The importance of governors in setting the tone for a college

A myriad of rightly-sounded notes add up to the symphony that is organisational culture

A myriad of rightly-sounded notes add up to the symphony that is organisational culture

27 Dec 2024, 5:00

Early on in my chair career, the principal of Kensington and Chelsea College said to me that I “set the tone”. We were working through some difficult times together, absorbing justified local anger following the Grenfell tragedy. I didn’t really know what he meant at the time, but decided the best thing to do was to take it as a compliment!

I now see “tone” as the mood music setting up the great symphony that is a strong and positive organisational culture. I believe tone is quite strongly anchored in modelling behaviours and setting standards as a governor.

How do you talk to students and members of staff beyond the executive leadership team? Are you seen as an active listener? Are you prepared to challenge a board colleague who makes a casual but inappropriate remark either in or out of a board meeting?

Setting the tone can also be about softer cues like how you dress. A governor wearing a suit and tie might briefly attract the attention of college staff in a college building, especially if that governor doesn’t regularly wear a suit and tie. Staff might briefly wonder what’s going on in their college that day that a governor is dressing formally.

At Croydon College, we are well on our way to striking up our own grand symphony, in south London and more widely. We have focused hard on quality and on teaching and learning, and were delighted with our recent Ofsted ‘Good’ judgment – an excellent platform for our ambitious new strategic plan. This will all help to positively define our organisational culture.

Culture is famously the subject of hundreds of different definitions in academic literature. But we can be pragmatic about it. Critically for our sector, I see it as meaning that all staff including the executive team and governors understand and support what the organisation is trying to achieve.

This cannot happen unless the board and executive team work closely and productively together.

In many or even most organisations, however, wider staff might have only a general or limited understanding of the role of the board. Similarly, boards – no matter how much governors ‘take part in the life of the college’ – can only have a certain perspective on the organisation’s culture.

This is one of the ways you find yourself really enjoying the job

This means that governors must rely on insight and inputs from staff and the executive team in areas such as EDI and measures of staff morale to take an active part in helping shape and then monitor organisational culture.

It is also true that organisational culture will always substantially be shaped by the chief executive’s leadership. Therefore, how the board appraises and rewards the chief executive through its remuneration committee can also greatly influence the culture of your college.

And of course there is no point pretending that achieving or maintaining a great college culture is easy. Strategy alone can be hugely challenging, and as the famous saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast!

This is where setting the tone comes in. Relative to culture, tone is easy. Tone is entirely down to you. It’s individual, it can be authentic if you wish it to be. It can convey rigour as well as humour, and it’s a simple way to communicate standards and professionalism.

In fact, setting the tone should be one of the ways you find yourself really enjoying the job!

It can be sa apparently trivial as putting a bowl of fruit (or strictly one colour smarties) on the table for a board meeting. Or it can be as conspicuously important as defending your college and principal in the middle of a public challenge from an angry local authority chief executive.

Whatever the circumstance, the tone you set as chair in your college is a window that people look through to confirm their impression of the organisation’s culture.

All these notes – little and large – are what adds up to that symphony in the end. It’s important not to sound the wrong ones!

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