Ask a self-made millionaire and erstwhile star of Dragon’s Den about the key to being a successful leader and you would expect an onslaught of self-aggrandising statements about leading from the front, trusting your gut and never taking no for an answer.

But Sarah Willingham surprises: a truly great leader, she says, recognises the importance of listening to the wisdom and insights of others. “I repeat this to everyone - surround yourself with brilliant people. That’s been key to a lot of the success I’ve had in business and I think it translates to education, too,” she says. “You’re only ever as good as your team and so you want to have people with you who will tell you if you’re about to fall into a hole before it’s too late. It’s about acknowledging that you can’t do everything.”

Willingham expands on this further by saying that refusing to ask for help and trying to govern on your own leads only to disaster. “A lot of people are scared to ask for help; they feel it’s perceived to be a weakness, but it’s impossible for people to know everything and there is nothing wrong with asking ‘stupid’ questions,” she says. “In fact, the strongest people are those who ask questions because the majority of people don’t know either, so you will become the smart one because you will know what you are doing.”

As one of the judges on the BBC’s pitching show for entrepreneurs for the past two years, Willingham is renowned for her no-nonsense approach and head for business. Having made her fortune in restaurants, health products and establishing a private equity company, among many other ventures, she is well placed to offer headteachers advice on managing budgets and taking tough decisions when faced with financial imperatives to cut spending.

Her advice to listen to others is key here, she says: headteachers must seek out expertise. But you have to be willing to take action based on the input from those around you, not just take it in and forget it.

“There is no point in listening to someone and making them feel valued if nothing then happens as a result - that’s really demotivating,” she explains. “You need to make people feel valued.”

Tough decisions

Of course, taking advice from those around you depends on whether or not you have a team that you trust. To get that team, she says, leaders need to make tough decisions: certain skill sets need to be fought for and anyone not pulling their weight needs to be let go.

Willingham, who last month announced she was leaving the hit TV show to spend more time with her family, acknowledges that it is not always easy to remove people within the education sector, noting that work she has done to try to get the government to include basic financial education on the school curriculum has made her aware of this. “One thing I heard while doing this was that a lot of headteachers were unable, or scared, to get rid of poor teaching staff,” she says.

But not taking action can be damaging, she warns. “In a business, you would not tolerate that - you need to be able to stand firm and get rid of people,” she explains. “It can be a sign of weakness if you don’t and it usually demotivates the brilliant staff you do have.”

But while seeking expert advice and adopting a democratic style of leadership are important, Willingham stresses that, for financial considerations and much else, headteachers need to be the final decision-makers. “I’m a big believer in a democratic approach but you can’t please everyone and you may even need to go against the majority,” she says. “You have to have the strength of your convictions to make a decision and stick with it.”

Willingham says it’s important to accept the reality of this and not get hung up on trying to please everyone - an attitude it took her a while to shake off. “Someone is going to disagree with you, or even not like you, but that’s OK. It’s taken me years to work that out, but it’s one of those things you have to accept,” she admits.

On teaching and learning, headteachers may well rule the roost but they don’t always have the necessary financial training to manage a school budget effectively, meaning that some may not feel confident to act in the way Willingham suggests when it comes to matters of money. As a result, it can be easy to defer financial decisions to someone who seems to know more.

To gain confidence, Willingham suggests taking control of the business plan and putting together a clear vision, just as you would for education-related matters. The team can be involved in the creation of such a plan but the headteacher should take ownership.

“Write a plan and involve your team in that. Maybe give the department heads pages within the plan for their input as part of the strategy,” she says. “That way, every time a decision is made, you are making it within the plan. Of course, if things change wildly - like there’s a major economic crisis - you can’t be so rigid but, generally, it should help guide your decisions.”

Willingham says that the leader must be the one to focus on the efforts that will achieve this rather than being waylaid by day-to-day financial issues.

“With the Bombay Bicycle Club [the restaurant chain she took from loss-making venture to profit and expansion], I could easily have spent 18 hours a day fire-fighting, but that never would have turned around the business,” she says. “You have to look at it like a dam that has lots of holes in it. You can’t keep covering them up all the time - you have to go further upstream and tackle the source of the flow itself, so you can stop the leaks.”

Trust your instincts

This is where a leader has to trust in their instincts because you may be taking a decision that won’t show results for 12-24 months. “You have to think in the mid to long term, and always have an eye on that rather than just dealing with immediate issues all the time, because that won’t really change the underlying issues causing those problems,” she explains.

Continuing her open, collaborative ethos, Willingham advises anyone not sure of how they set about achieving a certain goal or strategy to be willing to look outside their own walls and ask for input from the local community. “Look around you and say ‘what are they doing brilliantly?’ Knock on doors and ask - you’ll be surprised by how much people want to help,” she says.

Willingham is reluctant to call this networking because the term puts some people off and they think it’s something they can’t do, but she says it’s really just about forming a relationship with peers - something most people do anyway. “People are always good at forming communities in all kinds of areas, from business to new mums to schools, so it’s just about using each community for help, advice and guidance.”

That includes working with other headteachers, she says. By forming close ties with other schools, it could give you more power when negotiating deals with suppliers. “If there are other schools near you and you’re thinking about buying something new - computer software, for example - you should ask those around you if they are in a similar position and see if you can use that to get a better deal.”

Finally, Willingham says that those still daunted by the idea of managing a budget should recognise that they are likely already adept at such matters, at least on a basic level, in their day-to-day life.

“If you run a household, it’s already like a small business, with money coming in and out, and managing credit and planning to pay back loans and so on,” she says. “You can use that to guide you in some of the basics of budgets.”

Schools as a cottage industry? It may be an unpopular analogy in a sector wary of business involvement, but it is certainly a useful way of bringing the huge task of running a school budget into a more manageable perspective.

Dan Watson is a freelance writer