As the year comes to an end, the question hangs in the air: how did it go?

So how are you going to find the answer? Being able to critically assess performance is a critical tool for leaders to develop, but getting it right can be more complicated than it may seem.

The lowdown

Self-assessment is hard, but it’s also immensely valuable. By honestly appraising your strengths and weaknesses as a leader, you can identify areas for improvement and capitalise on your existing skills, helping you to be better at decision-making in the future, have a stronger team, and, ultimately, create a more positive and effective work environment for everyone.

But where should you start when it comes to taking a look at yourself? What processes, techniques or programmes can you use to assess your own performance over the year? And how should you prioritise and integrate that feedback?

What we know about what works

The first major hurdle to effective self-assessment is snapping out of “survival mode”, whereby you are working just to “keep your head above water, so problems don’t get out of hand”, says Bogdan Costea, professor of management and society at Lancaster University Management School.

While it is understandable that middle leaders might find themselves in this mode, especially new ones, this can hamper the kind of overview needed to assess your performance in a wider sense.

Feedback from your team is invaluable in this process, Costea explains, but there can be challenges in getting it.

“You can’t force people - on an individual basis or a collective basis - to tell you what they think about you,” he says. “It’s hard, you never really know the truth.

“Even in close teams, people can change when you become the line manager, and the feedback you get from people and the informal reactions that they give you, which used to be very useful and truthful, may now become less reliable. And what you think about yourself can be extremely different from what people think about you.”

But informal conversations are not the only way to gather feedback; there are a variety of strategies, from the 360-degree approach (gathering feedback from staff at all levels to get a well-rounded view of a leader’s strengths and weaknesses across different perspectives) to anonymous surveys, coaching conversations and formal tracking of performance around targets and key performance indicators (KPIs).

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But, Costea continues, it’s vital to accept that “you never ever have a system by which you can elicit the whole truth”.

“You can’t force the truth out,” he explains. “You can’t say to somebody ‘I will take you to the side now and I need you to tell me exactly what you feel about me and my work. So in many ways, this is a question about how you know the truth of your own work and the value of your own work. You need to think simplistically, rationally, what would be the conclusion from an institutional perspective?”

It’s also worth paying attention to repeated themes that keep coming up in the feedback you receive from various sources, he says. So “if you hear the same thing from a few different sources separately - if a lot of people are perceiving X, Y or Z in a particular way and saying a similar thing - that is usually a more reliable measure”.

“In my experience, it’s always the case, that whatever you tried to do, however good your intentions, whatever you think you’ve done is different than what people perceive as being done, so you have to make peace with that you will never please everybody. You will be a very different animal in different pairs of eyes, and the bigger the team, the higher the incidence of disagreement. Everybody sees you differently, and that’s OK.”

The experienced leader view

Jon Hutchinson is director of curriculum and teacher development at the Reach Foundation. He writes:

It’s likely that there have been highs and lows this year. Often that’s part and parcel of working in schools - but it can be felt more keenly as a middle leader. Along the way, it’s easy to ride waves of catastrophe and elation, but a little time gives the opportunity for perspective that’s tricky to grasp when you’re in the thick of it.

Still, as you look back on the year there will no doubt be a huge number of decisions that you could potentially analyse. Maybe early on in the year you spoke too harshly to a member of your team, and have struggled to rebuild the relationship since. Or perhaps you feel that you should have more closely monitored members of your team when implementing a new initiative.

First, be kind to yourself. Education is sometimes described as a “VUCA” domain: you’re often working under conditions that are volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Relitigating every leadership moment of the year is likely to leave you feeling hopeless, and isn’t particularly practical anyway.

So how might you go about parsing the totality of your leadership over the course of the year in order to evaluate what you did well and what you should try and avoid in the future? The reassuring thing is, as Bogdan Costea suggests above, there is no perfect way of doing this.

That means that it doesn’t really matter whether you RAG rate the objectives that you set out at the start of the year or use a five-point scale. What’s important is that you make an informed judgement of your own performance informed by a range of data.

One thing that can be very helpful in this exercise is seeking out a partner who holds the same role as you to talk through your assessment. This could take place as you work through your self-assessment or after you’ve completed it. Whether you are a key stage 1 phase leader, a Sendco or a head of maths, having the chance to talk to someone with the same job title is invaluable.

They’ll understand the true challenges of the job, and if you choose someone outside of your school it lowers the stakes, allowing you to be more open and honest. It may take a little bit of time to organise this - finding the person and setting up a video call to talk through your year together - but you will almost certainly have a much richer conversation. Growing your professional network in this way could also save you plenty of time in the long run as you share best practice, resources and advice.