There is something genuinely exciting about being a school leader; distilling this into a few sentences can be tricky as it really depends on what floats your boat.

I loved the salary… come on be honest, so do you! Leadership in teaching is well paid and after years of scraping by and having a tutoring job in the evenings to help pay for a wedding, I was looking forward to being able to buy the car I wanted and increase the shoe collection.

I loved leading the top team in school; there is so much to do, so much to accomplish and when you have a great team, absolutely anything is possible. Tackling and solving issues as a collaborative became our speciality.

I enjoyed the status….yes I’m being honest. Once I lost the fear of the sentence “the buck stops with me”, I relaxed and found a satisfaction in the sentence instead. I chose to spend time developing the leadership in others throughout the school and watching them flourish was fantastic. I decided that  the buck stopping with me could relate to so many positive aspects of school life and not just the constant worry that year 11 were not going to do it that year and the GCSE crazy season was going to be tough.

Making the choice to enhance the “positive bucks” tipped the balance of stress in the job and led to some positive outcomes for me personally and for the school community. It softened my working week helped make that cliché of it’s the best job in the world become more of a reality.

Positive bucks…

1. Genuinely distributing the leadership; giving competent staff responsibility and letting them get on with it, including an in-house associate assistant head program

2. Designing and implementing a staff well-being program, from discounts at local restaurants to health services on site

3. Promoting exit plans! If someone wanted to leave and get a promotion, it was my responsibility support them in their ambitions. This is not counterproductive, change is a good thing; I have never regretted helping a colleague pursue their next challenge.

So, what floats your boat? Take some time to think about a positive buck you can develop over the year, if you would like some support developing this or other positive areas of leadership get in touch. Let’s talk.

In all honesty I was not sure about writing a blog at all; life is too short for…

1. Stuffing mushrooms

2. Camping

3. Choosing between the same shoes in two colours (buy both and save time)

4. Counting calories/ eating celery / beansprouts or anything else with no taste.

5. Blogging

I’m in my mid-forties, I have never used Twitter (or Instagram or snapchat) and blogging about leadership really did not seem like something fun to do on a Sunday evening whilst watching my beloved Inspector Morse. But apparently this is the contemporary (hip / cool) way to communicate your thoughts and offer advice to others.

So here goes….

(Updated monthly…truly, life is too short to do this more often)