How the roles of headteacher and corporate CEO are growing ever closer

With the role of headteacher edging ever closer to the role of CEO, Keziah Featherstone completes some corporate negotiation training to judge how school leaders compare to their business colleagues
18th March 2016, 12:01pm

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How the roles of headteacher and corporate CEO are growing ever closer

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/how-roles-headteacher-and-corporate-ceo-are-growing-ever-closer
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I am terribly English. In my view, it is simply not good manners to haggle. In fact, I have avoided holidays in places such as Morocco for fear of potentially having to bargain at a souk. A price is a price. Negotiating it down, well, it’s mortifying. 

However, I am also the daughter of a professional government procurement officer, who spent more than 35 years saving the taxpayer money. Often my dad would invite door-to-door sellers in for a laugh, to practise on.

So where do I stand between “useless” and “expert” on the spectrum of financial capability? Probably not as far to the right as I should: headteachers are now essentially chief executives of multi-million pound businesses. Only an hour of one of my National Professional Qualification for Headship days focused on finance - and that is all the training I’ve had. I am not alone. 

We headteachers rely heavily on school business managers, where we are lucky enough to have them. As a result the day-to-day money side of the school does not cross my desk as much as it could. 

But this can be dangerous. While still a headteacher-in-waiting, my then boss’ advice to me was to “trust my finance director”, which is fine, but I am also aware of schools where there has been too much trust in such a person and large sums of money have vanished. 

What is the solution, when most headteachers would much rather be focusing on children rather than contracts, on teaching and learning rather than the budget? Would it be sensible to look to the world of private business for some tips? To learn from an industry where the bottom line is squeezed mercilessly for maximum profit? 

With this in mind, TES arranged for me and my business manager to undertake some corporate negotiation training and reflect on its usefulness. If we are to become experts in business, then being able to extract every last saving out of each deal we do is a good place to start. Money is tight. I absolutely need to get the deals I do right because this will deliver greater returns for the children. By cutting costs (that doesn’t include staff or other essential resources) I can provide more for them - they are my bottom line and provide the moral purpose to dirty my hands with talk of money. So once more unto the breach, to learn the art of negotiation.

The training 

I am not alone on the morning of the training. My school business manager, Helen Guy, is with me. Helen is brilliant. She once accompanied me to the BETT show solely so she could walk behind me saying, “No, we can’t buy that”. I have always said that if I was in charge of the school accounts then we’d run out of electricity quite quickly, but we’d all be wearing lovely shoes. Helen rolls her eyes when I say this: there’s too much truth in the joke.

Kelly Harborne, from The Gap Partnership, is our trainer. She does not seem daunted by reducing a three-and-a-half-day residential training course, titled The Complete Skilled Negotiator, down to three-and-a-half hours. We have no more time to give it, as Helen and I have to sandwich it in between duties, meetings and teaching. This is an early-warning sign, of course. The government wants headteachers to be more business leader-like, but I can’t imagine anyone in a school being able to devote that sort of time to training. That said, if it might save thousands of pounds, would it be time well spent; time that should be found?

First, Kelly gives us the lowdown on her company. It was established in 1997 by Steve Gates, who spent a year researching negotiation skills through observing good practice: a solo research lesson study, if you will. The Gap Partnership is now one of the leading negotiation training companies in the world, and we are doing the same (if much-reduced) course as some of the world’s leading business people. 

All this makes me feel very unqualified. My longest-lasting negotiation at my current school is with Helen - I really want a school dog, and I’ve been negotiating (aka begging and pleading) with Helen for more than a year. My secret ploy is to become so good at negotiation that she will have no option but to agree. I accidentally mention this to Kelly, aloud, in front of Helen. I then feel even more unqualified: good negotiators do not reveal their game plan.  

Kelly is great: she sets us at ease and has already identified the key issue we have to deal with - the public sector mindset v the private sector mindset. We’re simply not used to the bullish, bottom-line-driven necessity of a negotiation. She gets Helen and me to discuss our experiences of, and feelings towards, negotiation, and she deftly identifies that I feel completely disenfranchised if I am negotiating over anything that cannot be connected to pedagogy - such as the cleaning contract. Helen feels the complete opposite: she wants to know what value, for instance, that additional teaching assistant will bring. 

Kelly allays our “we know nothing” anxiety and establishes our own priorities for the training. Like many schools we inhabit a PFI building, which brings with it all sorts of other nuances. So as well as the priority to reduce expenditure and boost value for money, we need the tools to manage the PFI contract in a better way. 

The first lesson is about embracing discomfort. Being uncomfortable with discomfort is something to conquer or at least disguise, Kelly tells us. Most people’s natural style is to avoid conflict. But as Kelly points out, does it matter if external competitors think we’re cold? Will we meet that supply agency consultant again? Does it matter if the reprographics contractor thinks I’m mean? Not if I have the courage of my convictions, if I am driven by my moral purpose, which is that the children come first.

Kelly refers to this as putting on the negotiation jacket: it is a disguise to be adopted when needed (I know, as if headteachers need any more jackets in their wardrobes, but bear with me). Society values individuals who are caring, sharing, selfless and honest. We are conditioned to think that rejecting these qualities can seem arrogant and mean.  But it should not matter whether you are fair to the person you are negotiating with, Kelly tells us - your duty is to be fair to the children.

This boosts me greatly. I was not being asked to be cold and calculating, but I could get a better deal for the school if I became good at pretending, and became comfortable with that pretence. 

And Kelly points out that having the confidence to be this cold negotiator is easy to engineer: in any negotiation, she says, each party usually assumes that the other party has all the power and can hold them over a barrel. When negotiating for a school dog, for instance, I think that Helen is the more powerful one as she is the school’s business manager, our health and safety queen and the link with the PFI provider. Conversely, Helen -assumes that I have all the power because I am the headteacher and I might be unhinged enough to just go out and get a mutt, regardless. Knowing that your opponent is afraid of you can give you the upper hand.

Next, we turn to the practical skills. Kelly reinforces numerous times that the key to a successful negotiation is research - read the contact, know the people you’re meeting, gather intelligence on how they are doing, identify what is important to them. Don’t be afraid to ask them questions directly, for example, whether they are under the pressure of a deadline.

So if we want the PFI provider to complete some work at a lower cost, what do we have as leverage - flexible access to the site? It is about planning out a series of “If you…then we will…” statements. (Yes, negotiation training has writing frames and sentence stems, too.)

To finish, we present a genuine negotiation problem and ask if Kelly will help us to overcome it. Using a series of planning templates, we identify the potential -trade-offs and practise the wording using the sentence stems. We start to see some solutions to issues that have frustrated us for a while, and by working together we are able to pool our thinking and resourcefulness. With that, we are done. 

Conclusion

Looking back, it was all simple and effective stuff - and we enjoyed ourselves. Kelly was patient and informative. We finished our session full of enthusiasm, eager to find the nearest stationery supplier and crush them, using our newly found skills of negotiation, into a 50 per cent reduction in the price of our contract. 

I spent a great amount of time during the training reflecting on the amount of negotiations that I do in the course of the average working week, and it’s a lot. I negotiate directly with colleagues over special leave dispensations, attendance at courses and moderation, leadership roles and duties, meeting agendas, performance management, curriculum design, access to students for interventions or revisions, and much more. I rarely know in advance what might be coming through my open door - an NQT wanting to train to become a SENDCO, a head of department seeking more curriculum time, or an assistant headteacher wanting all their team off timetable for a meeting. But my experience compensates for the lack of research.

I have to accept that I don’t have that wealth of experience to call on with business negotiations. Ultimately, that is the biggest message from the day. Headteachers and their school business managers cannot go into these negotiations simply hoping for the best. We have to create a level of certainty and need to work together to do this. I have to ensure that my school business manager has the time to prepare for every negotiation, which means taking away from her the more mundane jobs, such as complaining about leaky ceilings. 

And I have to get over my own hang-ups, too. The negotiation training actually made me feel all right about myself - I think headteachers are better prepared than we imagine for the world of business, especially given that we’re negotiating a lot more than we give ourselves credit for. We just have to apply that knowledge properly in financial negotiations. 

There will be those who will argue that we should delegate all this, that the creep of business into schools is to be fought at every opportunity, and that we should separate the educational and the business aspects of a school. However, when Helen is negotiating on behalf of the school for the children, my spin on things may prove valuable every now and again. Headship is about good leadership. I wouldn’t dream of assessing a teacher’s effectiveness by looking only at their results and standing by if they were having trouble with a class. Similarly, I shouldn’t stand on the sidelines of Helen and her team, commenting only on the balance sheet.

And, ultimately, we cannot separate the money and the teaching as if one does not impact the other. We cannot say “we’re rubbish at business” and wear it like a badge of honour. We need to get better at it, not despite the obligations to our students but because of them. 

(PS. I need another session with Kelly. I still don’t have a school dog.)

Keziah Featherstone is headteacher of The Bridge Learning Campus

The trainer’s view

My job is training business executives in the private sector to become better negotiators, through residential workshops and consulting on specific projects. I was fascinated to see how coaching two leaders in education would compare, particularly as a headteacher’s role is fast becoming as much that of chief executive as educator. 

Early on in my session with Keziah and Helen (Helen is pictured, top right; Kelly is bottom right), I ran a “profiling” exercise to pinpoint their negotiation development areas. An important concept we teach at The Gap Partnership is about “being comfortable with feeling uncomfortable”, which emerged for Keziah as a challenge. 

By contrast, Helen identified as being a highly competitive negotiator, who is at home with a “cut and thrust” approach. 

While that is understandable - after all, Helen is the guardian of the academy’s purse and her role is to safeguard it - in reality, a desire to “win” can sometimes be harmful to a negotiation’s successful outcome. The danger comes when the satisfaction of “winning” comes at the cost of the value of the deal. 

One of Keziah’s and Helen’s main negotiation challenges stems from a lack of competition in their supplier base, which is amplified by copious red tape and a consequent lack of freedom - all of which can be a particular feature of the public sector. As a result, they have often felt powerless. But the balance of power in a negotiation is often misjudged, with each party attributing more power to the other. One way to counteract this is with information. As a first step, I advised Keziah and Helen to thoroughly read the contracts they have with their service providers. 

This could yield information, which can be used as leverage. For example, what are the service provider’s key performance indicators? What deliverables are written in? Under what conditions could the contract be revisited before the end of its term? And what are the implications should the end user’s needs not be met?

At The Gap Partnership, we also teach the importance of separating values from -behaviours. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this resonated with Keziah and Helen. In negotiation, a desire to be seen to be fair can hinder success. And for an academy, the key objective must be securing the best possible value from the budget to benefit its children’s education, not that its leaders were perceived to be “nice” or “fair” to deal with. 

My time with The Bridge Learning Campus showed me that negotiations between schools and their suppliers are, in essence, not that different from negotiations in the private sector. The key to being a successful negotiator begins with an understanding of human nature and psychology, and how some universal truths about both affect your behaviour and that of the person you are negotiating with. This is true whether you are the chief executive of a FTSE 100 company or the headteacher of an inner-city school. 

Here are my three top negotiation tips for leaders in education:

  • Plan, plan, then plan some more. Don’t enter any negotiation without thoroughly scoping it out first. At the very least, work through possible trades between you and your counterparty, so you will always know your next move. 
  • Don’t assume that the other party has more power than you. Information is power, so gather as much as you can.
  • Separate your values from your behaviours. In negotiation, wishing to be perceived as fair and equitable can cost you money.

Kelly Harborne is a senior consultant at The Gap Partnership, a leading negotiation consultancy. It specialises in negotiation and provides -training and consultancy to more than 500 clients globally. 

This first appeared in the 11 March edition of TES. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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