Dame Alison Peacock is CEO of the Chartered College of Teaching. She has been a headteacher, has written books and has advised the Department for Education. She writes:

If you value people, and show them you value them. They appreciate it and they react accordingly. It sounds simple, but leaders can underestimate that and not do it enough.

I have always been a bit of a rebel, even in the early days when I was a new teacher. But a rebel in a positive way. I wanted to know why things could not be done. I wanted to prove it could be done. And yes, I often went against what people advised me to prove that point. As a leader, I am still like that and I like my teams to be like that, too.

Optimism is at the heart of good leadership. You don’t always have to believe it, but you have to model it. You have to persuade people everything is possible; that it is going to be OK, that you believe in them.

When you get a good reputation as a leader, your recruitment process becomes different. People begin to seek you out and it is easier to find the people who want to buy into what you are trying to do. You need to be very aware of how you are perceived.

I have never gone back to the school where I was head for 14 years. I got in the car and never turned back. It is a wonderful but boxed-off memory; a moment in time.

I avoid the negative spirals that can spin up in education. I used to go to headteachers’ meetings and really quickly the conversation would turn to how much of a struggle the budget was, how difficult the governing body was, how ridiculous the latest government initiative was. I never saw the point in that. Actually, we need to set that aside and look at what we can do when we work productively together despite those constraints. That’s how I want to lead.

I have never talked to any individual teacher about holding them to any standard of anything. I lead by example, encourage people, fan the flames of things that are going well. I make it clear this is a collective responsibility to hit a rigorous ambition of what we want to achieve. In that culture, people know what is required and they want to hit it. I turned around a failing school with that model. It goes against the common wisdom, but it is important that people know there is that other way.

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I don’t miss opportunities. If I think I might regret saying “no” or not doing something, I make sure I do it. I will take that risk.

I am a talker. I share my concerns and worries, and I want feedback. I like to know what people think. That can be my team, my colleagues, friends or a random woman in Tesco. When people say leadership is a lonely job, it has never been that way for me. I have always shared and sought out a network when I am facing something really tough.

Always remember that when you are a leader, it is never your success, it is the success of the whole team. It is always owned by everyone involved.

There are always critics. And if, like me, you worry you are not good enough or that you don’t make the right decisions, that can be really unsettling. But never ignore them. It’s crucial to really interrogate what they are thinking and why by having that conversation with them directly.

I knew by the time I left my headship that I was not the head I used to be. When I started, I knew every child’s name. When I left, we had expanded with a teaching school and I was spending a lot of time at the Department for Education advising. I always felt guilty. If I was at the school, I worried about my DfE commitments, and if I was at the DfE, I was worried I was letting down the community I was supposed to be serving. You have to be able to spot when your time is up. My time was up and I left.

You need a team with a range of different expertise and skills. You need all those viewpoints and the complexity it brings is a positive: you need the diversity and, as a leader, to be able to bring that together to make decisions.

I am not a control freak. I really like it when people take the initiative and fly with it. The teacher in me wants to enable others to be successful.

I don’t like to be restricted. I don’t thrive in a tied-down environment. It brings out the mischief in me. I want somewhere I work to be joyful. To mess about a bit. To have a laugh. For me, that is so critical to create as a leader - a place where joy can happen.