Steve Munby was chief executive of the National College for School Leadership between 2005 and 2012 and chief executive of the Education Development Trust between 2012 and 2017. Among other roles, he is now visiting professor at the Institute for Education at University College London. He writes:

I could teach, but I wasn’t a great teacher. Years ago, I went on the website Friends Reunited to see if anyone had written anything about me. There was one mention, it said: “He was a nice man but he couldn’t control us.” That was the only record of my first year of teaching. I did seven and a half years in the end, and I got better. So it proves you can overcome a bad start. But, to be honest, I was a much better leader.

In my first year as director of education for Knowsley, the Daily Mail rang me and asked me to do an interview as it was doing a piece on us being the worst local authority in the country for education. At the same time, the Liverpool Echo ran a letter calling for my resignation. Obviously, I had huge self doubt. But I had a mentor and he helped me to see that I was doing the right things; I just needed more time. He helped me to believe in myself and in what I was trying to do. And I realised that what I needed to do next was give our heads the optimism to succeed and then support them with some clear processes to help them to go on and deliver it. Both of those things were as critical as the other. One is about mindset and the other is about the work. Both are about doing the right thing.

I had not thought about leadership as a concept when I took my first senior role. I thought about what I had to “do”, not how I had to “be”. That’s a common problem, I think, in those who step up to lead.

I went from five years in Knowsley in a concrete building overlooking a McDonald’s and a car park to CEO of the National College for School Leadership, in purpose-built buildings that had a lake and a moat and swans, Molton Brown soap in the bathrooms, a bar and a restaurant. To some extent, that is an indicator of how far and how quickly the status of educational leadership shifted under Labour in the late 1990s and 2000s. Looking back, was that extravagance necessary? I think it was probably excessive, but the government wanted to send a signal that education leaders were critical and that it was a high-status profession. It was of its time and those things helped to achieve that aim.

We asked heads why they wanted to be heads, and they told us it was because of the leaders they had worked for. It was either because someone had inspired them to become a head and nurtured them to the point they could do it. Or it was because they had worked for someone who they believed was not good at the job, and they wanted to prove it could be done better.

You need to get genuine buy-in to achieve anything. I used something I called “misty vision”. It would be a rough sketch of where I thought we needed to be. And then I got people to hone that with me. You can’t do things “to” people. Asking them for help to make a strategy better builds a sense of collective responsibility.

Around 2008, I did a “360” with colleagues and with family. The feedback from colleagues was very positive, I was really pleased. The feedback from friends and family was not so good. They said I was stressed, tired, that I didn’t give them enough time and they were worried about my health. I realised that I was trying to be my “best” person at work and then coming home and not being that. It was extremely challenging to hear that. But I really needed to hear it.

Work-life balance is essential. After that 360, I blocked out weekends for personal time. It was a big thing for me, I had always worked on Sundays. I think I was a better leader for having more of my weekends without working. At that moment, my elderly mother needed me. So, I also blocked out 24 hours every month, and I dedicated that time completely to her. I realised that what was important was not so much the quantity of time I spent with her but the quality of time.

You can never fully prepare for how it feels to lead - to be the person in that chair calling the shots. Leadership training can’t fully prepare you for that, so it has to be something that we acknowledge and support when people are in the job for the first time. That is one of the reasons why I believe mentoring is so important.

The people leading leadership development now might say we were perhaps too soft and too generic in what the National College did before 2012. I understand that and I know that there needs to be a balance, but I would say that leadership development is perhaps too technical and too technocratic now. A lot of leadership is about relationships - motivation, enabling enjoyment in the job, getting the extra mile out of people, how you get a team working well together. I believe that you can address these aspects in leadership development, that we should teach those elements and that it is not “soft” to do so.

I would send a handwritten card to every new headteacher in the country when I was CEO of the National College. It was about 1,100 heads every year. They needed to feel that someone had their back, that they were seen and that they had somewhere to turn. Some trusts do this now and do it very well. But the overall picture is mixed. And for a lot of heads, there is not a feeling that they have much support.

If you are a school leader right now, give people the chance to lead. Give them mentoring and feedback while they do it, and build that into their day-to-day work. Then expose them to other ways of leading - let them go out and see what leadership looks like elsewhere. And then give them access to research and evidence. That’s how we build future leaders.

We need more diversity in leadership, but our leadership training models have not always adapted to make that happen. The models of leadership that are talked about are too often still focussed on one type of leader, and that model is likely to be putting a lot of other people off. That’s why I am a big fan of the idea of imperfect leadership.

If you have one non-negotiable as a leader, make it authenticity. You can’t stand up and talk about ethical leadership, or teamwork or whatever, and not do it in practice. Your team will know it is gross hypocrisy. You will have no authority or respect.

Leadership is a privilege. You cannot lose sight of that. It’s about service. If it’s not about service, then it ends up being just about you and you will lose moral purpose. And moral purpose and authenticity are why people will want to follow you in the first place. We all make mistakes. We are all imperfect. But if you do your best to serve others and to improve your organisation, then you should be happy with what you have done.