Building confidence from the middle
5 August 2021 | Prof Catharine Coleborne
Working on School academic leadership development following change processes can be very rewarding writes OO client Prof Catharine Coleborne
Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash
In 2017 I managed a whole of School reorganisation for the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, a process I’ve written about elsewhere. The School – home to a slightly unusual mix of disciplines including speech pathology, social work and an array of the humanities and social sciences – had not seen any major changes for a decade, an era of a previous restructure.
Disciplinary identities had solidified and signalled personal interests, with degree programs reflecting the patterns of vested interests, and a kind of relaxed reliance on the expectation that students would continue to turn up. The internal governance in the School was a strength, with a number of staff experienced as deputies, or who had spent time in faculty leadership roles. Yet with me as a relatively new Head of School on the scene – appointed from outside the institution - a new middle leadership tier was emerging.
Uncertainty around the formation of four multidisciplinary ‘Clusters’ meant that it was mostly Level C staff who expressed interest in the roles as Cluster Leaders in 2018. Creating this new leadership for the School to bring to life the new structure resulting from the change process was difficult, and the first year was a patchy experience. I needed to help staff imagine their leadership identities and start to build their confidence to lead in the new environment. This was a job for Outside Opinion!
From the first time I first met Denise Meredyth and began to work with her and members of her team, I sensed that she was open to providing fairly bespoke work around specific challenges. In October 2018, I held the first strategic planning day around developing understandings of the leadership and values required to lead in the School post-change. We invited Denise to work with our School Executive team on the kinds of external drivers in the higher education sector, as well as internal strengths and opportunities.
This developmental work around leadership styles, including fun and playful exercises, also linked to a series of readings we shared with the team about the future of the humanities, NESTA (UK innovation agency) resources about ‘challenge-driven’ universities; pieces about collaborations and partnerships for social sciences, and other national and international examples of ideas about changing universities and the future of work.
Looking back, I can see that this was the start of a series of important and much-needed interventions into the confidence of the School and its staff to help rebuild the direction of our work for a very new environment: changes that took us into 2019 and beyond. Later, on an off-campus retreat in early 2019 (on an extremely hot day in the Hunter Valley) the same team was able to explore new ideas about how we could connect our School to community and industry partnerships through themes and examples: this became our ‘Everyday Laboratory WIL project’ in 2020.
Engaging with a consultancy like Outside Opinion in this ‘co-production’ has allowed me to be experimental in a safe space with supportive and intelligent ideas that gently lead the academic staff to grow their sector awareness and capability. That School Executive team was able to successfully embed the new Clusters, taking the concept from an initial place of doubt to one of conviction that these groups could function to provide collective ownership of the School’s culture and activities.
Prof Catharine Coleborne
Professor Catharine Coleborne Head of School, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle. Prof Coleborne is an internationally recognised historian of health and medicine with an extensive portfolio of research, teaching, administration and academic leadership. Her research and publishing in the histories of mental health, families, illness, colonial worlds and medical institutions, as well as in law and history, has attracted world-wide attention.
