Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, the largest secondary headteachers’ union in the UK. He was formerly an English teacher and, before his current role, was headteacher of King Edward VI School in Bury St Edmunds. He writes:

I don’t have a model of leadership. I never have done beyond a simple desire to get things right. And the truth is, the nature of leadership is that you rely much more on the team around you than people often credit. So any individual model of leadership is less important than people make out.

The little things matter. They always matter. And though it can be tedious to keep talking about the little things - and people may think you are giving those things importance beyond their worth - you have to keep making the little things matter. Because it is the little things that add up to help you build the big things.

Feeling vulnerable and catastrophising situations that turn out to not be as bad as you thought: these are things I have always suffered with but that I have learned are entirely normal. We have to demystify that. We just need to better support each other and have better systems for when we feel that way.

One of the best bits of advice I got was to write down on a Sunday night all the things I was worried about and review that at the end of the week. The majority of things you worry about are not as bad as you think, and doing this helps you regain perspective.

So often as a leader, I have thought: “I wish I had told that person earlier.” In my experience, you have to share the good, the bad and the challenging at the earliest opportunity. It is fairer and it almost always leads to better outcomes.

As a child, I would shy away from responsibility. I found the idea that I would be held responsible for something incredibly stressful. So, to look back on the career I have had, it is a surprise.

The majority of my friends are outside the sector. Mixing socialising with my job would make the hard decisions harder, and make me more likely to compromise or let things slip when they actually need addressing. It has been a conscious decision. I need that boundary, to be able to play the role of the leader and to not blur the lines between that and my life outside of that job.

I like my senior team to be involved in decisions, to offer feedback, to challenge. Maybe it is having run the school debating team when I was a head, but I love to argue out a point as I think if done respectfully, both parties get so much clarity from that process.

I am very bad at recognising when I have done something well. People will think that is an affectation; there is this reputation of, “with Geoff, the ego has landed”. But the truth is, I am hyper-critical of myself. I obsess about what I could have done better or what I could have done differently.

You have to let people screw up from time to time. If you don’t let that happen, how will they ever learn the resilience needed to lead, and to learn the multiple other lessons that come from failure?

I’m trying to talk to my wife more about the stresses of the job and things I am particularly worried about. Yes, I want to compartmentalise work and home, but she’s encouraged me to talk more and her advice is always invaluable, and correct. She is prepared to tell me the truth, in a gloriously blunt Northern English way. I need that.

Difficult conversations are an important and inevitable part of leadership, but you don’t get any training in how to do it well. You need to find a way of doing it that you are comfortable with, and techniques you can use. And you need to understand the repercussions of not having those conversations; that can be so important in helping you come to terms with what you have to do.

You should try not to surprise people too much with the positions you take on issues. There should be a consistency between what you say and the general narrative of your leadership, and if you do need to step outside your normal lines, you should try to give people - your trustees, your political opponents, your governors, your colleagues, whoever - a heads-up beforehand.

Criticism will always sting. But it is important to hear it and to understand it. And it is important who it comes from. I don’t have an executive coach; I tried it and found it a bit cringey. But I do have people I trust to give me criticism and I am a better leader for it.

I think every leader is anxious about legacy. I was conscious as a head that I didn’t want to get to a point where people were saying: “He used to be great, but he’s lost his touch.” That idea of overstaying, that’s always in my mind.