‘I’m spending all my time being operational‘, is a common complaint I hear from school leaders.

They are, in other words, too busy dealing with the day-to-day to be able to focus on the the longer term. They sometimes describe this in a way which suggests that ‘operational’ is somehow more basic, a set of lower-level skills, while ‘strategy’ is more complex, operating several levels above the daily grind. We often assume that the life-cycle of leadership means moving steadily from the operational (early in our career), towards the strategic (as we become more senior). Which suggests the operational stuff is something we eventually leave behind. This blog is my response to this feeling.

Let’s deal with the two sides of operational first. I think there is both good and bad operational:

Good operational
When you find that you’re spending much of your time on lots of fixing things, this suggests that people rely on you and your strengths to solve important problems. There’s a reason you are doing this work – people come to you because you are effective, and they have confidence that something will get done: a behaviour intervention, following through on a team decision, a curriculum document written or shared planning completed to a deadline. We spend much of our early career building operational efficiency, and this takes a specific skillset plus the commitment of time to make it really land and have impact. Colleagues love that certainty. This is priceless to your team, so don’t undervalue it.

Bad operational
This operational expertise tips into frustration when we begin to feel alone in it, or when we sense that others are passing things over to us, which they should really be dealing with themselves. It’s often accompanied by throwaway phrases: you’re brilliant at that, or people will listen to you. At first, this kind of feedback feels good because people seem to be telling us that they value our impact. But this soon pails as we notice our free time evaporating before our very eyes, while others seem to have all the time in the world to sit at the desk, luxuriously planning strategy. We reach home-time with a sense that we are not on top of things, because we’ve taken on tasks from others or solved their problems. Our to-do list has grown, while theirs has shrunk.

We sense that something needs to change, both in how we are functioning (feeling frustrated, exhausted and inefficient) but also in the behaviour of others (are we being taken for granted?). As we look for a solution to fix the problem, we may voice a generalised sense that we need to be more strategic, but because we simply cannot find the energy, bandwidth and thinking time to make this shift.

Now let’s take a look at the two sides of strategy.

Bad strategy
Not all strategic work or thinking is helpful. We are all familiar with colleagues who pontificate through unrealistic scenarios and PowerPoint dreams about some possible future which takes little account of current challenges, financial reality or the abilities of our teams. The kind of so-called blue sky thinking which feels like it has been lifted straight out of the pages of a consultancy manual.

Leaders who deliver this nonsense will often spend more time or distance away from their teams and the reality of the chalk-face. As a result, although they may design impeccable slide decks, pdfs, and presentations, you won’t find them sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with their team solving real problems here on terra firma.

Good strategy
The most useful and practical strategic solutions are, in fact, often borne out of the frustration of feeling lumbered with other people’s operational luggage. One leader I work with recently described to me how she’d dealt with this frustration. She was used to a situation where people would sometimes look to her to solve pupil problems with behaviour. Tired and frustrated, she waited for the next significant issue (a pupil with high needs), caught herself before stepping in to solve the ‘problem,’ and instead invited a group of staff to join her in a planning meeting about how to co-produce a solution to more effectively support that child.

This had two effects. Firstly, together the team created more possible solutions than she could have created alone. Secondly, the plan and the monitoring going forwards was a shared one, so that the responsibility for fixing that child’s issues did not sit squarely on her shoulders alone. She found herself, because of her operational effectiveness, being the broker of this solution, and able to ensure follow up on actions that they together shared. What began with frustration, became an opportunity to step back, think more strategically, and create a stronger joint solution. Not a blue-sky theoretical possibility, but concrete actions that colleagues could easily get behind.

Most emerging leaders have successfully arrived at their roles and reached their current career positions, because of their ability to perform exceptionally in their field of expertise. So, it’s not surprising that they find it hard to pull themselves away from the front line, to encourage others to be part of the solution. We want to stay in control. We are reluctant to hand over the operational because we sense we may well do the job better, or we fear that handing over the reins means we may lose our reputation for what we are best at.

For experienced leaders, we can easily lose confidence when things seem like they’re going wrong. Returning to your area of operational specialism can help. A number of senior leaders have said to me, ‘I just want to become an expert again.’ Perhaps they were sensing that their role had begun to feel too generalist (headteacher-jack-of-all-trades), or that they spend most of their time dealing with other people’s issues. Getting back to your signature strength reminds you what you’re really good at, and why people come to you for advice.

In identifying the things operationally that we do brilliantly, then stepping back to study and then draw out the operational skills from others, we can achieve an end-result which is still operational excellence, with more fulfilled staff and ultimately happier children. We stop firefighting (focusing on the how), and move our thinking to the broader underlying issues (thinking about the why).

Moving from an operational to a strategic lens requires shifting from doing to thinking, but we don’t lose the doing. We teach this to others.  At its core, strategic leadership is creating space to think, so that more of us can become more effective operators.