives throughout the institution, development needs to reach beyond small cohorts of nominated senior or high-potential participants.
Second, mindset shift.
Less focus on acquiring theoretical leadership knowledge, and more on developing leadership as a practice embedded in day-to-day work.

It is worth saying that this approach is not universally loved.

In one pilot, around 70% of participants found it energising and highly relevant. But 30% did not. In fact they hated it. That ‘Marmite’ pattern was instructive.

Some colleagues are understandably looking for clarity, structure and prescription: “just tell us what to do”. Many traditional programmes provide exactly that reassurance.

But if the goal is adaptive capacity in complex environments, the work needs to be a little more alive – and a little less tidy.

What actually makes a difference

From what we are observing, traditional leadership content is not useless. Conceptual clarity still matters.

But sustained growth in capability tends to come from a different mix:

Practising listening in live situations
Handling difficult conversations earlier and more directly
Surfacing unspoken needs within teams
Working collaboratively and in safety on real institutional challenges
Iterating and adapting and learning in the flow of work

As an illustration, we were recently working with a cross-institution group exploring how meetings were functioning in order to make them more effective. Most participants arrived with visibly low expectations, sitting with arms folded and a “how soon can I get out of this?” look on their faces. They were braced for the standard lecture on ‘good practice’ and ‘proven’ leadership models.

But we didn’t do that. Instead, we started a genuine inquiry into their actual experiences, inviting their best guesses on why things were stalling and holding a space where different points of view could be aired.

When the group realised we weren’t there to lecture, but to facilitate a real conversation about their committees and projects, the atmosphere changed.

Shoulders softened. Arms gradually uncrossed. People began speaking more candidly about where decisions were looping or energy was draining away.

It wasn’t a dramatic breakthrough, but a visible shift in how safe the room felt, and how willing people were to engage with the real work.

Moments like this capture the relational, practice-based side of leadership, where learning is embedded in doing and noticing rather than in frameworks or models.

Small intentional shifts compound

Through practice and iteration we have seen:

Better quality conversations at senior levels
Coalitions forming across organisational boundaries
Issues being surfaced earlier, when they are still workable
A gradual strengthening of psychological safety in operational spaces

Keep making small steps like that and over time it all adds up.

It was simple practices that enabled the shifts in the case above. For example:

Ending meetings with three minutes of “what have we not said yet?”
Building lightweight cross-team check-ins around live work
Explicitly naming where decisions feel stuck and why

None of these look like major interventions. But repeated consistently, they begin to reshape what becomes discussable.

Reframing leadership development

Leadership development in Higher Education could use a gentle reframing. Let’s make it…

Less about episodic knowledge transfer. More about context-informed practice.
Less purely individual. More explicitly relational and collective.
Less one-off. More iterative and sustained.

In essence, leadership as something you practise, reflect on, and refine continuously in live situations — rather than something primarily acquired through attendance.

If leadership is more a thing you do than a thing you are, let’s help people do it.

Several institutions are already moving in this direction.

A final thought

Leadership development in HE is not completely broken, but there is room for improvement.

In many institutions programmes emphasise an individualistic approach to equip people to solve systemic problems. If you’re noticing that people come back from programmes energised but the wider culture remains stubbornly unchanging, it may not be a failure of the individuals involved.

It may simply be that the development focus needs to move closer to the real dynamics of how teams and organisations operate day to day.

And the good news is – that is work that can be done.

What you can do next

If this resonates, here are two simple next steps you might take:

Start a conversation in your team: Where does leadership feel stuck in our day-to-day work, not just in theory?
Review your current offer: Is most of your investment focused on individuals, or on how teams actually work together? Is the emphasis theoretical or practice based? Is it available to the many or the few?

And if you’re exploring how to help leadership development translate into real cultural movement in your institution, I’d be very happy to compare notes.

If this resonates – and you’re navigating change, culture shifts, or leadership questions in your institution – I’d be glad to talk about how to support your teams to work together better. Get in touch or book a call here.

The post The gap at the heart of leadership development in Higher Education appeared first on ThenSomehow.

The conversation you’re avoiding is holding your university team back

Howard — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:15:48 +0000

Difficult conversations in Higher Education

If you are a leader or manager in Higher Education, you don’t need a report to tell you that the pace of change is relentless. Across the UK, university teams are navigating constant volatility, from financial deficits to complex restructures.

In this environment, ‘change fatigue’ is a real barrier to progress. When everything feels urgent, the very thing that could help is often avoided: honest, difficult conversations. We tell ourselves we’re protecting our teams from more stress by staying silent, but the opposite is true.

Avoiding these discussions – whether about a missed deadline or a departmental shift – is exactly what holds your team back. By reframing these moments as opportunities rather than threats, you can unblock the energy and collaboration your institution needs right now.

The cost of silence in HE

There is a lot of change, transformation and rapid improvement in Higher Education in the UK right now.

Even the mention of change can spark anxiety about job security, about roles, about workload. Before you even start talking, people are primed for conflict. That’s a scary prospect.

This baseline anxiety is not helped by the state of workforce wellbeing: the 2025 Teacher Wellbeing Index reported that 76% of all education staff are stressed, with half stating that their organisational culture negatively impacts their mental health.

In our work supporting change in HE we often see a similar pattern. ‘Consultations’ that feel performative because they’ve been rushed to gloss over anything uncomfortable. The result is frustration and resistance: people feel unheard, powerless, adrift, angry. Exactly the outcome you feared.

The truth is though, if you’ve been avoiding the smaller day-to-day difficult conversations – the missed deadline, the tension in a team meeting, the underperforming colleague – you reduce the capacity to have these ‘bigger’ ones.

The invisible debt of unresolved conflict

Have you ever worked with a ‘difficult’ colleague? Have you waited in vain for your boss to ‘deal with it’? Or avoided doing it yourself, because you are just thinking about the worst that could happen?

Whether it’s a faculty-wide reorganisation or a single team member’s negativity, the danger of staying silent is the same. The people affected by a difficult colleague build up a debt of resentment, waste energy working around them, and absorb their negativity. Things look functional from the outside so you can justify not acting. But what’s your staff turnover like?

This isn’t just a cultural issue; it’s also a productivity one. Research from Acas shows that workplace conflict costs UK employers between £500 million and £2.3 billion and estimates that when conflict leads to an avoidable resignation the cost to the organisation is about £31,000.

Reframing conflict as a superpower

It’s tempting to imagine that by ‘not going there’, by not having that difficult conversation, you’re keeping things safe – but actually that’s only because you haven’t worked out ways to do it well.

In a university context – where transformation and pressure is everywhere – you simply can’t afford to stay stuck. Avoiding difficult conversations leaves projects stalled, teams frustrated, and blockers to change piling up.

The longer conversations are avoided, the more friction, miscommunication, and wasted energy accumulates.

What if, instead of seeing these conversations as something to avoid, you saw them as opportunities to make things better? It might sound crazy, but if you can see your way to that mindset shift, you can unblock a lot of energy, progress and collaboration.

How teams get stuck

The words ‘conflict’ or ‘storming’ (from Tuckman’s team development model) are really loaded. It’s hard to see how they could ever be positive. But rather than seeing conflict as a threat, if you see it as the bringing together of differences it becomes less negative.

Developing a practice of bringing differences into the light is a superpower we can all learn to harness. It starts with the recognition that no two people see the world in the same way. I’m responsible for good student outcomes, you’re responsible for cost reduction. You want to simplify your processes, I don’t want to pick up the work your team is no longer resourced to do.

Everyone’s point of view is reasonable from where they are sitting.

‘Conflict’ in some form is inevitable when you’re trying to do anything complex. Teams have different ways of working or different KPIs. People feel unsafe, their identities threatened. Learning to sort out disagreements is something that you have to be ready to do and need to learn to do well.

And it’s not so hard, most of us have been doing it since we could crawl.

The trap of the mental rehearsal

I recently spoke to a leader who was quietly frustrated about a team member who prioritises the wrong thing, or is too detailed: when a three-point bullet summary is wanted, they deliver a five-page document that the leader doesn’t have time to read. They needed to raise it with them, but kept not quite doing it.

When faced with something like this people often rehearse the conversation over and over in their head, trying out different ways it could go. You might get trapped there, imagining all the ways it could go wrong, putting it off or waiting until the moment is right.

And while you’re doing that, the real conversation isn’t happening – your colleague doesn’t get the chance to be different and your frustration continues to fester.

You are not being as kind or honest or courageous as you might be – to yourself or to them.

Avoiding the issue strengthens the invisible barriers that keep you all stuck. A manager might be quietly seething because someone isn’t delivering, or a team member might feel unheard. That stuff burns slow, and deep.

All that energy on worrying and imagining unhappy outcomes instead of solving problems and getting work done.

What’s the worst that can happen? Actually, honestly, it’s THIS: what’s already happening because you are not talking about it.

The good news? The majority of the time, having the conversation goes way better than you expect.

And even if it doesn’t solve everything, it makes future conversations easier. If not solved, progress at least.

A personal lesson: when the problem was me

Here’s an example from my own life. My first job was in radio. I did well and at a young age I was promoted to head up a local station. A few months in, during the regular weekly team meeting, I asked about any problems. There was an awkward silence. After a pause, someone finally said:

“Well the thing is Steve, there is a problem. And it’s you… You’re a nightmare. One minute you’re cracking jokes and being a laugh. The next you’re all uptight. Grumpy. Aggressive. We’re sick of it. We don’t know whether we’re coming or going. It’s horrible working with you, Steve.”

I’ll be honest, my first instinct was panic, then defensiveness, then desperately grasping at straws for a way out of it. I found one.

I was completely taken aback but I managed to respond with something we could all do: I asked the team for their proposals for what could be better and what they could do to help that. Later at the suggestion of my boss, I asked them to add what they loved about working there.

And I did it too.

A few days later we read out our answers. Without interrupting, without justifying. The more we spoke, the more we all realised: this wasn’t an attack, it was a mutual shout for help. We were working out what was holding us all back.

It was a turning point.

We started to talk openly, to acknowledge frustrations, to work on the issues together. We all felt heard, and I felt a clarity I hadn’t had before. What began as a moment of conflict became a moment of connection.

From that point on, meetings were different. It didn’t solve every problem overnight, but it created a culture where difficult conversations became opportunities to improve, rather than threats to avoid.

That lesson has stuck with me ever since.

How this plays out in teams

That same principle plays out with the clients we work with:

At one faculty, the leadership team went through a formal consultation on a reorganisation. On paper, the process was followed perfectly: “But we did the consultation, Steve,” they told me. They did, but it was performative. They only succeeded in convincing colleagues they hadn’t heard a word. Frustration built. Meetings became tense, people shouted. Had the leaders been willing to really listen and create space for candid feedback, for genuine concerns to be raised, the process could have been smoother, resistance evaporating instead of solidifying.

At another institution, one senior leader I worked with dreaded giving honest feedback. They imagined arguments, upset colleagues, even blow-ups. When they finally had the conversation, it was calm, constructive, and revealing. It didn’t magically fix everything, but it cleared the air, allowed both sides to feel heard, and made future conversations easier.

Even the hardest conversations – like discussing someone losing their job, or giving difficult feedback to someone whose behaviour has been challenging – can lead to unexpectedly positive outcomes.

The act of talking, listening, and acknowledging each other’s perspective can form an allyship, even in difficult circumstances.

Moving from friction to collaboration

If this resonates, here are a few questions to consider:

Which conversations are you replaying in your head instead of having?
Where is your team stuck because of unspoken issues?
Which discussion could move your team from friction to collaboration?

7 guidelines for a good conversation mindset

However, before you jump straight in and have that difficult conversation – it’s worth pausing to check on your assumptions.

If you think you know what’s going on for the other person, take a breath. Instead start with curiosity, generosity and respect, it’ll demonstrate that you value them enough to find out more. That is a good foundation for progress.

Here are seven guidelines for a good conversation mindset:

Listen first: ensure people feel heard, especially when they are angry. Irritation is usually a sign of an unmet need.
Assume you don’t know: Your ‘facts’ about why someone is underperforming are usually just guesses. Ask them instead.
Clarify your intention at the start. Begin by saying: “My goal is for us to work together better, not to place blame.”
Admit your own anxiety, and commit to trying and sticking with it even if it gets hard. Acknowledge your own contribution: your behaviour shapes the conversation and their experience too.
Set simple ground rules: pause if needed, agree to keep trying, clarify next steps.
Be aware of any power imbalance. How can you make this space safe for everyone?
Stop imagining the worst, start imagining the best. Assumptions are guesses, not facts.

Difficult conversations are iterative: the first one rarely solves everything, but it creates a pathway for progress to be made together.

What you can do: a call to action

If a difficult conversation is keeping you up at night, here’s one practical step you can take:
Try to reframe it as an opportunity. What would be better if you managed to get unstuck?

Even if you can’t fix it all, having the conversation will move things forward and will often help more people than you expect – you, your team, and your wider organisation.

Often the worst-case scenario is far less likely than you imagine. And the act of having the conversation is often the best thing that can happen.

At ThenSomehow we help universities and other HE organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

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The leadership you need? It’s already in your teams

Howard — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:38:45 +0000

We’ve been struck recently by how much energy, initiative, and creativity goes unnoticed in universities.

People are solving problems, making decisions, and influencing outcomes every day – but it’s rarely called leadership.

However in many institutions the overriding culture is still one of waiting for permission, for approval, for a senior figure or a committee to give the green light. And when that green light is slow or uneven, the system slows.

This is especially a challenge now, when so many universities are implementing transformation projects and are thinking: “we’ve got to resize… we’ve got to take costs out… we’ve got to be more efficient… we’ve got to do more with less… we have to do it at pace…”

But the faster they try to move, the slower they go.

We believe a habit of looking up for solutions is a big contributor to this inertia.

In a recent workshop with a senior group from one university, we were discussing the traditional “heroic” model of leadership – prompted by the recent Gillies report on the failures at Dundee university.

There, one leader at the top owned and held the vision, decisions, and attention, creating an environment where expressing difference or doubt became so uncomfortable that there was no challenge at council, court, or anywhere else in the organisation.

The group I was with looked sideways at each other. “Yes, we’ve got a bit of that going on,” someone said.

Another participant put it succinctly: “That style of leadership… it’s sucking all the leadership out of our group.”

That phrase captures what many universities experience. When attention and authority are concentrated at the top, and it doesn’t feel safe to challenge, people lower down hesitate to take initiative. They feel disempowered and much of the leadership potential present in the organisation is never realised.

The cost of centralised attention

The Gillies report suggested that the senior leader’s focus on certain areas effectively created ‘mandates’ for some people, while others struggled without the same visibility or interest from above.

When that happens the system becomes reactive: teams respond to what the senior leader notices or prioritises, not necessarily to what matters most.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding patterns: overly hierarchical structures can inadvertently remove agency, diminish initiative, and slow down meaningful progress. Staff feel less empowered, waiting for permission to act. Leadership – if it’s seen only as a top-down role – gets trapped at the centre.

An alternative to looking up

The alternative can seem paradoxical from a leader’s perspective because it’s about letting go, ceding control, carrying less. It’s about relinquishing the dominant idea of what being a leader means. And it’s not free of risk, although it might be inherently less risky than what happens now.

It’s about leadership being distributed through the system.

Whether this is possible comes down to how people see themselves, and if they can give themselves permission to act. Whether they believe it’s their responsibility to fix that thing that’s clearly not working, or whether they assume it has to be solved somewhere else by someone more senior. In universities in particular, people are often conditioned into that kind of powerlessness.

I think that’s because people often confuse leadership with being a ‘leader’. The latter is a role, a job a person does. The former is a set of behaviours all of us can do.

Distributed leadership works when people practise leadership behaviours regardless of the job title. It’s people close to the work sorting out local issues, in a collaborative way with others involved or affected. It relies on people feeling empowered, being networked, having access to one another, and having spaces where they can come together and say, “let’s just try this.” It doesn’t require grand permission. Often, it’s about trying until someone tells you to stop… and discovering that nobody will.

When that happens, leadership stops being something reserved for a few people sitting at the top of the organisation and starts becoming something that’s practised every day, through small decisions, experiments, and improvements. That’s when momentum might build, not because someone is pushing harder from the centre, but because people throughout the system are taking responsibility and moving things forward.

Distributed leadership in action

Here’s an example that highlights how to enable and encourage leadership behaviours. We’ve been supporting rapid improvement projects at a number of universities that illustrate what distributed leadership can look like. Staff are often frustrated by fragmented processes, for example, relating to student assessments: different systems in every school; thousands of requests each year; manual intervention required at every step.

Instead of waiting for top-level approval or relying on someone senior to commission a solution to the problem, we bring the right people together, give them space to collaborate, and encourage them to take small, practical steps. With no development budget, just enough authority, and the right voices in the room, a simple solution is specified, built and rapidly prototyped on a small scale (initially). Regulatory or territorial blunders are avoided, comms get sent out, training takes place, users get looked after and lots of lessons are learned, reflected on and responded to in the next (larger) iteration. These projects can save thousands of hours of unnecessary work or thousands in unnecessary spend.

The impact is enormous: better experiences for staff and students, time saved, and a repeatable process that teams can use independently in the future.

It sounds easy. The truth is it always takes effort to gather the group, demonstrate it is worth their time and reassure them they won’t be at risk. And it takes effort to keep it going – regular meetings to scope the work, build trust, strengthen relationships, renegotiate scope, fit the work in on top of business-as-usual, and hold everyone together when things go wrong.
Taking part in these projects shows people that they can do these things. Maybe even should do these things. It shifts their sense of who they are in the system.

That is the best part, and the point of the whole thing.

Principles for unlocking leadership everywhere

From these kinds of experiences, we’ve identified the patterns that make distributed leadership possible:

Psychological safety: People need to feel they won’t be punished for trying something new, for experimenting, or even for failing. A senior sponsor in the background can help, and clear terms of reference. But mostly this is about how people show up in meetings.
Agency: Staff could discover they can act and that it’s a part of their role they can choose to access: to make improvements, not wait for direction. It’s not a given that it is present, and it is what we want to see emerge.
Networks: Find ways to build strong networks. It’s a key enabling technology to gather perspectives, cutting through inertia, getting help. People need to know who to connect with, share ideas, and how to solve problems together.
Do things together: Doing something different is the fastest way to learn. Staying practical is too. And it’s better to aim small, fixing simple things quickly to maximise the frequency of success. That’s motivating and builds capability for addressing harder things.
Repeatable habits: Small, structured practices such as early sharing, mini experiments, coalition working, or ‘kick-off’ sessions, help distributed leadership become habitual rather than sporadic. How we do things is often more important than what we do.

These things help people reframe their identity, grow their confidence and support their ability to act locally, solve problems, and gradually transform an organisation from within.

Small moves, big impact

It’s worth emphasising that distributed leadership isn’t about grand projects. Often, the most powerful leadership is local and incremental:

Choosing to focus on five priorities instead of the expected thirty(!), as one team did. Better to choose to deliver well on a few than poorly on all of them.
Running small improvement experiments, knowing that even failures generate useful data and learning.
Sharing early and openly, modelling safety and creating opportunities for others to engage and contribute, and bring in different perspectives.

The cumulative effect of ‘small moves’ can be profound. Hours saved, processes improved, teams feeling empowered.

Leadership emerges when people discover it can be safe to take responsibility.

Challenges to distributed leadership

Of course, it’s not automatic. Universities are complex systems, full of noise, competing agendas, and hierarchical conditioning. Staff are often socialised to wait for permission or to assume they can’t make meaningful change.

There are times when this approach has met with resistance. A few people say things like “I don’t get paid enough to do that work”, or “It’s above my pay grade.”

In one sense that is an attractive proposition, to deliberately (if unconsciously) relinquish your agency, or submit to power. There’s no pressure to decide, no responsibility for failure, no expectation of understanding. It’s an easier path and best of all – you get to complain about everyone else messing things up.

How dangerous is that for an organisation?

The truth is we co-create the culture we operate in. We are all in part responsible for it, because we actively propagate it or passively collude in maintaining it.

The resistance of a few is normal, and from another perspective perfectly reasonable.

That’s where there is a role for facilitators, coaches, and colleagues to help people recognise their own agency and create the conditions for action. That might include convening groups, clearing obstacles, or simply encouraging people to experiment.

Once the first steps are taken, and the right conditions are maintained the pattern can become self-reinforcing: confidence grows, networks strengthen, and leadership spreads.

A different way to lead

And distributed leadership doesn’t remove the need for senior leaders. Their role shifts: instead of being the sole source of authority and direction, they become enablers, creating psychological safety, empowering people, offering priorities, holding spaces for different voices to be heard, and modelling curiosity rather than control.

Acting in service to the organisation by enabling the right conditions.

Ultimately, transformation in universities happens faster when it is recognised that leadership exists at every level. It’s in the questions staff ask, the solutions they try, and the improvements they make. It’s the small, local, connected actions that collectively transform the organisation.

Taking action: what you can try now

If this resonates, here are a few small, practical things you might experiment with.

Notice where you or your team are waiting for permission, and ask whether it’s actually needed. Encourage them to decide for themselves and take action until someone tells you to stop. Promise you’ll take the heat if they do – and see what happens.
Create a space for people to come together around a real problem that’s irritating you. Give it a clear, short timeframe and focus on making one thing a bit better, rather than solving everything.
Share work earlier than feels comfortable. A rough first version often invites collaboration in a way a polished solution never does. Tell people what you are doing and why.
Reduce the noise where you can. Fewer priorities, fewer meetings, fewer competing demands can create the headspace needed for people to take responsibility and act. That’s a really important part of leading.
And perhaps most importantly, pay attention to where leadership is already happening quietly in your organisation. Name it, value it, and make it easier for it to happen again.

If you can see leadership everywhere, you can unlock the potential that hierarchical systems often obscure.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post The leadership you need? It’s already in your teams appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Why better conversations matter more than perfect plans in Higher Education

Howard — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:15:40 +0000

From 10-year visions to responsive strategy

We’ve been noticing something interesting with a number of the universities we work with. A decade ago, there was a flurry of ambitious 10-year strategies – grand visions for 2025 and beyond.

Now, as those plans reach their expiry date, many institutions are thinking differently.

We’re seeing a shift to shorter horizons and 5-year strategies. It’s all about 2030.

Not because longer-term thinking has lost its value, but because the world feels more unpredictable, and the pace of change makes the idea of focusing 10-years ahead seem fanciful.

It isn’t just our observation: across sectors, research shows that traditional strategic plans often struggle when things are unpredictable and that organisations benefit when they build agility and adaptability into their planning process.

I commented to one senior leader that the HE landscape will look very different in ten years. They replied plainly: “Ten years? More like three.”

It’s a shift in horizon that says a lot about how we are all having to think. There’s a broader realisation: institutions still need direction, priorities, and alignment, but the ability to respond, adapt and learn may matter more than a fixed plan.

The fallacy of the plan

It’s a recognition, perhaps, of the lesson Covid should have taught us: that you can’t plan for every eventuality, and that the real value of planning isn’t the plan itself, it’s how it prepares your organisation to respond when the unexpected happens.

Strategic plans that looked solid in 2019, for example, were tested by lockdowns, budget shortfalls, and rapid shifts in teaching and research delivery.

The truth is that plans rarely work out exactly the way you expect, even small things can take you off course. Traditional planning models are less effective when the future can’t be reliably predicted.

That’s the problem. You make plans with limited information – unavoidably. And then hold them in too high esteem.

This is the heart of what we’ve come to think of as the fallacy of the plan.

Plans themselves are fragile. At best, they offer temporary guidance.

But the act of planning -the conversations it creates, the shared understanding it builds, the skills it develops – is where the real value lies.

In the current state of the world, universities need systems and plans that can bend, or even break but recover.

Planning vs the plan

In many universities annual operational planning has a three year focus, with plans slowly adapting year by year. The processes are often highly structured and tied to committee cycles which makes it slow. The only place all those plans are lined up next to each other is in committee meetings, so only a small number of senior people tend to see the whole picture – and only that small number of people are well equipped to respond to changing circumstances.

When it‘s all about the process, that’s a missed opportunity.

Planning is an opportunity to build shared understanding, surface assumptions, and align people around a context – not just priorities. When shared understanding is critical to enabling people to act with clarity and confidence, conversations are not just about sharing data, they’re about co-constructing meaning.

So how might planning cycles be designed in ways that equip people to respond well?

A different approach

We recently supported a university client that tried something different. Instead of issuing a top-down strategy and asking each faculty or school to “align”, they experimented with a lighter, OKR-style approach:

Senior leaders set a few high-level objectives and a small number of things they thought might matter.
The wider leadership group explored what those objectives could mean for their areas, together.
Then they took these conversations back to their teams to develop local plans that aligned to the overall direction and integrated with other team’s activities.

The goal wasn’t to control outcomes but to clear the noise so people could focus on what really mattered, and creating spaces where people could see how they fitted in with other parts of the organisation.

What was particularly interesting: members of the leadership group shared perspectives they might never have voiced in more formal settings.

The result was encouraging. Teams at all levels had a better understanding of the context, saw where their work fitted into the bigger picture, and felt heard. There were fewer priorities, and more clarity.

People were better equipped to respond well when the unexpected inevitably happens.

Leading in uncertainty

Responding to change, and navigating uncertainty requires skills and behaviours that are often undervalued: listening, reflection, empathy, and hardest of all, a willingness to make tough choices about what to prioritise and what to pause.

These skills don’t develop automatically, they need deliberate space, to be practised and supported.

Teams need room to understand the wider context, explore how their work aligns with institutional strategy, and have honest conversations about what to stop or redirect when priorities shift. Building shared understanding and trust across teams, faculties and directorates matters more than a static, long‑term plan ever could.

These are the capabilities that make universities responsive, resilient, and aligned.

When control replaces conversation

At a recent HELP Group session a mixed group of academics and professional services peers working in different roles and levels from several universities reflected on the tension between centrally imposed strategies and local (faculty level) needs. Much of that tension came from a feeling of being controlled and dictated to, without reference to local nuance.

There was a desire for a less directive approach: As one group put it: “Just give us a topline strategy we can align to.”

They were craving something closer to an OKR approach – clear direction and the freedom to respond as seems fitting.

For example: rather than try to increase undergraduate income by overselling the most popular courses (without telling the department that can’t accommodate the extra students or cover the additional marking), just ask them to focus on increasing the surplus. That might be solved by developing new courses, looking at post graduate opportunities, reviewing use of space, spinning something out or any number of ways that might make sense locally.

It seems quite subtle but the difference in agency is huge: “let us find the solution that works for us rather than dictate a solution without talking to us.”

Not every part of a university necessarily needs to respond in the same way to align with a high level goal. Telling people how to do something may not be the best way to innovate.

Two workshops, two outcomes

We observed this firsthand at workshops for three different organisations all focused on setting priorities for the year ahead.

Two were deemed a success. In those cases, senior teams spent a day together exploring context, interrogating strategy, challenging each other AND getting to know each other a bit better. It was all about exploring ideas and options, not refining or focusing.

In the third workshop, despite great conversations, which were exhilarating and motivating, the leadership team was impatient to reach a conclusion. In reality, they already knew what they wanted, they just wanted everyone else to get there too. My concern was that we had inadvertently facilitated something performative, that might lead to resentment and frustration in the team: exactly the kind of tension described in the HELP group.

The two successful workshops were great because they focused on understanding context, difference, building trust and appreciation for each other. Less about defining a plan and more about establishing the conditions, connections and relationships that support adaptability.

If you make a plan that can’t adapt and refocus, that’s a risk. If you don’t have the skills and networks to make that easier, that’s something to work on.

As leaders and managers you need to be encouraging and enabling people to plan and plan and plan and abandon those plans, if necessary, on a heartbeat.

A final reflection

I’m reminded of a family summer trip to Iceland (highly recommended). Part of the single ring road that runs around the whole island had been swept away by a flood. We worried we’d be stuck and unable to continue our plans. The hotel told us to keep checking the updates as it would probably be okay.

It actually was. We drove over the ruined stretch of road a couple of days later.

That ring road was littered with the remnants of giant concrete bridges – edifices of strength and power swept away by glacial melts and earthquakes.

Yes, the current road is fragile and easily destroyed: it’s just a thin layer of tarmac on top of a narrow embankment built from the broken, dust-like material around it.

Precisely because of that it can be repaired quickly and easily. Endlessly adaptive and renewable.

Plans don’t need to be rigid and permanent. They need to be adaptable and flexible.

That road’s fragility doesn’t mean failure. It means resilience.

Taking Action: What You Can Do Now as a Leader in HE

As we start a new calendar year, here are some practical ideas you could use to build adaptability and shared leadership in your institution:

Keep planning, but hold the plan lightly.

Treat it as a temporary guide, not a script. Have a plan B, or C.

Create spaces for contextual conversations.

Build in regular time for collective reflection and strategic discussions in your leadership teams – at school level, faculty level and university level. If you only talk about operational concerns you may be missing an opportunity. Learning will flow in all directions.

Focus on fewer, clearer priorities.

Propose a narrow beam rather than a wide beam. Make it clear what matters most – and what doesn’t.

Develop adaptive leadership skills.

Support your teams to develop skills that help them be more comfortable with changing circumstances. Agile project management, project review points, retrospectives, critical thinking, supportive challenge. Think experiments, with opportunities that are “good enough for now, safe enough to try.”

Be willing to stop or redirect.

Recognise when initiatives no longer fit your strategy, and give people permission to change direction when reality demands it.

Because this year, like every year, won’t follow the plan. And we all need to be okay with that.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post Why better conversations matter more than perfect plans in Higher Education appeared first on ThenSomehow.

How distributed leadership unlocks decision-making in universities

Howard — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:17:32 +0000

We’ve been reflecting on the patterns we’ve seen across the universities we’ve worked with over the past year – and one theme stands out more than any other.

There’s something wrong with the assumption that we need to be led.

I don’t mean leadership is irrelevant – far from it. But in many organisations, especially in Higher Education, a quiet belief has taken hold: that progress depends on someone else. The Dean, the Director, the Head of Department. Someone above who will make the decisions, fix the issue, or tell us the next move.

What if that assumption is holding you back?

It’s not a new idea. From Peter Drucker in the 1960s to more recent work by Brené Brown and many others, organisational psychology tends to show that collaborative methods of leading harness more knowledge and creativity across an organisation.

We’ve been exploring this idea a lot recently at ThenSomehow.

It keeps coming up because it taps into something so familiar. Many of the challenges we see across universities: bottlenecks, slow decision-making, cautious teams, overworked managers – trace back to a shared belief: leadership lives somewhere else.

Everyone’s looking up for the answer

A recent project brought this to life for me.

We were working with a team running a programme nested inside multiple layers of the university. They faced a resourcing issue they felt powerless to resolve alone. They believed only their manager had the power to fix it.

The programme team said, “That’s for the department to fix.”
The department said, “That’s a school-level issue.”
The school pointed to the faculty.
The faculty said, “We’ll need to check with the university.”

And when we got to the people “up there,” they felt just as stuck: “Sounds like a local issue, it’s not something we can solve here.”

When leadership is imagined as something that only flows downward, everything travels upward for permission. Agency stalls. People stop experimenting, collaborating, or acting on ideas because they don’t believe they’re allowed to.

The culture of permission

Once you notice this, you see it everywhere.

Sometimes it starts for good reason – like during a period of financial restraint, structural change, increased scrutiny. But the controls and caution often last longer than the crisis.

We still see cases where a manager with full budget authority can’t release a small payment without a physical signature from a Vice Dean. “It’s more than my job’s worth,” they’re told.

It sounds absurd, but it’s entirely human. People want to do the right thing. They want to be safe. So they copy in more people, seek reassurance, double-check what to do. Over time, this becomes the norm: a culture of permission-seeking, risk-aversion, and back-covering where everyone waits for someone else to go first.

Not because people don’t care, but because the system quietly teaches them that caution is safer than agency.

The cost of assuming we need to be led

When we assume leadership must come from elsewhere, we give away our agency, our power to act.

Teams become reactive. Ideas get stuck. People stop asking questions or trying alternatives. They wait.

And leaders don’t want this either – the thing we hear most from senior managers is: “I just wish my team would step up.”
And yet the system and the unspoken rules reward the opposite.

The result is a kind of organisational learned helplessness.

A different view of leadership

So what’s the alternative?

Leadership isn’t something that’s just bestowed. It’s something that happens everywhere in a healthy organisation: in conversations, small decisions, moments of initiative, acts of clarity or convening.

In that view, the job of formal leaders isn’t to hold all the authority but to create the conditions for others to lead. To clear the way. To help people notice the leadership they’re already doing.

When US Navy Captain David Marquet, author of Turn that Ship Around! took command of the underperforming nuclear submarine, the USS Santa Fe – which had poor morale and the worst retention rate, he decided to “never give another order” except to direct the firing of a weapon. For everything else, he empowered the right people to act without approvals. As a result, the Santa Fe went from worst in the fleet to first.

At ThenSomehow, we love this distributed or collective leadership. Not dismantling hierarchy – but rebalancing where leadership shows up.

Unlocking agency in practice

We’ve seen the impact of this shift again and again.

At one university, we were asked to design an Emerging Leaders programme. The brief focused on leadership skills, but what participants actually needed wasn’t more theory, it was confidence. Many didn’t consider themselves leaders at all.

Through reflection, dialogue and practice, they discovered that leadership was already present in the way they listened, asked questions, supported colleagues, and convened conversations. Once they saw themselves differently, everything changed. They stopped waiting for permission. They started trying things, nudging change, making progress from where they stood.

In another institution, we ran a series of cross-faculty rapid improvement ‘coalitions’, each were given practical challenges and the freedom to act without constant approval. They didn’t have formal authority – but they had purpose, clarity, and trust.

Some produced modest outputs, some more substantial, but the size of the project wasn’t the point. What mattered was how they worked: quickly, collaboratively, confidently. People left with new networks and a renewed sense of agency.

They shifted from “I’m waiting to be led” to “I can make a difference.”

What helps people step up

Across our work, a few patterns stand out that can unlock this kind of leadership:

Build confidence, not dependency. Encourage your team to act even when things aren’t perfect. “Good enough for now, safe enough to try” is a powerful mindset.
Ask before assuming. Questions such as “What outcome are we really after?” often reveal that half the work isn’t needed.
Model distributed leadership. Run meetings where everyone contributes. Make leadership a shared activity.
Celebrate initiative. When someone acts without waiting, recognise it – especially when it goes well (and sometimes even when it doesn’t). That’s how new norms take hold.

What leadership really looks like

We still need people in formal leadership roles. Absolutely.

But the best leaders don’t try to be indispensable – they try to become increasingly unnecessary. Their success is measured in how confidently their teams act without them.

That’s not the absence of leadership. That’s leadership working as it should.

So what might this mean for you?

Whether you’re working inside Higher Education or in another complex organisation:

Where are people waiting for permission they don’t actually need?
What would make something safe enough to try?
What could you do to help people see the leadership they’re already exercising?

Because leadership isn’t simply about leading from the front – it’s about helping others realise they were leading all along.

At ThenSomehow, we help organisations unlock agency and collaboration while making rapid improvements – so that leadership becomes something everyone does, not something everyone waits for.

→ Read about one of our early experiments in distributed leadership: Aston University case study

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

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Why psychological safety is the hidden superpower for organisational change

Howard — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 15:50:43 +0000

The hidden power of psychological safety in Higher Education

Research by Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson and Google’s Project Aristotle found that teams with strong psychological safety outperform others because people feel free to challenge assumptions, share mistakes, and offer new ideas.

In Higher Education, this matters more than ever. Universities are facing financial pressure, cultural strain, and the need for rapid transformation – progress depends on people feeling safe enough to tell the truth.

This article explores how psychological safety (or the lack of it) shapes the ability of universities to lead change, drawing lessons from the Gillies Report into the financial collapse at Dundee University and insights from our work with teams across the sector.

When local teams thrive but senior leaders panic

We’ve been doing some work with a faculty at one Russell Group university who have been getting better at psychological safety.

They’re starting to raise issues that were impossible before, supporting each other more, and frankly, just working together better. It’s the kind of localised empowerment that’s needed when things are tough.

But they’re operating inside an institution where the senior leadership team (SLT) isn’t encouraging safety. This isn’t intentional but they are falling into some classic traps: knee-jerk reactions, flashes of panic, individual rather than coordinated thinking and rampant back-covering.

Now cuts and reorganisations are hitting, the instinct of leaders is to individually grab back control and start telling people what to do.

That might make them feel better, but what the university really needs is the opposite: more empowerment, less fear.

High motivation, high anxiety: the paradox of academia

If you have watched Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmundsons’s great Ted Talk where she talks about psychological safety, you’ll know she says two things about highly motivated people (which is most people in HE):

if they’re in a safe environment they can get to high achieving and high learning,
but if they’re in an unsafe environment, they’re more likely to be underperforming, anxious and not speaking up.

In universities, the awareness of power and status – academic primacy and grade anxiety – is pervasive.

The teams I have been most impressed with have successfully dispensed with that within their group: they have a team leader who regularly canvasses opinion, asks for feedback and enables a space where each person clearly feels valued and respected.

The alternative is power dynamics that lead to fearful environments.

I remember watching a senior colleague chair a meeting and visibly wilt when criticised for letting the meeting ‘languish.’ The rest of the room, though finding the discussion useful, said nothing. No one backed the chair up. Everyone colluded, felt deeply uncomfortable, and walked away feeling a bit helpless.

That moment of silence isn’t just about one meeting; it’s the noise of fear cascading through an organisation. The uncomfortable behaviour at the top becomes the default everywhere else – an isomorphic pattern like the ones we wrote about in a previous post.

The cost of silence: what the Gillies Report reveals

What happens when that cascade reaches right across an organisation? Look at the recent Gillies Report into the financial collapse of Dundee University.

How low psychological safety amplified financial risk

Professor Gillies found serious failures in financial governance that were amplified by low psychological safety. The data was all there, but as she put it, her investigation uncovered a “culture in which challenge was actively discouraged.”

Nobody was questioning the financial information they were given because, her report found, there was no culture or expectation of constructive challenge at executive or court level. Financial literacy was patchy and critically, dissent was routinely shut down, particularly by the Principal, who simply “did not welcome difficult conversations.”

This shutting down, whether it’s the Principal’s decision to only share good news or female staff being routinely spoken over or labelled as obstructive for asking questions meant very few people dared to speak truth to power.

The most practical insight from Gillies? The value of one person’s innocent question.

She noted that one person’s sincere, “I don’t really understand…” is often a catalyst for someone else to step in, opening the door to curiosity and debate.

This engagement leads to a far richer understanding and, crucially, the uncovering of risks.

That vital question, however, was being squashed out.

And this was happening at School level, at the Executive Board level and at the level of Council. Arguably the Principal’s behaviours directly reduced psychological safety across the whole institution.

The cultural risks of discouraging dissent

The risks introduced by this culture were invisible for a long time. But as the levers used by universities to balance out financial bumps have been eroded by government policy and global instability, the risk went up significantly. Low safety limits institutional capability to respond to difficulties and erodes the checks and balances of effective governance.

Ultimately, Gillies made it clear: a “values-led university culture which privileges transparency and accountability is likely to actively support evidence-based collaborative decision-making, integrity and openness to challenge and debate.”

In other words, the cultural lack of psychological safety wasn’t the cause of Dundee’s failure, but it was a major contributing factor.

I’m sure many readers of that report will have been thinking, “that could easily have been us.”

I can think of three or four other institutions that we’ve worked with at ThenSomehow where there are similar patterns. Where members of the executive group have a real reluctance to challenge a VC. The members say things to us such as, “[challenge] is not something you can do very easily in the meetings, I have to pick my moments… never in front of the wider group.”

That failure to challenge is a misunderstanding of a key role of these groups, and will likely play out in a number of ways across all levels of an institution:

Reluctance to make decisions.
Permission seeking.
Over-attention to the politics.
Managing the optics and presentation of data.
People not getting on with things, instead worrying about whether their back is covered.
Concerns routinely not being heard or even shared.

If you are wondering if this could possibly be happening in your university, here’s a link to a brilliant illustration by Liz Fosslien of how low psychological safety plays out at the most basic level.

Have you ever experienced that?

Another of Liz’s brilliant illustrations show one of the differences between effective and ineffective teams.

Building psychological safety from the top down

Five key principles for building psychological safety from the Gillies Report

In response, Gillies says executive groups should be receptive to challenge – that it should be the normal mode of operation. She proposed 5 key principles, which we could treat like a checklist:

1. Make it a principle to actively challenge your financials

The University Executive Group (UEG), or its equivalent, should learn how to interpret financial data and routinely challenge the institution’s management accounts. Not to beat up the Finance Director but to back them up, demonstrate robustness and stand by their recommendations together.

2. Model fearless questioning

Do people speak up at town halls? Do you provide a range of fora for questions to come out from all levels of your organisation?

3. Be receptive to challenge

All senior role holders ought to be receptive to challenge, routinely requesting it, demonstrably grateful for receiving it, evidently listening to it and responding.

4. Encouraging curiosity in every forum

How do your committees structure conversations so that everyone is heard, and ‘stupid’ or naive questions are aired and built upon? (See Liberating Structures for practical ideas to support this.)

5. Communicate issues clearly and honestly

Is your instinct to paint the best picture or to trust your advisors with the whole truth? This is especially true when it comes to governance, and arguably works well for your team too.

Three steps to strengthen psychological safety in your team

The challenges at the top of HE can feel overwhelming, but you can have a lot of influence over the environment you create in your own corner of your university.

Here’s what you can do today, taking a leaf from Amy Edmondson’s great exploration of psychological safety, the Gillies Report, and Liberating Structure’s alternatives for how to structure meetings:

1. Frame discussions as learning opportunities for everyone

It’s completely appropriate to admit that things are complex, uncertain, and interdependent. No one perspective can hold all of the data so hearing every single voice is very necessary. Speaking up isn’t risky: it’s the only way you can ensure you have the best understanding.

2. Use vulnerability to de-stress the system

You have power, use it to level the playing field. Tell people, “I don’t know what I don’t know. If you have a doubt, say it – we’ll miss something important if you don’t.” As Amy Edmondson says: “Showing vulnerability acts as an immediate de-stressor for your team.”

3. Encourage the “innocent question”

Commit to making the time for real explorations. Actively ask questions to draw people in, especially those who are quiet. Take the advice from Gillies’s 5 key principles: make it a habit to minute challenges – not just decisions – and ensure every person in the room has contributed to the discussion.

The real risk of low psychological safety

If you are currently shouldering the responsibility for change in HE, there is a clear personal risk, too. Low psychological safety means leaders can become isolated and unable to ask for help or feel able to challenge, leading to poor decisions simply going through. If you or your peers are experiencing high levels of burnout, isolation, or a sense of helplessness, these are critical warning signs that the safety nets of challenge and support may be failing across your institution.

Ultimately, psychological safety is not just about creating a thriving workplace, it’s the foundation of sound financial and institutional governance.

As the Gillies Report reveals, the cultural dynamics that silence an “innocent question” at a committee level are the very same dynamics that can bring down an institution. Cultivating safety isn’t just about being a ‘nicer’ leader; it’s about making your university more resilient, more responsive, and more capable of fulfilling its mission.

Psychological safety is the hidden superpower your organisation needs to navigate the current climate.

When people don’t feel safe to speak up, systems fail – not just teams.

From safety to strategy: why it matters for every leader

The Gillies Report showed how low psychological safety can ripple from executive level right through an institution, silencing the very questions that could prevent disaster.

For leaders in Higher Education, the challenge is twofold: to nurture psychological safety in your own team, and to model it in the wider organisation. That means creating the conditions for curiosity, honest feedback, and shared learning – even, and especially, when things are uncertain.

At ThenSomehow, we’ve seen how one team’s courage to work differently can start to shift a whole institution. Building psychological safety isn’t a soft skill; it’s a strategic capability for resilience and intelligent change.

So ask yourself: what’s one question you could ask today that would make it safer for someone else to speak the truth?

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

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Is your Executive Leadership Team a ‘team’ or just a meeting? How to move beyond the agenda

Howard — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 07:58:06 +0000

Life in Higher Education – or any organisation – seems to get busier, faster, and less predictable every year. The time Executive Leadership Teams have for reflection, relationship building, and understanding complexity is precious and often squeezed out by mandatory governance.

As one Vice-Chancellor recently shared with me, “There is so much formal business to get through, we never have time to think, or be together.”

When a leadership group’s calendar is perpetually locked with statutory meetings to monitor performance, review papers, and rubber-stamp policy, they risk missing out on something critical: genuine team collaboration.

When Team Two Takes Over

When senior leaders never meet as a genuine Team One (ie focusing on the organisation as a whole), to genuinely talk, think things through, or build relationships, they tend to show up to meetings wearing their Team Two hats: representing the self-interest of their individual departments or silos.

They will dutifully contribute to the business at hand, but they may not see the value of going further, of having the difficult conversations that lead to the best long-term outcomes.

Effective teams collaborate well, and to do that, they must learn how to handle conflict and challenge safely, enabling them to hold conflicting perspectives and find the best ‘least-worst’ way forward.

This learning process is a difficult but essential part of the Storming phase of team development (Tuckman/Agazarian et al). It requires trust, appreciation, patience, and understanding — qualities that simply won’t magically occur in the blank lines between an overly committed meeting agenda. If your agenda is full until next quarter and your team hasn’t done that work, that could be a significant risk.

Case Study: The Cost of Discouraging Challenge

The 2025 Gillies report into the financial collapse of Dundee University highlighted a major contributor to their calamity: a “culture in which challenge was actively discouraged.”

Professor Gillies found serious failures in financial governance that were amplified by low psychological safety. The data was all there, but nobody was questioning the financial information they were given because, her report found, there was no culture of constructive challenge at executive or court level, and dissent was routinely shut down.

Culture has an amplifying effect. Without psychological safety, healthy challenge simply cannot thrive. We would guess that Dundee’s senior group met regularly but were not a genuine team. The risk of groupthink and critical oversight failures is significantly higher when difficult conversations are systematically avoided.

Learning from Governance: Mandating Robust Challenge

To find a process-based solution, my co-director Katharine shared an interesting perspective from her work supporting school governance.

Governing bodies often have very structured agendas and formal duties to work through during the cycle of the academic year. Building relationships is challenging when most members are volunteers and so have less time. This led to a very helpful solution: the role of governors is defined in crystal clear terms and includes a requirement to provide robust challenge to their executive team.

The challenge is not on operational details, but disciplined questions about process, validity, implications, and options:

“What steps have you taken?”
“When will you review this?”
“What are the consequences?”

Crucially, these challenges are minuted so the school can prove to Ofsted (the regulator) that the governing body is fulfilling its role appropriately. This process enables the desired challenges.

Leadership teams can learn from this approach.

6 Steps to Shift Your Group from a Meeting to a Team

To shift from being a formal meeting to being a high-performing team — and to avoid the consequences of missed challenge like what happened at Dundee where difficult conversations were avoided — adopt a clear process for enabling robust, effective conversation.

Here’s a checklist for your institution:

Create space and do the work
Meet as a team for more than the statutory sessions. Don’t just socialise; use this time to problem-solve, get into strategic context, and deep-dive on specific issues.

Define clear expectations
Clearly define the responsibilities of your leadership team: strategic oversight, rigorous challenge, critical decision making — not just statutory compliance nor operational management.

Build psychological safety
Actively work on team trust. Welcome questions and concerns, model vulnerability, and take time out of meetings to do group-based developmental work.

Mandate equal airtime
Facilitate meetings to ensure every voice is heard, particularly those from non-traditional or quieter domains.

Think whole-organisation
Act as one group, not a collection of individuals. Leaders must climb out of their silos and self-interest, ready to make sacrifices for the health of the institution if needed.

Record challenges
Record the substantive challenges and questions raised (not just actions and decisions). This demonstrates your robustness and makes the process of challenge visible and auditable.

Which of these steps could help your team move from pure formality to genuine, high-stakes conversation?

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

This article was first published on LinkedIn on October 16th 2025.

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At the start of a new phase in HE: what kind of leaders do we need?

Howard — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 12:07:48 +0000

The UK Higher Education sector is facing a critical moment, defined by financial pressures and market volatility. In 2023/24, many universities reported major deficits, and in 2025 the situation intensified, with the Office for Students forecasting that 43% of institutions will operate at a deficit for the 2024/25 academic year, marking the third consecutive year of financial decline.

In response, universities have been making redundancies and restructures that transform the working and learning conditions in their institution.

In this context of pervasive uncertainty, a senior university executive recently voiced an understandable, yet impossible impulse: “I just want to remove all the ambiguity.”

However, if they were to try to achieve that, it would more likely lead to disaster than success.

Yet it speaks to something many senior leaders in Higher Education feel right now.

This longing for control, predictability, and stability is strong. But chasing that rainbow is as effective as trying to stop the wind from blowing.

Trying to erase uncertainty will fail.

Instead, the kind of leadership needed right now in UK Higher Education is leadership that embraces uncertainty and complexity rather than fighting it.

Why ‘heroic leadership’ often fails in a complex system

When leaders or boards try to remove ambiguity, they often resort to a heroic, top-down leadership style. This involves actions like:

Hiring a charismatic ‘rockstar’ VC with a strong story and an air of certainty.
Rolling up their sleeves to lead from the front, believing only they have the answer.
Clamping down, micromanaging, or telling others to “just get it done.”
Launching a new initiative with a soft sounding name (reshaping, rationalisation, transformation, and our new favourite: ‘easing’).
Not listening to their people.
Letting their executive peers jostle for power.
Changing direction a lot.
Overselling a positive story and dismissing any challenge.
Blaming people for getting things wrong.

In that attempt to be the ‘leader we all need,’ the effect is often the opposite of what’s intended: anxiety rises, effort is wasted, and people withdraw or burn out.

The organisation gets busier, not better. Effort goes into managing fear rather than making progress.

The problem of organisational complexity

Why do we keep falling into these traps? Because we are coded to respond to the fantasy of certainty a heroic leader offers. However, universities are complex systems. There isn’t a single lever to pull or a neat restructure that will make the mess go away. This is precisely why the traditional model of leadership doesn’t serve the current needs of UK Higher Education.

Complexity demands a different response.

One of our ThenSomehow colleagues, Pete Burden, created this great slide that sums it up pretty neatly. Many of us are stuck on the older, dominant model of leadership that doesn’t serve us well.

LHS: The story told about traditional leaders. RHS: Think about your own experience of being alive!

Adaptive leadership works with uncertainty

Fortunately there is an alternative. Instead of trying to control, predict the future, or rely on a single hero, leaders in Higher Education can learn to live with ambiguity and uncertainty, discovering how to roll with unexpected emergence, and practise working with others on complex problems with interdependent solutions.

Instead of telling us what to do, leaders might help us redefine our identity, build networks, access our agency, lead ourselves.

That’s a kind of leadership we get excited about at ThenSomehow. Leadership that is about what people do, not who they are. This approach is less glorious and messier. It can feel slow and not to the point, but ultimately it is more effective.

It establishes a model for people operating together to work through uncertainty, to adapt and iterate. It doesn’t give a single answer, it offers a way to solve a problem – any problem.

Key behaviours of adaptive leaders in Higher Education

Leaders who make the difference do quieter, harder things. They mobilise others, rather than hoarding control. They:

Help people feel safer in ambiguity
Make room for multiple voices and perspectives, including dissonant ones
Acknowledge staff so they don’t feel powerless or ignored
Enable others to lead by giving capable people the autonomy to act.

This means trusting your teams.

It also means using practical tools like consent-based decision-making, (ie “Can you live with this?” rather than “Do you agree?”) which helps teams move, learn and adapt without pretending a certainty that doesn’t exist.

A practical example of adaptive leadership

A great example of this in action was a Dean of Faculty we worked with who resisted calls to adopt a more directive leadership approach, and instead found ways to make time to speak directly to anyone in the faculty that wanted to talk to him. 15-minute meetings and bullet-pointed agendas in advance helped them to prioritise the right topics. People felt listened to and valued. This relational approach worked really well, delivering an almost painless reorganisation.

It worked because it paid attention to identity and belonging.

Identity, belonging, and the human layers of leadership

In our work with HE institutions, we’ve seen how staff identify most strongly with their immediate teams: the people they sit with, solve problems with, and rely on. When change ignores that local identity, it cuts to the core. Engagement drops, trust erodes, and fear dominates.

The same is true for students: success and failure are identity experiences, not just metrics. If leadership doesn’t see the human layers – life stage, values, pressures – it will miss what actually drives behaviour and resilience.

This is disciplined, relational work: setting direction, holding space for honest conversation, naming tensions early, and giving capable people the autonomy to respond to what emerges.

And this might look slow or introspective – but for the people doing the work, it’s rooted in action: do something, see what happens, do something more, adjust, adapt, keep moving.

The message is clear: you are not passive in this system waiting to be led. You are struggling your way through it together. It’s the opposite of performative certainty.

At the start of this academic year, we believe this is what is needed in UK Higher Education: steady presence, shared purpose, spaces to think and act, and the courage to lead with complexity rather than against it.

The kind of leadership that matters is collaborative, adaptive, and deeply human.

Three practical steps for practising adaptive leadership and navigating complexity

Steady, relational, adaptive leadership isn’t about heroic fixes. It’s about practical steps, small experiments, and learning together. Try these three actions, see what emerges, and keep moving.

1. Hold a team check-in around ambiguity

Ask your team: “What’s unclear right now, and how can we act despite it?” Make space for multiple perspectives without rushing to a single answer. Acknowledging the ambiguity is the first step in disarming it. Explore what you collectively feel matters most.

2. Experiment with consent-based decision-making

To move initiatives forward while respecting different views, shift your team’s question from “Do you agree?”, to “Can you live with this?” This allows for forward motion and continued learning, rather than freezing the team until a perfect consensus is reached.

3. Map local identities and influence

Identify where colleagues seem to be working well or where they are stuck. Get curious about the local habits, behaviours, and shared identities that shape your context. What does this tell you about what might work locally, rather than what is being mandated from the top?

If you’d like help making sense of uncertainty in your organisation – with practical programmes that can help, we are always happy to have a chat. It might just shift something important.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post At the start of a new phase in HE: what kind of leaders do we need? appeared first on ThenSomehow.

The invisible trap of isomorphy: how to break free from repeating patterns in Higher Education

Howard — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 14:14:18 +0000

What is isomorphy and why it matters in organisations

There is a principle – known as isomorphy – that patterns repeat across different levels of a system. What happens at the top, especially in leadership teams, is often mirrored across departments, faculties, and functions – even if no one realises it.

Put simply, isomorphy means that patterns at one level of an organisation often mirror themselves at other levels. It’s like the way the patterns in the fjords of Norway look the same no matter how much you zoom in.

Recognising isomorphy in your organisation

To understand isomorphy better, it helps to look at the current challenges facing the UK Higher Education sector such as leadership culture. When looking at these we often see repeating patterns across our Higher Education clients. These patterns repeat across different institutions and they reverberate up and down organisations with the power to both energise and diminish agency and effectiveness.

More than one head of service has complained that their teams are struggling to juggle competing priorities, or to react to sudden changes of direction, or are afraid of provoking a negative reaction from somebody senior.

When we hear these stories, the first place we look is up, to try to find the source of the pattern.

All too often it’s present right at the top. Senior leaders competing with each other rather than working toward the broader interests of the institution. Or a charismatic VC who will brook no challenge.

The isomorphy of these behaviours is powerful.

Case study: the University of Dundee

The recent Gillies report into the financial woes at the University of Dundee was highly critical of weak governance and a culture that discouraged challenge, and how that particular pattern contributed to its failure. The inability of the University Court to provide sufficient challenge was echoed in the executive and senior management levels and almost certainly in the levels below that.

That’s the thing about isomorphy: what happens in one place is happening everywhere.

If a senior leader feels the need to protect themselves from a capricious boss, they won’t challenge, they won’t make proposals, they won’t back up their peers or receive back up in return. Their isolation might lead to overwork and burnout, or behaviours damaging to others. Their teams will get frustrated when plans suddenly switch, and when their well-reasoned proposals get rejected on a whim they’ll start to spend more energy on trying to manage the politics than solving the problems. Worse, they’ll stop raising concerns.

They’ll stop taking the initiative and wait to be told what to do rather than waste their efforts.

Ultimately, they become passive, slow to respond, and focused on survival.

It’s not anyone’s fault – but it is everyone’s opportunity.

The domino effect of isomorphy: how patterns cascade through teams and leadership

A few years ago, we were called into a faculty where tensions between heads of teams and the leadership felt as though they had reached breaking point. Trust had collapsed. When we sat down to explore what was going wrong we found a repeating pattern.

The team leads were complaining they were experiencing:

Lack of clarity
Poor communication
Poorly wielded power
Conflicting interests and priorities
No time to manage properly
Mistrust
No space to talk about what’s difficult

And when we spoke to the managers above them, they explained that they were going through exactly the same thing. They were also unclear, stressed, overworked and unsupported. They were also frustrated and operating with lack of clarity, using their best guesses.

Each level was frustrated and irritated at the levels above and below them. Everyone was blaming everyone else. Everyone believed someone else had the power to fix things.

Everyone was looking up for a solution.

Once it became clear that everyone was trapped in the same pattern – and that no one person had the power to fix it – they realised they had to find a solution together.

That wasn’t easy, especially with a lot of bad feeling that was so hard to let go of. But it was possible, with patience and effort.

Breaking the pattern with relational leadership

This experience highlights a key point: If you notice what’s hard for you – the confusion, the anxiety, the lack of transparency, the powerlessness to address it – there’s a very good chance your team is experiencing the same thing. There is a good chance it feels worse for them.

And in fact, they might be experiencing it because you are.

So what helps? In our work, we’ve found the simplest – and hardest – answer is: listening.

Really listening.

By slowing down and creating space to hear what’s happening beneath the surface, you can take a relational approach that helps teams recover. If you get good at it and do it repeatedly, you can prevent things from getting bad in the first place.

Real-world example: a faculty group rebuilds trust

It was only when the faculty group we supported stopped blaming each other, realised they all cared and discovered they were all trapped in the same pattern, that they could start to find their own solutions and enough clarity to operate effectively together.

The power of listening differently

Effective listening goes beyond simply hearing words. It’s about:

i. Listening to understand

To find out what’s actually going on for people – what they are seeing, how they interpret that, what it makes them feel and their underlying needs. This is an important part of including and enabling people, and can reveal differences in understanding that create opportunities.

ii. Listening to draw out those differences

Everyone experiences things slightly differently. These differences can feel like a challenge or a threat, but they are actually a chance to find new solutions.

And yes, it is difficult. Everyone’s under pressure to deliver. Time is tight. When you’re working remotely, spreading your time across multiple priorities. You don’t bump into each other in corridors anymore. And when you are face to face it’s still hard to go deeper.

But if you don’t find time to really understand each other, or the relational skills to have conversations in the right way, misunderstandings can multiply. For example:

I think I’m being inclusive and open, but you experience me as unclear and indecisive.
I believe I’m as transparent as I can be, but I don’t actually understand what you need.
You expect support, but I’m also struggling to stay afloat.

What feels like conflict is often just misaligned intent, unclear expectations and unspoken assumptions. And without seeing the patterns of isomorphy, you risk replicating them.

Small actions that can shift the system

The good news is that these patterns can be broken. If you pause, you might discover that the things that feel like differences are actually commonalities, and the things that you’re craving are shared.

If you’re a leader who can slow down, listen differently, and communicate with more clarity, – you can shift the dynamic not just in your team, but across the entire organisation

This is because isomorphy works both ways. If suffering can replicate, so can care. If confusion cascades, so can clarity. By intentionally trying to shift the pattern, you will have an impact far beyond your immediate sphere.

Practical steps for leaders to disrupt repeating patterns

1. Spot the pattern
Take five minutes to notice what’s frustrating you. Then ask yourself: is this also showing up in my team? What might I be unintentionally passing on?

2. Listen differently
In your next one-to-one or team meeting, try asking: “What’s one thing you wish was clearer right now?” Then just listen, without fixing or defending.

3. Explore it further
If you’d like help making sense of the patterns in your team or leadership group – we have tools we can recommend – and are always happy to have a chat. It might just shift something important.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.

The post The invisible trap of isomorphy: how to break free from repeating patterns in Higher Education appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Beyond Job Titles: How Leaders Can Support Identity in Times of Change

Howard — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 15:53:50 +0000

Who would you be if you didn’t have your job?

Years ago I was the managing director of a radio station in Brighton. At the time, the station was being sold, and I busted a gut to help make that happen.

Some people became millionaires.

I didn’t – I didn’t have any shares.

I was given a nice bottle of wine. So swings and roundabouts.

I thought the sale would fix everything. The new owner had deep pockets, and for the first time in ages, we had enough money to pay all the bills. That felt like a relief.

Then they fired me.

Technically they moved me into another role and brought somebody else in as MD. (It didn’t go well. The new person was a disaster.)

But for me, it triggered a collapse of identity. I’d been “the guy who ran the radio station,” and suddenly I wasn’t.

I remember the moment I had to change my voicemail. It used to say, “You’ve reached Steve at Surf 107.2”.

Deleting that message really hit home.

My whole sense of value had been tied up in that job.

It was a turning point.

I made a decision: never again will I define myself solely by what I do for a living.

Because I am not my job. I’m me.

Who are you if your job disappears?

I ran into an old friend this week. His role is at risk of redundancy. The company offered him a different role, one they wanted him to do. He told me, “I think I won’t. I think I’ll go.”

So he did. And then immediately had a mini crisis.

Who was he going to be now?

In a Gallup survey of over 18,665 US workers, nearly 70% said their organisation experienced disruptive change within the last year – and half of them report burnout and disengagement as a consequence.

In the context of the current financial pressures facing Higher Education in the UK, a lot of people are facing similar challenges.

Why job loss or role change shakes us to the core

When your job is at risk or your role is changing or no longer needed, it’s no wonder people feel anxious, or even betrayed.

Years of discretionary effort. Loyalty. Hard work. It suddenly counts for nothing when deep cuts are being made.

If it’s your job at risk, it’s not just the fear of losing an income that affects you; it’s the sense of betrayal and the self recrimination for surrendering so much of yourself. And all those hours focused on work instead of friends and family, turned out to be a poor investment.

Alongside all that, troubling questions bubble up:

What is my status here?
Am I a victim or do I have agency?
As a professional services person or as a junior academic – do I have any power?

Talking about this in our HELP group recently, one person asked, “I’m the Director of projects – if I’m not that, what am I?”

That’s the thing. For so many of us, identity gets wrapped around our role. Our job title becomes shorthand for our worth.

That person went on to reflect, “I’m also really good at directing projects, which is a skill I can apply in many different domains.”

The point: identity isn’t fixed. It’s multi-layered. It’s not one thing – it’s the sum of lots of things including what people know, love, and respect about us.

This matters organisationally.

Identity and belonging in organisations: a leadership challenge

We recently worked with a faculty at a London university, asking people which parts of the institution they identified with. Unsurprisingly people identified most with their immediate teams – a strong indicator of engagement, satisfaction and belonging. Interestingly, where we expected the sense of belonging to diminish when we looked further out from the local team, something else was happening. People identified with their department and the wider institution, but not with their school or faculty.

The reason? The study found a leadership vacuum at school and faculty levels, driven largely by unclear expectations of leadership roles. No one saw the value of them or the importance of shaping a collective identity at that level. When the inevitable faculty restructure happened people felt threatened by the change, their sense of belonging torn up by a part of the system they did not feel connected to or safe within.

Building identity beyond your job title: a personal journey

Someone asked me what advice I would give for not over-investing in one identity?

I could only say what happened for me. When I left radio I became a freelancer. I had no plan and no safety net. With a young family, that felt risky. (And it would have felt impossible if not for my wife’s salary).

But it worked out. I found work. I stayed busy.

At the same time I broadened my sense of who I was:

I volunteered as a scout leader and enjoyed being part of a team.
I joined the board of the local play group, and
I picked up new skills: I took up knitting and woodwork.

By saying yes to more things and putting myself out there I reconnected with a friend and we started a business together that lasted five years. It was the precursor for ThenSomehow.

All of that came from letting go of a fixed idea of myself.

How leaders can support people through identity-shaking change

In my coaching work I am often asked to help people reframe the negative stories they tell themselves – the ones that hold them back.

And that feels like a key skill for a manager or a leader: demonstrating that you believe in a person even when they don’t believe in themselves.

Especially during change, which can be really traumatic. A reorganisation can break apart teams and communities, roles and titles. It can destabilise your sense of who you are. Especially if you have overinvested in your work identity.

It’s no wonder people often respond negatively to change.

That’s where leaders can help.

Not by giving life advice – but by noticing the signs of overinvestment and creating new kinds of opportunities:

Encouraging people to connect outside their silos.
Supporting people to take on projects or roles that stretch them, including outside of work.
Highlighting skills and strengths that go beyond their current job.
Involving everyone affected by a change in the conversation so they feel heard.

And perhaps most importantly: by modelling that yourself.

It’s a key leadership skill: helping people see that their identity is bigger than their job title.

Because change is easier to face for all of us when we know who we are beyond our roles.

So if you’re going through a restructure, it might feel like the ground’s shifting – but the truth is, you’re still you.

The work might change. The title might change. But your value doesn’t.

A case study: making change smoother through listening and clarity

One HE leader – a dean of a faculty – created a lot of space to hear people out during a change, in a really effective way:

They arranged 15-minute meetings, with a ‘no meeting without an agenda’ rule, plus a requirement to summarise the purpose in three bullet points ahead of the meeting:

What’s this about?
What do you want to achieve?
What do you need from me?

This meant they could spend time with lots of people without getting swamped. This approach was critical to understanding what was really going on during the change programme.

It helped everyone feel heard, their needs recognised.

And it reduced the sense of done-to helplessness that so often drives much of the anger and frustration felt by people whose sense of self worth and agency is denied.

There was an added benefit too: their EA had enough clarity to triage meeting requests and be able to protect their time. For projects that were clear, the EA could say “yes, go ahead” without needing a meeting, or “no, it’s not thought through enough, come back with something clearer.” The EA also grew in confidence and purpose – no longer just ‘managing a diary’ but being an integral partner for the dean.

At the end of the process, the leader got a surprising compliment: “This was the smoothest reorganisation I’ve ever been part of.”

No bloodletting. Just listening, clarity, and a shared sense of agency.

Four ways leaders can help people through change

Four things you can do to lead more effectively through identity-shaking change:

Spot signs of over-identification – in yourself and others. When someone’s self-worth seems tightly wrapped around their job, open up space to explore what else they bring. Encourage them to broaden their network, do a secondment, take a developmental course.

Create small openings – low-risk, high-trust moments where people can show up as more than their role: peer learning groups, cross-silo projects, mentoring others, enabling volunteering.

Model a multi-layered identity – if you are comfortable, talk openly about what matters to you beyond your job. It gives others permission to do the same.

Take time to actively listen to people – help them feel heard, help them find what agency they can. Show them their concerns and contributions are valued and that you believe their motivations are good.

If this resonates – with you or your team – and you’re navigating change, a culture shift or have questions about identity at work, get in touch here, we’re always happy to chat.

The post Beyond Job Titles: How Leaders Can Support Identity in Times of Change appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Leading and Motivating Archives - ThenSomehow

The gap at the heart of leadership development in Higher Education

This is what is wrong with leadership programmes

The myth of leadership with a big ‘L’

Why the assumption persists

Leadership doesn’t live in a classroom

A different approach

What actually makes a difference

Small intentional shifts compound

Reframing leadership development

A final thought

What you can do next

The conversation you’re avoiding is holding your university team back

Difficult conversations in Higher Education

The cost of silence in HE

The invisible debt of unresolved conflict

Reframing conflict as a superpower

How teams get stuck

The trap of the mental rehearsal

A personal lesson: when the problem was me

How this plays out in teams

Moving from friction to collaboration

7 guidelines for a good conversation mindset

What you can do: a call to action

The leadership you need? It’s already in your teams

The cost of centralised attention

An alternative to looking up

Distributed leadership in action

Principles for unlocking leadership everywhere

Small moves, big impact

Challenges to distributed leadership

A different way to lead

Taking action: what you can try now

Why better conversations matter more than perfect plans in Higher Education

From 10-year visions to responsive strategy

The fallacy of the plan

Planning vs the plan

A different approach

Leading in uncertainty

When control replaces conversation

Two workshops, two outcomes

A final reflection

Taking Action: What You Can Do Now as a Leader in HE

Keep planning, but hold the plan lightly.

Create spaces for contextual conversations.

Focus on fewer, clearer priorities.

Develop adaptive leadership skills.

Be willing to stop or redirect.

How distributed leadership unlocks decision-making in universities

Everyone’s looking up for the answer

The culture of permission

The cost of assuming we need to be led

A different view of leadership

Unlocking agency in practice

What helps people step up

What leadership really looks like

So what might this mean for you?

Why psychological safety is the hidden superpower for organisational change

The hidden power of psychological safety in Higher Education

When local teams thrive but senior leaders panic

High motivation, high anxiety: the paradox of academia

The cost of silence: what the Gillies Report reveals

How low psychological safety amplified financial risk

The cultural risks of discouraging dissent

Building psychological safety from the top down

Five key principles for building psychological safety from the Gillies Report

1. Make it a principle to actively challenge your financials

2. Model fearless questioning

3. Be receptive to challenge

4. Encouraging curiosity in every forum

5. Communicate issues clearly and honestly

Three steps to strengthen psychological safety in your team

1. Frame discussions as learning opportunities for everyone

2. Use vulnerability to de-stress the system

3. Encourage the “innocent question”

The real risk of low psychological safety

From safety to strategy: why it matters for every leader

Is your Executive Leadership Team a ‘team’ or just a meeting? How to move beyond the agenda

When Team Two Takes Over

Case Study: The Cost of Discouraging Challenge