What does good leadership look like as a trustee?
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What does good leadership look like as a trustee?
Being a trustee is, at its heart, about leadership. But what kind of leaders make up a really effective board?
The importance of that collective responsibility is laid out in the Academy Trust Governance Code, as Principle 2, which states that trusts need to be “led by an effective board that provides strategic governance in line with the aims and values of the academy trust and engages effectively with its members”.
We spoke to experts from the Confederation of School Trusts and Eden Academy Trust to explore their approach.
The expert view
Eden takes a “portfolio” approach to its board, wherein each member has responsibility for a different area. This has transformed the way the board functions, explains Barry Nolan, chair of the Eden board of trustees.
“It used to be very different; there was an expectation that everybody [on the board] would know everything about everything, and we felt that was unrealistic, particularly as we were growing,” he says. “And it was actually not a particularly productive use of time. So we came up with the concept of portfolios, where all trustees have a good working knowledge of the board but each has their specialism, based on their background and where they’ve come from.”
That means the finance portfolio is looked after by a trustee coming from accounting, people management is overseen by an HR expert, and so on, which enables trustees to feel that they are “adding real value”, he says. The move has also dramatically shifted the way meetings are run, from a leadership perspective, from the previous situation, where “about 80 per cent of each meeting was a download from the CEO”.
“It was all very informative but why were we hearing from the CEO so much?” he says. “We still need to hear from the executive, clearly, but the majority of the board meeting now is downloads and discussions from trustees on their individual trust portfolios.”
Each of these portfolios has specific terms of reference, set out in the governance charter, so that roles and responsibilities are very clear. That’s key to making such a system work, says Samira Sadeghi, director of trust governance at the Confederation of School Trusts, as some boards can find themselves working too operationally, with members feeling that they need to be more hands-on in their area of expertise than the trustee role requires.
“I think it just depends on your culture,” she says. “If you have the right culture and you make it really clear that trustees aren’t expected to get involved on an operational level, then you’re fine.”
Also vital for effective board leadership is the relationship between the CEO and trustees, Nolan says.
“If there is a common understanding of mutual respect, it works really well. But if that’s not working, it can make it far more challenging for the CEO, who may be on edge and not performing as they want to.”
That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be challenges to leadership, he continues, but that it needs to happen in a helpful manner.
“We can challenge hard, but there is that understanding that it’s coming from the right place,” he says. “We had a situation before with a trustee who did challenge very, very hard and, on occasion, completely inappropriately. It wasn’t done in a supportive way; instead that person had taken the ‘challenge’ part of the role too literally.”
But how about when it comes to monitoring the effectiveness of the board leadership? Nolan explains that they take a multi-pronged approach. One of those prongs is to have a one-to-one conversation with every trustee, often over the summer, to find out “how they feel it’s going, how they feel they’re contributing, and how they want to develop, along with what else they think they can bring to the board”.
Elsewhere, trustees complete a self-evaluation each year and the board also undergoes an external review of governance every three years, he says, which often offers up “things to make you think and reflect on what you’re doing, and maybe what you could, not necessarily should, be doing differently”.
The view from the ground
Susan Douglas, CEO of the Eden Academy Trust, also highlights the collective nature of a well-functioning board, especially when there are difficult issues at hand. She refers back to a “heavy HR issue” that came up last year, and how the “weight of leadership around that particular issue felt very much a collective one”, owing to the way the board works.
“We do have debates quite a lot about ethical decisions,” she says. “It is part of our bread and butter that we’re thinking about those sorts of things all the time, at a strategic level.”
Ensuring that the group has a diverse mix of voices within its collective leadership identity can present challenges, however. Douglas explains that the Eden board currently has a great balance around gender, but is “still improving” on its ethnic mix in order to “truly represent the families and the staff” of the trust.
“It makes a difference that we’ve got people from so many different backgrounds, we’re really diverse in terms of the career pathways and I do think that helps in terms of different perspectives,” she continues.
“Another thing that’s quite important for us, as a special school trust, is that a number of trustees have wanted to become involved because they have some lived experience of SEND in terms of a family member or as a parent, or they might be neurodiverse themselves. That’s quite important for us in terms of reflecting our schools.”
Keith Holroyd, head of governance, policy and compliance at the trust, adds that effective board leadership is about “a commonality of purpose - that’s absolutely key to making the whole thing work”.
“If new trustees coming in don’t share that same vision and purpose that the trust does and the rest of the board, you’re not going to get that cohesion and all be pulling in the same direction,” he says.
Ensuring that trustees understand the role is crucial for effective leadership, he says, explaining that “there are some technical things that you can do from a governance perspective” to help with this.
“We have a governance code of conduct that gets refreshed and reviewed every year, and everybody in the community has to sign up to that at the beginning of the year,” Holroyd says.
“I think also part of it comes through that recruitment process. We have a very strong and staged recruitment process, just so that we can make sure that they fit into that ethical framework that we work in. It comes back to culture, making sure that we are getting the right people.”
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