Responsibility Changes You

In the past three months, I became responsible for three very different things: a school, a home and a child, and all three taught me the same lessons about leadership:

• It's about presence over control

• Building systems that hold when you can’t

• Using humility as professional strength

• Leadership as stewardship, not heroics

The illusion of readiness

I stepped into headship as prepared as I could be: policies reviewed, priorities mapped, values articulated. Years of leadership and stewardship with my epic mentor Sally and friend/accidental coach Adam had trained me to anticipate risk and plan for complexity in a job that I desperately wanted.

What I hadn’t anticipated was that the same term I took on a school, I also took on a huge mortgage and a newborn, each arriving with their own version of uncertainty, vulnerability and sleepless nights.

Three domains, one pattern

In school, every decision feels amplified where even the smallest of choices carried symbolic weight. I became acutely aware that leadership is never truly neutral because people read meaning into tone, timing and silence.

Leadership needs to understand that clarity matters, consistency calms and people always watch more than they listen

Home ownership

Buying a house during arguably the hardest term taught me something leadership courses rarely do, despite their best efforts: most failures aren’t dramatic, they’re slow, structural and preventable. Wiring, boilers, foundations; ignore them and the crisis arrives later, bigger and louder than you could have possibly imagined.

This means that your safeguarding, culture, workload and trust are all forms of infrastructure that, if working, will make good leadership look boring. But it's the maintenance of these systems that becomes a moral imperative.

Fatherhood

Becoming a father for the first time has stripped my leadership back to its essence. My son doesn't need confidence, certainty or strategy, he needs presence, regulation and care - especially when I feel least capable of offering them.

People don’t need leaders to be invincible but they do need them to be regulated and self-aware. As with our wider thinking and work at EduPulse, such vulnerability builds psychological safety in teams, not weakness.

Time to Shift Perspective

Across those three roles, I am learning that leadership is not about having the most answers, but about building conditions in which others can function well; especially when you cannot. I'm indebted to an amazing school team, mentor, coach and friends who have raised me up and will continue to do so as a traverse this new landscape.

With this in mind, there are key leadership shifts you can explicitly name:

• control to trust

• pace to sustainability

• individual heroics to shared systems

• certainty to honesty

Final Thoughts

So, three months into the hardest job I have ever had, I am a different leader than I was when I began. I'm calmer, less performative and more intentional in my actions.

The road ahead will come with its challenges and there'll be some questioning my sanity, timing or even experience (bless him, he's very new to all of this...).

Headship, home ownership and fatherhood have each reminded me that leadership is ultimately an act of care; for people, for systems and for the future we are temporarily entrusted with.

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