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image and ending up with a staff of ‘mini-mes’ who see the world exactly like you do). Honest feedback will help you to clarify your areas of strength and where you need to improve. The added bonus is that leaders who seek feedback will appear more confident than those who avoid it. This in turn inspires confidence in you from your team.
8. Plug your gaps High pressure combined with low skill levels leads to stress. Yes, you should own your strengths but own your weaknesses too. Address them. Find some professional development that will help you improve. Yes, budgets are squeezed so tightly at present, but it does not have to be an expensive course necessarily. Spending time working alongside or shadowing a colleague skilled in one of your weaker areas, be they in your school or in another, will increase your knowledge and skills base, helping you to feel more confident. Finance was my Achilles’ heel when I started out as a head but, by working on improving my knowledge and understanding, I became competent and, without tooting my own trumpet too much, I was pretty good at it and could hold my own in complex budget meetings with the local authority.
9. Keep track of your priorities for the week I have rarely met a school leader who was not really busy, and if they were not, they were probably not doing the job well. Most leaders have a ’to-do’ list as long as their arm (well two arms actually). The temptation (and I know because I did it at times) is to complete lots of quick actions so that you can tick more off the list, but in doing so you are often completing low-impact actions first. Ask yourself whether this is the best use of your time. Are there some items on the list that would have a bigger impact but they are the can that ‘keeps getting kicked down the street’?
Riding the Waves
10. Ask for help where it is needed Knowing where and when you need input from others is important. Yes, you are paid to make the final decisions (and of course how swiftly a decision needs to be made), but gathering more information and the views of trusted colleagues will help you to make decisions with greater conviction. (For more on this see Ten Traits of Resilience, Chapter 5, ‘Decisiveness’ and Chapter 6, ‘Asking for help’.)
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