Leadership?

I got a new qualification back in May. I’m usually very proud of getting new qualifications, including my PGCert in Academic Practice, which most people treat as a burden. I didn’t tweet or brag about this one though because it was a leadership qualification. I am now an accredited leader to level 5 of the Institute of Learning and Management leadership framework. I was ashamed of this qualification because of one of the key learning points from the course for me – that when we think of “leaders” in English, we think of, well ultimately:

A man. Shouting. Bullying people to do what he wants them to do. And ultimately what he wants people to do is wrong.

I ended up doing the course because after I was promoted to Senior Lecturer last year I ended up leading a couple of key pieces of work in the University – leading a research programme, and leading an Athena SWAN application. I realised in October 2016 that I was writing about how good the Aurora leadership programme was for women and thought I need something like that. Fortunately for me, a space had come up on the University’s ILM5 course that was starting the following week. Luckily I could make all the sessions over the six months. I realised quite how much I needed it when I was walking through Waverley Station the day after I'd said to HR I would do it and I burst into tears realising that I'd said "I can't do this anymore and need some help."

Because of my preconceptions about leadership, I went in very skeptically and determined to have a feminist approach to my learning. Chatting to colleagues, they suggested speaking to Frances Patterson who leads our social work leadership courses. She put me onto shared leadership theory that is heavily informed by feminism, and particularly the work of Joyce Fletcher on post-heroic leadership.

A lot of contemporary leadership theory is based on neuroscience, and I have to confess, I remain unconvinced of that. I’m just too focused on understanding sociologically to accept psychological evidence for human behaviour.

Engaging with the literature and realising that the way I operate in organisations is good leadership that is empirically demonstrated to lead to better performance was really eye-opening and empowering. As I say, I think the word “leadership” in English is too corrupted now. If we were into compounds nouns in English, like the Germans, I’d say empoweringcaringsharingrolemodelperson would be a much better word.

As part of the course I got some leadership coaching sessions with Michele Armstrong. I had my last session this morning and it gave me time to reflect on my “leadership journey”. A big part of my leadership reflection was getting to my core values – what makes me tick. These are helping the most vulnerable in society and delivering equality. Another key value for me is competence, and getting the job done and delivering change.

One key reflection, that I need to discuss with others, is how I come across on this. Although these are my values, and I would say they are progressive, I don’t immediately leap to activism, resistance and complaint to go about delivering them. I like to go with the grain and use bureaucracy for positive ends. Also, in a HE context, a lot of the things that are the focus of ire – audit and “administration” – because they are “Neil Librul”, I actually think are not all bad. Following Clive Barnett, I always look for the shades of grey in our friend Neil. He’s not a totalising force. A lot of his tools – like audit, or performance measures – can be used to progressive ends. I feel more comfortable in this space and doing this work, and I think I need to talk about it a bit more as I'm worried I come across as a management stooge.

I keep my “resistance” quieter. For me, it means using the inefficiency of bureaucracy to thwart its own ends – no one will notice if I don’t fill in that spreadsheet I’ve been asked to complete. I’ll conveniently forget to forward on requests to protect colleagues from something either I could do, or I think is ill-advised and needs to be rethought. In working with colleagues, I’ll focus on how exciting their ideas are and encourage them to take them further, rather than bash them over the head with targets. If you meet the targets it’s a bonus, but your job should be enjoyable, empowering and intellectual stimulating. The chances are, if you are doing that sort of job then your “customers” (students) will be happy and getting good learning (and a Gold TEF award) and you’ll be doing the sort of research that will tick the REF boxes.

I suppose a key frustration of mine though is that on these leadership and coaching courses I go on, everyone has been like me - already a very good leader, who just needs to space to reflect and some theory and practical ideas to hone their skills. That we have said to ourselves that we need to develop these skills, to me, says that we are good leaders. Those who think they are good leaders, who practice heroic leadership, aren't reflexive enough to attend such courses and yet they quite often are in leadership positions. 

So, I am proud of being a leader, and my leadership skills. I still don’t like the word leadership though. 

Lady training

BEFORE YOU ALL SHOOT ME, THE TITLE OF THIS BLOG IS AN IRONIC PUN.* PLEASE READ ON.

The Athena SWAN truck rolls-on. Along with colleagues, I'm co-leading our Faculty application for a Silver Award that is due to be submitted next April. If we are awarded it, we might be the first social science department to have such an award, which we will be very proud of, but will also be in the fullest knowledge that there will still be a lot of work to do to make my Faculty a more inclusive place.

Anyway, why the title - well, a criticism I have heard of Athena SWAN action plans has been that they use Aurora Leadership Training as a solution to everything. Most Athena SWAN gender audits correctly identify stuff we already know, but put concrete numbers on it: women are under-represented at higher grades in universities, are much less likely to apply for promotion and are also less likely to get it when they do apply.

The logic of leadership training as an action is that, firstly, the role descriptors for academics at Senior Lecturer and Professorial level include lots of leadership stuff - you have to have demonstrated you have done this to get the promotion. Secondly, the training is also predicated on improving the assertiveness of women in actually doing things like going for promotion in the first place. This is all very laudable, and I am sure evidence exists that it makes a difference.

Yet it troubles me. I apply my policy analysis brain to it, specifically work on problem definition and causal stories, and note that this presents women themselves as the problem in their own advancement. If women were more like men in their leadership and assertiveness, then they would do better within patriarchal bureaucracies. The only "solution" applied to men is often unconscious bias training. But, as a colleague pointed out, it's great knowing you've got unconscious bias, but it's very difficult to do much about it.

This got me thinking as to what else you might do, more systematically and structurally, to tackle such problems: blinding advancement and promotions processes, for example. The fact many women are sent on the Aurora training also led me to consider whether I needed leadership training - I've suddenly found myself, as a mid-career-academic (gulp) with a lot of leadership roles, including around equality and diversity. I noted that the Leadership Foundation in Higher Education do such a course - Transition to Leadership.**

The logic I've now followed is that maybe this is a bit of the answer: we need inclusive leadership. having an interest in issues of gender rights in higher education I have specifically trained myself and changed my behaviour in the following small ways:

• I make sure I am not the first person to ask a question in a Q&A session and will wait a long time before doing so to provide more space to women (I also sometimes keep a gender count of the questionners on Twitter);
• I put my hand up to ask to speak in meetings;
• I try to not speak over people, or raise my voice or be too assertive;
• I call-out Mrs Triggs moments when I see them, and call myself out on it when I do it;
• I have refused to speak on an all-male panels;
• I've become very active in Athena SWAN processes and encourage other men to do the same as feminist allies.

This has not come naturally. I've been brought-up a man with the confidence that this is my world. I have all this in-built behaviour that was given to me by patriarchal society and conditioning. I know I'm not perfect in my behaviour either, but I do my best. I'd hope as I develop as a leader then the sorts of inclusive practices I do would grow in number. 

The sort of behaviour change I'm describing here could be delivered through wider leadership training - perhaps the Transition to Leadership course does do this; it's not clear from the website. In sum, it seems an inclusive leadership training course for men would actually place the responsibility for sorting out the problem where it lies - on men who recreate the structures of patriarchy in their everyday actions. This seems a much better way of delivering the outcomes we want than blaming women from the structural inequalities they face. 

*or at least it's trying to be,
** this was after a bit of internal "oh isn't it so awful to to be a man" grumbling about the fact I couldn't access the Aurora programme.

International Men’s Day

This post falls very much into the category of “things I am not an expert in”. So I tread somewhat wearily. The post reflects on the Athena SWAN process and it is inspired by my colleague Paul Cairney who wrote this excellent post reflecting on the process too.

So, today is International Men’s Day, which just loosely frames this post. And now to immediately go off on a slight tangent, my colleagues Vikki McCall, Jane Smithson and I are leading on an Athena SWAN application. Athena SWAN emerged from the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines as a process to encourage women into these subject and once they were in, to progress to the highest levels on a par with their male colleagues. This recognised the long-standing issue that far more men than women enter these subjects and women tended to drop out before reaching Professorial level. If you don’t think this should be an issue, I shall point you in the direction of new Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s comments on gender equality.

The ECU have broadened Athena SWAN to cover the ASSHBL (Arts, Social Science, Humanities, Business and Law [I prefer SSHABL myself]) subjects. This makes perfect sense to me – the world’s population is 51% women and 49% men, if we’re going to increase women’s representation in STEM to 51% we need to (possibly) increase men’s representation to 49% in the ASSHBL subjects.

Now, I’m not saying the social sciences are not sexist. I have heard many horribly stories of everyday sexism from women colleagues in the social sciences; I have seen horrifically sexist behaviour in seminar or conferences; I have seen the massive differential expectations on men and women academics in the social sciences; and I have blogged about the awful macho working hours culture that pervades the social sciences as much as any other area of academe. 

But – and here is where it gets tricky – one of the main challenges we have found in evidence gathering for our Athena SWAN plan is what I refer to as the “feminisation” of our subjects: sociology, social policy, criminology, social work and education, particularly at an undergraduate level. The term “feminisation” I’ve borrowed from colleagues in Biology where it is used to describe how their subject, fairly rapidly, changed from being one men would do to being one women would do. It seems to us that when people are choosing what subjects to study at university, they look at us and think "that's a woman's degree subject".

If we look nationally, 60% of graduates from Scottish universities are now women. Whereas around three-quarters of the students on our programmes are women. This is a particular problem in programmes like Primary Education and Social Work because in broader workforce terms there are long-standing recognised issues with a lack of men in these professions. Even more concerning for us, is that there is some evidence (with a million-and-one caveats attached to it) that these men might not do as well as the women on our programmes – again this reflects broader societal changes.

The question is, what can we do about this? It seems talking about it has been a brilliant start actually – there’s been really useful input from colleagues over the past few months as we’ve been discussing these issues. One of the better Tweets about International Men’s Day I saw was this one which links to broader debates about the “crisis of masculinity”. One of our own undergraduates, off their own back, responded to our data by asking what the gender breakdown of students accessing student support services was – it was overwhelmingly women. As touched on in those stats on men’s mental health and suicide, I ruminated whether we’re in this situation:

Little girls are taught at school to be super-bright, work really hard and always ask for help. Little boys are taught at school to be boisterous and self-reliant, and if they have a problem it’s their own. There might not even be a male role-model around for them to ask for help from. At university this means women get incredibly stressed and anxious about assessment, but then ask for help and support and ultimately do very well. Men, meanwhile, sit back and do nothing and just go with the flow.

There is also the role of assessment methods in here, although a quick search for this journal for the term “gender” didn’t inspire me with confidence that I’d find answers. So, there’s more research and work for my colleagues and I to get at here. But, if you can suggest things to help us on our way, I would welcome any comments.

I am to be an assessor for a number of Athena SWAN submissions from ASSHBL departments in the New Year and I'll be really interested to see how they tackle their issue, but also how they tackle the issue I tentatively mentioned above: I think in the ASSHBL subjects, and particularly social science, men very easily presume that because they're left-liberal and feminist they are not sexist, and there is not a greater reflection on culture and behaviour. If Athena SWAN is going to make an impact in the ASSHBL subjects then, as my colleague Prof. Cairney highlights, we will need buy-in from all academic staff and also probably greater culture change than seen in the STEM subjects. 

/edit: if you want to read something much better about International Men's Day, read First Dog on the Moon's amazing cartoon here.