“Being” a Head of Department in an English University

ABSTRACT

This article takes the author’s personal experience of being a Head of Department (HOD) in an English University, and frames this experience as a transition narrative. The format draws on the work of Sandra Acker, who framed her own experience as a Head of Department in Canada, in three areas. Utilising literature both on Higher Education Management and the emotions of leadership, the article proposes that a focus on the personal affective side of leadership can help the nascent department Head understand more clearly how the personal and the political, policy frameworks intertwine. Finally, the article suggests that understanding one’s own leadership skills in a particular context is crucial to working with academic colleagues.

KEYWORDS:

• Leadership/management
• higher education/university
• identity
• governance/management/administration
• emotion

Prologue

I left being a Head of Department after four years of joy, anxiety, and tackling knotty problems. I now understood what Ackerman and Maslin-Ostrowski (2004) who first looked at how leadership events leave “wounds” meant, because many of the day-to-day decisions of leaders may cause emotional fallout. As someone with a Certificate in Counselling I wanted somehow to reflect on these in relation to my own experience and life history. My own slow progress towards Head of Department was defined by motherhood and the needs of a child with a chronic condition, which meant that my own emotional focus has often been on managing the emotional side of family life. As well as these aspects, there are specifics that apply to groups I belong to (white, female), and the context (new university department, social sciences, education). This affective context had taught me a great deal, and I wanted to write an article that argues that such life experiences can enhance empathy and the use of positive emotional work in difficult circumstances for oneself and others.

Introduction

The format for this article is straightforward. I will connect lived experience to my research interest in emotion and leadership. Because this is a personal narrative, I have anonymised much of what occurred in order to make sure to not identify any particular person or specific event as far as possible. As Sikes (2010, p. 1) notes “writing is never neutral or innocent because it is a social and a political activity with consequences and that, as such, writing about, and thereby re-presenting, lives carries a heavy ethical burden”. Using my own diary, I have aimed to give the reader a picture of the event as I experienced it, which may not have been the same as the other person. Richardson (1990, p. 116) notes that by doing this, narrative writers transform a real event into a particular view of reality, neither “true” or “objective” fully aware that our realities may differ.

As a Head of Department I learnt that I had to understand the part emotion plays in my own transitioning from solo academic to “manager” (Gmelch & Miskin, 1993) and the inter-connectedness between emotion, their own feelings, and the affective relationships in the department and the wider organisation. I kept a diary which notes many occasions on which emotions such as anxiety, anger and frustration make an appearance.

I will also acknowledge that in work that is in any way autobiographical, there are dilemmas in what constitutes truth; thus, this work is about my perception and my reality, as noted above. As Ellis and Bochner (2000, p. 739) state “the autobiographical genre of writing displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (p. 739). My relationship to the experience needs to be stated from the start.

My aim for this article is best summed up by my adaption of Volkman:

I lived daily with the ambivalences and ambiguities of my role, and this article is in itself a struggle with how to position this as research; how to cast an eye that is both critical and sympathetic, attuned to our own profoundly personal connections to questions and to an analysis of the cultural and political contexts within which leadership must be situated. (adapted from Volkman, 2005, p. 18)

In particular, I will draw on the research approach used by Acker (2012, p. 411), who reflected on her own experience as a department chair (HOD) in Canada in the following manner:

A mix of personal narrative with theory and literature, an approach that demonstrates the relative merits of different theoretical perspectives when applied to an account of experience as well as the difficulty of settling on one ‘true’ analysis. (p. 411)

This mixed economy approach means that this reflection aims as Ellis et al. (2011) suggest, to approach the subject as part of my autobiography, written as a narrative but by referencing emotion theory to describe and analyse my experience in a particular cultural setting, to look at my leadership self (Miller, 2008).

By a mix of personal narrative with theory and literature and through the lens of my own research interests, I hope to offer a narrative, coherent and believable understanding of what it feels like to be a Head of Department, in the form of a first-person narrative (Bochner & Ellis, 2002). It is a personal leadership narrative (Kelchtermans et al., 2011) drawing on reflexivity to tie concepts from the literature to my personal experiences. Elsewhere I have noted that a personal leadership narrative (Crawford, 2007) is not about memories per se, but concerns stories people use to make sense of situations. Ginsberg and Gray Davies suggest (Ginsberg & Davies, 2002, p. 52) that stories can be a productive way of examining leadership and the link between emotion and personal narrative has been taken up by several authors (e.g. Bottery et al., 2009). Personal leadership narratives depend on emotional involvement and recall. As Denzin (1984) has noted, the narrative truth can be elusive but the story of personal experience can be used by others to understand issues and human interaction. So, this is a personal leadership narrative, not a pure autoethnography, which endeavours to highlight the intersection of the personal with a cultural context (Ellis, 2004, p. 46). (In a sense this article is part transition narrative; by reflecting upon the past to make sense of it from the present day. As Rhodes and Bivol (2011, p. 426) reflect in their study, “‘what was’ is storied through the lens of ’what is’ (Järvinen, 2004) […] thus, stories of the past are organised through a narrative of the present.” In order to do this, I will first discuss the relevance of the emotion and leadership literature, with personal reflections. I will then utilise the frames that Acker used in her reflection on being a HOD in Canada to focus on the emotions of leadership. I finish with a reflection on what I think I have learnt which may be helpful to other new department Heads.

“You don’t understand!” (Lecturer to me after being refused a request)

Being a Head of Department (HOD) is a role which much of the literature suggests is challenging and personally demanding (Floyd & Dimmock, 2011). This is reflected in the title above, where one person’s anger at an institutional decision was framed as a personal slight by me as HOD. Perhaps this is why there are very few personal accounts, because of difficulties around anonymity but also the subjectivity that is inherent in a personal account. I would argue that I can use this personal experience to reflect on leadership, particularly in the area of emotion, and other aspects of the specific leadership and management literature for Higher Education (HE).

Gmelch and Miskin (2011) in a study of Departmental Chair Leadership suggest that reflection on self and others is underused by HODs, and I will try to redress some of this balance, in particular focusing on emotions such as empathy and anxiety as a way of understanding some specific emotional events. Although my experiences are inevitably context specific (type of university, age, gender, length of tenure, and subject area of the department), there are some issues that can be brought together and applied more generally to a range of university settings. The particular department in this narrative had a mixed history, involving amalgamations, name and faculty changes, and many academics who had only worked in one Higher Education Institution (HEI). I wanted to run a happy and productive department, and was naïve at first in not understanding how past experiences, both mine and theirs, could merge into day to day events, and affect the discussions. This is despite being a Deputy Head of Department in another university and Acting Dean of a large Faculty. The lecturer above was used to having their own agenda affirmed by the previous HOD. What I viewed as empathy was viewed by them as being difficult, and thus the insult, despite my actual research history at Russell Group universities. The reality was different for each of us.

I believe that empathy can manifest itself in particular leadership practices, including, but not limited to team working with consultation, negotiation of realistic timeframes and performance goals, and making sure that team members have access to the necessary resources, skills and capacity to accomplish the negotiated goals (Parrish, 2015, p. 831). Immediately, it becomes clear that this is more difficult to do in an environment where resources are constrained, or removed without notice. One example of this would be when the context is that of Voluntary Redundancy (VR), which I had to deal with. As well as a knowledge of the Human Resource Management legal issues (which can be supplied by an HR expert), the HOD needs to see if the goal of VR can be realised in an empathetic manner. Because of the emotions stirred up by VR (loss, anxiety etc.) an empathetic response can help all parties have access to the relevant information, and what it might mean for their specific life and career goals. This emphasis on empathy is noted elsewhere in the literature (Walker & Kutsyuruba, 2020) who suggest that:

The aspiration to make wise decisions may seem trivial but is vitally important within the complex world of administrators' decision-making wherein one cannot be sure what outcomes will actually emerge (p. 57)

Dealing with VR I discovered that empathy had a two-way advantage. By being empathetic, many of the people I talked to were able to move forward with a decision they were happy with (although some were not). Unexpectedly, it also made me feel better about the process, and manage my own anxiety (was I doing the right thing?) because I had tried very hard to understand the other point of view. As well as being the shield for colleagues from the sharp end of policy so they could continue with their own academic work, I found empathetic responses invaluable. Interestingly, colleagues did note that one of my chief assets was the ability to remain calm despite difficulties, which was fed back to me on my leaving for a new role. This was not easy to maintain, and occasionally my calm front was lost, of course, but having empathy, I believe, helped the balance between anxiety and calm for many of the parties involved. Thus, the reality for me was emotional whilst often in the HE literature, universities are portrayed via the prism of managerialism. Departments are complex environments where individuals are at once viewed as autonomous individuals (research, writing) and team players (teaching, course leadership). This can mean that senior managers need to be able to know which part of this tension between the individual and the team they need to work with at any one time. This handling of dilemmas is a key part of departmental leadership and is a part of the liminal spaces between us, in our relationships, interactions, and expectations, and our emotional lives. For me, emotional concerns are in danger of becoming marginalised by an over emphasis on competences and procedures, and as a HOD I wanted to see if there was some way to bring these together.

A HOD copes daily with situations that have an emotional component. Every morning I knew that there would be something, however small, that had the potential to build over time into an emotional storm. A new member of senior staff, for example, whose approach to people did not chime with others on their team, should have been talked to earlier than I did. Eventually I had to tackle issues, and I learnt that anxiety is part of the job, and that for me, the earlier these problems are tackled the easier. Hochschild’s (1983) work explored the tensions that can build up and introduced the seminal concept of emotional labour. where workers may be required to simulate or suppress feeling in order to maintain a specific outward appearance that produced the required emotional state in others. There is a large component of emotional labour in the Head of Department’s work. Often a HOD has to disguise, or put on a front in meetings or in discussions. This concept can be applied to the role that I took on. In order to produce the required state in others, my own emotional labour was high. For example, keeping calm in the midst of senior colleagues berating the latest policy statement from the centre of the university when I thought it had merit was not an easy task at first. This is where Acker’s reflection is useful to me. She used three frames which can be focused on to understand emotion as a HOD: learning leadership; surviving organisations; and performing leadership. Using these three categories, I will now look at how they frame my Head of Department experience.

Learning leadership

My position as the titular leader of the department writing this is clearly important because of my positionality. As Takacs (2002, p. 170) writes:

Only I have lived my life; only you have lived yours. This encourages me to listen to you and you to me, as we each have (by definition) a unique perspective. […] we realize we make assumptions based on our own positionality, and that this must, by definition again, bias how we view the world.

As a HOD my own positionality and that of others is very important because of the way subjectivity and emotions are discussed. Emotion is a central organising feature in some dynamic constructs of identity, because emotions and thoughts are the things that are most real to people at any given moment (Haviland-Jones & Kahlbaugh, 2004). Haviland-Jones & Kahlbaugh (2004) argue for an “ongoing construction of connections between emotion and self-knowledge” (p. 293). I would argue this is as true for the leader as the individual, but that the role of the leader is to aid in the process of self-knowledge. An example would be when a course was no longer able to run because of numbers; I saw my role as a leader both to support the data (why it could not continue to run) and support the person (academic who had invested themself in this course). Haviland-Jones and Kahlbaugh call emotional events the “glue of identity” and argue that the role of emotion is to glue together chunks of experience to provide meaning for individuals.

My interest has always been on the socio-emotional side of leadership, or what Blackmore and Sachs called (2007, p. 13) the “caring and sharing discourse” of women’s leadership, linked to gender. Acker’s thoughts are very compatible with the ones that I had when I started as a Head of Department. She writes:

I had ideas about what I hoped to accomplish. ‘When I came in, I wanted people to feel better about themselves and their work’ (2001 interview). (…) Women have been said to favour less authoritarian, more consensual and more democratic forms of leadership (Collins & Singh, 2006). However, one shortcoming of these attractive dispositions is that when a woman practices them, they can be naturalised as a personal attribute and typical female behaviour rather than authentic leadership (Elliott & Stead, 2008, p. 164). For all that, my own style seemed to fit. But despite good intentions, I felt confused and vulnerable. (Acker, 2012, p. 416)

Perhaps because of my knowledge of leadership theory, I did not initially feel that vulnerability, thinking that I had a fair grasp of what leading involved. It soon became clear that certain situations e.g. in senior leadership meetings concerning what seemed like my personal accountability for management targets, did leave me vulnerable, and made me anxious or angry. Contingency theory (Fiedler, 1964), suggests there is no one way to run an organisation, and that context is crucial. Learning the importance of the history of the department, developed, for me, over time. Fiedler developed the idea that situational control depends on three factors from most to least important: leader-member relations; task structure; and position power. If work relations are good, tasks are thought out, and the leader has a legitimate power base then it will be easier for the leader to lead. Thus, when I started as a Head of Department, I would argue that I had the positional power, but in terms of general situational control, work needed to be done on the inherited task structures, because they seemed to lack clarity about who did what, when. Of course, changing those structures impacted on academics' views of their own leadership remit, such as when I revamped the postgraduate programmes, and had to remove some cherished academic talks. The intergroup processes of leadership are also important. These are often neglected, in particular within work that looks at comparing one group against another. So, academics may compare the new Head to the previous, or someone they worked with before. I was compared to my predecessor who apparently was great, and always had his door open. As I got to know colleagues better, they were more forthcoming on his deficiencies as a leader. Both sides of my predecessor were probably true. In a sense any leader leads against other groups, either real e.g. within the university, or in the collective imagination of their colleagues (Brian, the previous HOD, once gone became better in retrospect). This is something that is not emphasised enough in writing about leadership, as the collective imagination can be very powerful in influencing people’s reactions to new situations, as can a sense of autonomy decreasing or lack of resources to do the tasks required. This can lead to academic stress which the HOD needs to be on the alert for, and ready to work through both with individuals and groups.

Surviving organisations

As I write this in 2021, metrics and in particular performance management processes, mean that most universities now have the key behaviours of any role identified clearly, and systems in place for managing people that can be viewed by academics as inappropriate. For example, as HOD the performance management system overview to me from the Dean suggests “outstanding” should only be used sparingly. However, senior academics then view a “good” on the system as an insult to their integrity. Again, this taps into identity and our own emotional world. A useful role definition for the Head of Department is that of Stevenson and Howlett (2007, p. 121) whose framework has six behaviours: Working at the strategic level; Leadership; Credibility; Communicating with others; Working with people; Embracing change. I would argue that leadership behaviours embrace all the rest especially if you view leadership both as an individual behaviour and as an organisational quality (Ogawa & Bossert, 1997).

In 2015, Bryman conducted an extensive literature review on effectiveness in higher education leadership. He concluded that “leadership, in the traditional sense associated with leadership theory and research, may be of limited relevance, because academics' professionalism and their internal motivation mitigate the need for leadership of this kind” (p. 707). Thus, he considered that higher education leadership is “not so much what leaders should do, but more to do with what they should avoid doing”. I believe this is now even more difficult for leaders because the situation has been emphasised by metrics and league tables generally. I certainly found this tension in practice for myself. Leaders cannot avoid engaging with these metrics in some guise, and some staff will find their very professionalism and motivation, prompts them away from engaging in the very metrics that pragmatically underpin much of their job security. My most terse conversations were with colleagues who either did not understand, or tried to ignore this tension in academic life. For example, discussions on how to handle the National Student Survey (NSS) scores tended to be viewed on a personal emotional level “It is all my/my team’s fault” rather than “How can we work together to improve this?” An individual’s inner experience can be viewed as a result of self-feeling, that is the way that a person processes real and imagined social relationships. Briner (1999, p. 337) maintains that, “Emotion occurs in the context of our personal narrative – our history, present and anticipated future”. I also noted earlier the importance of the concept of emotional labour. A useful study that looks at the importance of empathy is Parrish (2015, p. 829). She found in her study of the relevance of emotional intelligence for leadership in a higher education context that empathy, defined as “the need for leaders to accurately identify and understand a person, their concerns, needs and abilities and then appropriately manage the person in light of this understanding to promote productivity and success” was the most significant emotional intelligence trait in leaders. As a HOD, I took time to set up situations where I could understand concerns and needs more clearly, and listen to other points of view. Parrish also identified the ability of the leader to responsibly manage themselves (p. 830) – to be able to keep disruptive emotions and impulses under control, maintain a high standard of conduct that provides a positive role model for others and foster relationships that are considerate and professional in interactions with others. Disruptive for me would be all about handling the worry that I had made a major error, even when it was a small item of no real importance. These are competences that, I would argue, are built on an understanding of people and organisations. The lens of storytelling (Fineman, 2003), is a powerful one that can enable sharing of difficult issues. As Hochschild (1983) wrote:

Emotion functions as a prism through which we may reconstruct what is often invisible or unconscious – what we must have wished, must have expected, must have seen or imagined to be true in the situation. From the colors of the prism we infer back what must have been behind and within it. (p. 246)

Through the prism, individuals and leaders make sense of behaviours that happen fromday today, and craft their own stories. Specific behaviours are important, but fundamentally departmental leadership is about people, their emotions, and the way people write themselves in and out of different emotional narratives concerning how and where they work, and their commitment to working together. One of the ways narratives are both lived and crafted is through performing leadership.

Performing leadership

I have already mentioned some aspects of performing leadership in the previous section. Performing is tied to emotion, and emotional labour. The dilemma of studying emotion in organisations is that some emotions are more socially acceptable than others. This is because emotions inhabit organisations in various ways (Rafaeli & Worline, 2001). There are multiple views as to what constitutes emotion – an observable display or an internal experience for example, and this is the dilemma when particular competencies are used as a proxy for all work on emotion. For me feelings could be said to inhabit people, and emotions inhabit organisations. Through narrative, leaders can tell the story of the past and also the way forward in the future. The leadership and educational literature points at an ever-growing interest in the affective dimension of organisations (Crawford, 2007, 2018; Beatty & Brew, 2004; Ginsberg & Davies, 2002; James et al., 2019) with much of the work focused on schools, rather than Higher Education, though this is changing (e.g. Cherkowski et al., 2020).

Performing leadership takes place within a particular culture. Levenson’s (1999) definition of culture and emotion, although somewhat dated, is valuable because he notes that culture “not only creates the social world, it guides people in the affective reactions needed to function in that world” (p. 513). Levenson defines culture as a community of shared meanings, which are bound by the affective relationships within the group. The HOD is at once a part of this, but also needs to be able to examine culture with a leadership perspective. Levenson advocates that the primary function of emotion is to serve as a signal that helps us clarify our views on issues in our institutional narrative, and these feelings will alter behaviour over time.

I could argue then that emotion can influence culture and vice versa. It has long been maintained (Meyerson & Martin, 1997) that the definition of what culture is and how cultures change depends on how one perceives and enacts culture. At the extreme of this argument, it could be said that almost all structures can only be interpreted through the emotions, beliefs, values and behaviours of the people involved in creating and enacting them. If the culture of an organisation is created and sustained at least partly by the emotions of the participants, it is important that those in leadership roles learn to manage their own and others’ emotions, a key tenet of emotional intelligence (EI), of course. Some of these emotions may be conscious displays, some unconscious or conscious feelings, but it may be that bringing into focus the unheralded, and unacknowledged aspects are key for the leader’s own emotional understanding of him/herself, and narrative may be a safe yet powerful way of acknowledging and framing emotions for an individual.

Maintaining appropriate professional boundaries, handling difficult emotional events (e.g. bereavement, family issues) and managing the emotional responses of themselves and others are often experienced within a setting where the Head of Department is the most visible person. Small things are important – lending a part time colleague money when the university refused to pay because the claim was an hour over the monthly deadline, despite pleas of personal hardship. It is these critical processes sustained by emotion that are so important for leaders to understand and to a certain extent, manage. Diener and Lucas (2000) argue that in any subjective measure of well-being (SWB) that a person may make about their life and work, emotions play a pivotal role, not only because emotions are with people all the time, but also because “a person who interprets his or her life as composed of desirable events will experience more pleasant than unpleasant emotions over time” (p. 333). Thus, affective concerns are connected to areas such as values, principles and judgements; those very concepts that lend emotional colour, passion and individual purpose to lived experience as a HOD.

Thank you so much

I have noted that affective concerns were a huge part of my time as HOD helped or hindered by the managerialism inherent in a modern university setting. Despite these, I did get thanked during my time there and as I left in small ways such as notes, cards, emails. The HOD must become an insider, while also retaining the outsiderness that brought them to the role. Hargie and Dickson helpfully categorise three parts of insideness:

1. Physical insideness: Knowing your own environment in terms of physical details and having a sense of personal territory.

2. Social insideness: Feeling connected to a place where you know people well.

3. Autobiographical insideness: Knowing “where you come from”, and “who you are”. (Hargie & Dickson, 2004, p. 226)

Thus, the new leader from outside the organisation needs to rely on knowing who they are and where they come from, as they evaluate the new culture in which they find themselves, and build connections in the new environment. The relationship of the HOD with all those connected lives can be a challenge, especially for cultural newcomers, such as I was when I began my role. Jotting down my own thoughts in an informal diary helped me understand my feelings about my new context, and crucially what people seemed to understand about my role. For example, I noted, should I have open doors on a certain day of the week like my predecessor as mentioned above? If I wasn’t in the office, but say working at home or travelling on departmental business, this was viewed by some staff as not being a proper HOD, or so it was reported back to me. This was contrary to my lived experience at other universities. Understanding connected lives can influence decision-making, which is an important part of the Head of Department’s role. Mintzberg (1979) has argued that the work of leaders, including decision-making, sometimes involves the application of rationality – which he calls the “cerebral” aspects of leadership, and sometimes rests on the development of vision and encouragement of others – which Mintzberg refers to as the “insightful” aspect. The cerebral approach stresses calculation, and tends to see the world as if it were the components of a portfolio, using the language (words and numbers) of rationality. This applied when I was looking at how to make departmental savings, but I learnt that the insightful was equally important, because sometimes difficult decisions need to be made (course closures, redundancies, termination of contracts), and seeing the world as an integrated whole, using a language that emphasises the personal values of the individual could sometimes help to make those decisions easier, though not always. Oatley and Jenkins (2003) have argued (p. 82), that emotions arise in our daily lives largely in terms of problems to be solved. This particular attribute has been termed the “aboutness” of emotion (Oatley & Jenkins, 2003), simply because most emotions can be said to be “about” something. In other words, the focus is often clear, as with my problem as HOD with voluntary redundancy, but can also be more obscure when the presenting problem is not the actual problem. In terms of the voluntary redundancy scheme, it could be anticipated that this would be a circumstance where emotion is heightened and undesirable behaviours could occur. The part of the emotional narrative that took me by surprise concerned distributing leadership and the sharing of personal information. Often when a decision is made, there may be reasons that need to be kept confidential for a variety of reasons to do with health, security, safeguarding or other difficult issues. As a Head of Department, I was surprised how often the need to keep details back from (sometimes senior members) of the department was necessary both for operational and personal reasons. If you have a culture of shared leadership there are still occasions when “the leader” has to decide without sharing the details behind it, and in an academic setting, this can be unsettling to staff when it is not the normal practice to hide factors that lead to a decision.

The popularity of emotional intelligence (EI) as a competency framework may be because of its relationship to the “aboutness” of emotion, and EI’s implicit suggestion that emotion and decision-making is mainly a competence that can be learnt. Sometimes leadership programmes have viewed the EI/competence route in educational leadership as a short cut to effectiveness rather than part of a developing and complex affective paradigm for leadership (James et al., 2019). This is not to negate the importance of understanding the links between emotion and decision-making. Ornstein and Nelson (2006, p. 44) helpfully suggest that the key competence of emotional intelligence is that of self-awareness, which concurs with Parrish and managing yourself responsibly. As they put it: “People adept at self-awareness recognise their emotions, their genesis and the potential outcome of their state of feeling.”

I have tried in a small way to do that in this article.

Conclusion

Whilst reading many excellent pure ethnographic accounts I was struck by Holman Jones's (2016, p. 234) argument that when we aim to bridge analysis and action, we make claims on people. She notes, “The art in creating these bridges is to make these claims on people’s lives dynamic, nuanced, complex, open-ended, and relational.“ I believe that knowledge of a wider literature base on emotion can be part of this bridging, as well as making the narrative engaging and truthful. The idea of the rational organisation as a place where emotion can be controlled out of existence is a naïve assumption by those who manage (Fineman, 2003). It could be compelling to suggest that Heads of Department could somehow read the runes of emotion in order to restore rationality by managing our own feelings better. Justifying how one behaves emotionally in a social situation can be termed “professional behaviour”. Feelings and emotions lubricate, rather than impair rationality. We receive cues for emotional patterns, and these cues have characteristic feelings associated with them (e.g. defeat is an emotion that can arouse feelings of shame and fear). Most emotions and feelings are intentional (e.g. we worry about something, we are angry with someone). Allowing emotion in serves to remind leaders of how someone’s inner world may have a profound impact on the context.

Being a Head of Department for me was both challenging and rewarding. I would note, with Bryman (2007) however that the intensity with which staff want to participate in decision making is more intense in Higher Education. I would suggest this is even stronger now in a more metric driven policy context, where perhaps individual academics wish to reclaim lost agency, and emotions play a part in that. As identities merge and change over time, an effective academic department requires the department head to understand their own and others' affective reactions. From an emotional viewpoint the leader requires a degree of accuracy in understanding others' emotions, and the needs and wants that may go with that, which may or may not be connected substantively to work.

Walker and Kutsyuruba (2020) write that leaders in complex arenas (such as universities) should focus on an “active, attentive and thoughtful approach to people, their interests, and their dignity” (p. 63). This is written in the context of downsizing, and, as I have indicated above, this was a major facet of my leadership context. However, I think it lends itself to all aspects of academic leadership. I noted earlier that Bryman’s (2007) study suggests that leadership does make a difference to academics, but perhaps in a different way to other contexts. He argues that academics' intrinsic self-motivation means that their leaders need to avoid certain leadership behaviours. I would argue that these are those behaviours which are in some way damaging to their professional identity such as suggesting they take on a role they do not want to do (perhaps because it takes them away from research) but which is necessary for the greater good of the department. Leaders in the more managerial context of universities today, often in the context of downsizing, are left with somewhat of a quandary. Certainly, my own view was that most academics are supremely motivated to get on with their chosen tasks, but these do not always chime with the direction that is needed in your opinion as the Head of Department or even the one that the university may want the Department steered in. The old adage that working with academics is like herding cats is useful here – a study in 2013 that looked at this idea, discovered that “departments which are better managed also have better performance” (McCormack et al., 2013). My view is that, in any department, there are times when everyone, or groups and teams need to work together for a common purpose. This involves leadership which helps individual academics set aside personal goals and replace them with team goals. Activating this common purpose with academics can have incentives of different kinds attached, dependant on the individual – the personal, emotional component. I would like my leadership narrative to then be used by others to reflect on, understand, and respond to in their own context, drawing on their own personal strengths and weaknesses. Acker wrote, “By the time I finished my three-year term, I had developed new skills and gained increased confidence in my leadership abilities. I had accomplished many things for individual colleagues and for the department. Yet I was unsure that I had enjoyed my assignment or that I had achieved enough” (p. 415). I would contend that being unsure may be a good sign. Only by being unsure at the end of your tenure as a leader, I suggest, can you be certain that you have actively used a thoughtful approach to people, and their own personal context, all the while set within the complex interplay of changing policy demands in HE.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).