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Hello and welcome along. This is Walk into Your Next Grade, a podcast for thoughtful Higher Education professionals who are exploring career development. I'm Fiona Bicket, your host and resident professional development coach. And week in, week out, I'm here to help you explore the moves that matter most as, you Get Ready for Your Next Grade.
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And having just said that introduction out loud, what I'm actually going to do is suggest that for the next few episodes, we divert slightly from that plan. So I've just had my five years in business workaversary.
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Yay! And it really sparked me to do some reflection. So I've been back through client notes from the last few years. I've looked back over programmes I've delivered and loved, and thinking really carefully about the work and the conversations and the themes that I like to coach about most and that come up most often in my work.
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And so my suggestion is, for the next few episodes, what we do actually is take a bit of a shift away from explicitly career progression conversations and more into some of the threshold moments or the themes of the conversations that come up in coaching all the time, because we're kind of then going to be reverse engineering your career progression.
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So today is a bit of an introduction. I want to tell you about the series and what are the themes that we'll be covering. And then over the next few episodes, like I said, we'll unpack, each one in a bit more detail so that you can see if it resonates for you, if you see yourself reflected in what I'm describing.
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And I'll give you some pointers about how to move through it. Now, really importantly, I want us to situate these conversations in relation to my work as a coach. So I am a coach first.
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I'm like facilitator, trainer, all of that stuff second. And so these conversations are what I actually hear in conversation in with clients, in coaching conversations, and not what the theory says.
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It's not what kind of good practise looks like, it's what I'm really seeing day to day. And, So, yeah, hopefully some of this will be familiar. It's definitely familiar to me as well, because I know there have been some of these moments in my own career before I started this business, when I was working in HE as a professional services manager.
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So each of them relates to a pivotal moment or practice or bit of tension that crops up for managers and for leaders in their work.
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And then I think the sort of side effect of all of that is as you move through them, you actually are more likely to get promoted. It's one of those kind of, side effects, let's say, or kind of reverse engineering because what you're doing is solving some of the tension that you're experiencing and some of the friction that you're experiencing in managing and leading, so that then you're just doing a better job.
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And then your senior leaders see you doing that better job, they see you having more capacity, they then see you as somebody who's really capable, incredible and then promotion opportunities or new roles are more likely to come up, and you're also more likely to apply for them because you suddenly have some mental bandwidth back, and you're like, oh, well, I could actually apply for that or I can see myself doing that job.
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So I hope you don't mind the departure from the sort of scheduled programming, but we're going to go through, like I said, this little series and talk about each of these shifts in a bit more detail. So here's the list, some of them are quite management focused, some of them are quite leadership focused.
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And I just want to take a moment to uncouple the ideas of leadership and management from authority, from seniority. You know, actually a lot of really good management starts with self leadership and so I think whether you're really new in your career as a manager, or if you're very senior and think of yourself more as a leader, you'll probably find that some of these ideas resonate.
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And I also think some of these challenges or moments in friction, tension are, you can kind of see them play out in why some academic leaders struggle as well is because they sort of do the reverse of what professional services do.
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So, professional services typically you come up as a officer, whatever, like, job title, you've been an individual contributor. Then you might get a sort of team leadership type of role. Then you probably move into your first management role, senior manager, and then Head of Service or something that kind of looks and feels more like leadership.
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Remember though, everybody from the Vice Chancellor down is a line manager of some description, but on the academic side what happens is people spend their careers trying to be professor of whatever their field of expertise is. Then they get told, well, you can't progress in your career until you've taken a leadership position.
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And when they say leadership position, often that then requires some line management and so they start being programme directors and Head of School and those kind of roles that suddenly require them to be managing people where they might have been quite senior in their field of expertise, and then all of a sudden they're like, what?
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Why don't we know how to do management? Or I don't know how to have this difficult conversation, or whatever it is. So I think that's where some of the tension comes, because professional services are looking at academics and going, what? Why the hell? Where do all these issues come from? And it's because suddenly they're thrust into management situations that they're not really prepared for.
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Anyway that's a little side thesis and I'm going to talk you through the list of the moments, thresholds, tensions that I want to cover off in this series of episodes and hopefully you see yourself in some of them.
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They are in no particular order. So it's not like a journey that you progress through one and then the next one and then the next one. They're more kind of like interlinked circles or, I don't know, like parts of a map, let's say, where if you're trying to go from Scotland to London, you might pass through Milton Keynes, but you might not or Milton Keynes might be your ultimate destination or whatever.
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I don't know. I don't know what I'm trying to say with that. Let's back away from the map metaphor. Here's the list. They're in no particular order. The first one is time to think. So people really often come to coaching, they're like, I just don't have time to think or they have this kind of fantasy that the time to think will come when...
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when I've recruited these three people into my team, or when we get to the end of cycle, or when I've been on holiday. Whatever the thing is, is this kind of time to think. I'm not finding time to think and I think the flip here that we'll talk about in a load more detail is actually about, reclaiming your mental bandwidth and how to do that, why that feels so gross, what are the things that keep people in coaching conversations that I'm having in this sort of spiral of not having enough time.
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Yes, some of it is structural and you really do need three more people in your team, but I think there's some other stuff going on here that explains some of that. So we'll have a chat about that. Okay. The next one is the Repeating Conversation Loop. So I've recently been debriefing 360 degree feedback reports for participants on a women's leadership development programme for a large university in central London, and this is the most common conversation that we've been having.
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Actually, the last two. I don't have any time to think. Also, oh no a lawn mower is coming. What a nightmare. I'm gonna have to pause the episode here and move myself away from this really loud noise.
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This is the downside of recording outside. Back in a bit. Okay. Hello. Welcome back. I've moved, so hopefully we won't get too much lawnmower noise. Where was I? Yes. Okay, so the next one is the Repeating Conversation Loop.
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So I definitely know I experienced this one when I was working in HE before I started this business where you've got something going on in your team, like somebody's underperforming or there's a behaviour issue, or they keep making mistakes and you keep having the same conversation where you try to be supportive and understand what the problem is and help them to be better and they either apologise or they withdraw.
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Maybe they even kind of get emotional and then go off sick. And you keep going round and round and round this conversation and nothing gets resolved. And it's probably one of those things that is destroying your peace of mind and it's the thing that keeps you awake at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're like sitting there looking at your enormous to do list, like, how am I meant to do all of this?
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Then you realise, well actually, if that person was doing their job properly at full capacity, and if you didn't have to keep worrying about having this conversation with them, then probably both of you would be getting on with a lot more work. Sound familiar? So we'll be talking about how to get out of that loop, because it is something that comes up in conversation with clients all the time, over and over and over and over.
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It's one of the most common challenges that I see managers having. Well psychologically, there's a real trap in it, but also it's one of the things that causes senior leaders to not promote people is because they're like, well, there's all this drama going on in your team, or they kind of know, even if you're covering for the person who's underperforming or having the behaviour issue, they kind of know that you're not dealing with it and, like, with the greatest respect in the world right, they know that it's causing you a load of drama.
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And so they kind of sense that you don't really have capacity to progress to more interesting work because you're stuck in the drama of this person or this conversation that keeps going on and on, or covering for them when they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing. The next one is related, but maybe a bit before, or maybe it's part of the worry, actually, about moving the conversation on is the hope of outsourcing management.
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So this is where you're experiencing some challenges in the team. You kind of hope that HR will tell you what to do, like how to manage this performance issue or how to move the behaviour issue forward. Hoping that your manager will deal with it for you.
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Okay, so what we're thinking about here, then, is like a mindset upgrade because there's this kind of illusion, right? Well HR will tell me what to do or my manager will step in and deal with it for me and then there's this dawning realisation, oh actually nobody's coming to save me.
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So that's a moment that's really great to bring to coaching because nobody's coming to save you. A coach is not going to save you either, but a coach will help you work through why it feels so gross and help you to find the courage to move the issue forwards.
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And part of that is this sliding scale around the transition that happens between responsibility and accountability, where in our earlier careers as like individual contributors then we have responsibility, you have to do a load of stuff and then as we progress into management and leadership then we need to, to be accountable for a load of stuff.
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So this is a shift in mindset and ways of thinking and communicating that if we don't adequately make that transition then we Continuing to do all the stuff and you know, hoping that someone's going to come and save us from our issues when actually the realisation is oh, I have to be the one who deals with all the issues.
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Gross, but also coaching is where we can help you figure out how to do that. Okay, next is also related. Can you see there's a theme and a pattern here? But this is overworking to protect the team.
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And this is where you maybe think, well, the team can't handle more so I have to protect them and so I'm going to pick up all the slack myself. And the switch that we'll talk about here, this is really related to all the previous things, right?
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No time to think. Well, because I'm doing all of the do there's this repeating conversation loop. I'm being really over responsible and not setting up accountability so people can do stuff. There's a whole bunch of complicated things happening here and we want to shift again, it's related to that.
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Think about the slider, from responsibility to accountability and we want to be delegating really well, really cleanly and there's also another side of it. So delegating down cleanly and negotiating upwards, to make sure that the work that we're being asked to do is right sized for the team and the resource that we have.
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Which I know is a real challenge right now when everybody's under resourced, but I think that is a fundamental challenge that we need to deal with differently. Not just, okay, well you've made me make a 10% headcount saving and then you've given me an extra 20% of work because that right there is a 30% disparity.
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So we need to do something different in how we're managing upwards, leading upwards, how we're helping our managers to think about the work that we do and how much capacity we have. So we'll talk about that. Okay, next one is.
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This is one that happens typically when things in the team, immediate team or teams, if you've got a large portfolio remit, things in our team are going really well.
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Everybody's getting on and doing their jobs, everyone's pulling in the right direction, things are happening, you're making progress and then your peers and colleagues start messing up and you find that there is a team or another senior manager who is just not pulling their weight, they're not, they're not doing the things that they need to be doing or maybe a big mistake happens and you feel really tempted to swoop in and solve it for them or take responsibility.
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So again, this is kind of anchoring into this accountability, responsibility bit. But the shift here is also about recognising that sometimes our responsibility is not for the work per se, it's not about doing things.
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So we're not going to step in and take over processes that don't belong in our remit, but actually about framing the risk that is presented to our, area of work by that person's mistake or problems and leading upwards.
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So again, escalating that risk in a really appropriate way and asking your senior leaders to do the thing that you all ultimately know needs to happen, but that they are actually afraid of doing. So we'll talk about that in some detail because it again has, come up in several conversations recently.
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It's not just one person experiencing that. Okay. Related to that is this bit about being the adult in the room. Keep having this conversation as well, where people are quite accomplished managers, they are finding themselves in periods of change.
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I mean, who in the sector is not in change at the moment? And making suggestions and everyone going, yeah, let's do that, and then looking around going, shit, I didn't expect you to just jump and say, yeah, let's do it. And so there's something here about noticing where there's a leadership vacuum probably above you because you're sort of hoping that the person who you report to is going to be the leader, noticing they're not doing it and realising that they're all making shit up as they go along too.
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And then thinking really intentionally about how you position yourself in relation to that leadership vacuum and, stepping into the identity of the leader, letting yourself be the capable one in that circumstance.
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Okay, next, this turning to quite a big list, isn't it? But next, and I think this is the final one, is permission to be an introverted leader. So this is a quiet communication threshold where people will come to coaching and they'll say things like, well, you know, I don't know how to lead and be part of a really valuable part of this leadership team.
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When everybody else is extroverted and charismatic and has loads to say and is actually kind of making loads of noise and maybe not seeing the point and creating all this drama. And so they think they need to be more extroverted or more charismatic.
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And actually, I think the switch here is about appreciating and giving yourself permission for quiet communication. This is where you're finding ways of communicating and leading that are fit for purpose, but also fit for person.
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So if you're not an extroverted, loud charismatic, although I don't think that being loud and charismatic are necessarily the same thing or that being introverted and charismatic are mutually exclusive. But if you're witnessing other people as, as those things, not identifying as those things, really giving yourself permission to find ways of leading and communicating that feel right for you, that will give you so much more peace of mind when you start to give yourself permission to do that.
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Okay, that is the end of my big list. And I really hope this sounds good for you. I hope that you find something in the list that resonates with you and that you can see how actually overcoming some of these thresholds, implementing some of these practices, dealing with some of these tensions or moment sort of areas of friction in your work, will give you the mental bandwidth that then allows you to be great at actually the important stuff.
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And as I said in the intro, make the moves that matter most. As you're Getting Ready for Your Next Grade. It's like, well let's upgrade some of this thinking, clear some of that mental clutter and baggage so that you can just feel better about what it is that you're doing.
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And through doing that, you'll probably find you gain confidence and then you'll be applying for more interesting jobs and taking on bigger remits and getting promoted before you know it. All right, so this was the intro. The next few episodes we will dig into each of those phenomena that I am exploring in coaching conversations with my clients in real life.
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And have a look at what's going on. What's going on there, why is it going on, and how can you move through it if you are experiencing those same phenomena. All right, thanks for listening. I'll speak to you soon bye.
