Which leaders create lasting change?

The Heywood Quarterly’s first podcast provides some compelling answers

What sort of leaders perform best in schools? What qualities distinguish enduring organisations like NASA, the All Blacks rugby team, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal College of Music? And what can we learn from them to help improve leadership in the UK public sector?

Suzanne Heywood, Chair of the Heywood Foundation, sat down in January this year to discuss these questions with Professor Alex Hill and Dr David Halpern, two distinguished leadership and organisational experts.

Alex is Professor of Operational Management at Kingston Business School and Co-Founder and Director of The Centre for High Performance (a collaboration between senior faculty from the Universities of Kingston, Duke Corporate Education, London Business School and the University of Oxford). David founded the Behavioural Insights Team (or Nudge Unit) in Tony Blair’s government, remains at the forefront of applying behavioural science to the real world and is now Director and Fellow at Downing Battcock Institute, Cambridge.

The conversation focused on two recent research projects led by Alex – a 2015 study of more than 400 UK state-funded academies, in which he identified five archetypes of school head, and his 2023 book Centennials: The 12 Habits of Great, Enduring Organisations, which looks at the qualities institutions need to thrive over the long-term.

Here are some takeaways from the podcast which you can listen to here.

Sustainable change takes time

We all know that real change doesn’t happen overnight. As Alex argues, “headteachers should make at least a five to ten-year commitment” at their schools in order to deliver meaningful improvement. Anything less risks surface-level gains that disappear when they move on. That’s why great leaders are also great stewards – they don’t just focus on the current results, but also on what happens after they leave.

We often reward the wrong leaders – and the wrong outcomes

Beware the opportunists. In schools, this means heads who take poor performers out of the exam system, move the best teachers to the exam classes and thereby boost the proportion of students in their schools achieving five GCSE passes (widely seen as a predictor of success in life). These tactics seem to work on paper and they’re often rewarded.

As Alex notes, a third of those who game the system in this way – the ones he calls the “Surgeons” – get knighthoods. “There was one head who had a picture of every student on the wall, and it was like a race track to get them to five GCSEs,” he recalls.
Such measures of performance not only reward short termism but discourage growth (good teachers have an incentive to stay in small schools). Great organisations with great leaders should be scaled up, so as to maximise their impact.

The best leaders are “Architects”

The most successful leaders are “Architects”, humble and often inconspicuous people who are in it for the long haul, engage with all stakeholders and build the right environment before focusing on improving everything else. As one Architect put it, “nobody should notice when I leave the room.” Despite that, Alex says “everyone on the inside knows who they are and how significant they are.”

By contrast, “Philosophers” may be charismatic and good at delivering inspirational speeches, but they make the most ineffective school heads.

While hubristic leaders often encourage group think, David says the best leaders build teams and seek to recruit people [who] are even better than them. We need to find and support “Architects” in the public sector, he says, understanding that it takes time for them to build effective systems.

Too much management and leadership thinking comes from business

“If you want to understand long term success, look at the arts, look at sports, look at the military, look at science,” Alex argues. “Business is great if you want to do well for 10 years. But if you want to do well beyond that, then you need to think differently.”

One example is The Royal Academy of Music, a Centennial where around 70% of staff work part-time. They don’t follow the conventional business maxim that you should own all your resources. “What I want is the best people in the world to give me a third of their time,” Alex explains. “I want to know that they are working on the best things elsewhere, learning elsewhere, and then bringing all that learning back [to me]”.

We should balance stability and a disruptive edge

Successful and enduring organisations have a core around purpose and clarity, but they also have a disruptive edge.

According to David, large government departments often lack that disruptive and innovative edge. One indicator of this is how much they spend on R&D: in most cases, it’s a lot less than 1%, with many spending less than a quarter of a percent. In contrast, the car company Volkswagen spends roughly double the UKRI budget in a year just to make their cars slightly better.

“If you’re working with a startup, […] the challenge is to put some stability [into the structure],” Alex says. “If you’re working with a 200-year-old organisation, the challenge is to put some disruption into it.” Getting that balance right is critical.