Speak Up, Listen Up: Creating the conditions for leading and learning

If we want college cultures that are fit for the future, then we need to connect leadership, psychological safety and learning. Holly Bembridge, Principal of King Edward VI College and John Watters, Director at Living Leadership, reflect on the promising results of a new approach, taking it in turns to explain their work together.

Holly Bembridge: 2022 was the year that we finally moved out of London. Pushing down the anxiety that I was mad to leave a lovely job and a buoying network of friends, I came to Stourbridge as principal of King Edward VI Sixth Form College. I was alive to the risks of bringing my family to this unfamiliar place, but quite excited to explore too – both the leafy, wild-garlicky lanes near my new home and this college with a great reputation and long history.

The staff at King Ed’s were welcoming but occasionally it felt like I was being offered a set of clothes that didn’t fit.  One of the first surprises was how often I was asked to resolve what I thought were minor issues; questions about time off in lieu, or college trips, despite long and detailed policies that everybody knew a lot better than I did. There was a deference that could make it hard to feel I’d really understood what was going on. People seemed reluctant and sometimes scared to make decisions.

It was pretty clear that if the college was to evolve, I would have to model change, resisting the urge to please by fitting into those clothes, pushing myself to show my limitations and speaking up when I wanted and expected help.

I spoke with John Watters as I was starting to figure this out. I’d worked with him at Sir George Monoux College in London. He had helped to move our middle leadership from a hive-like Ofsted-ready formation to a freer and more self-starting team.

John Watters: In London I had admired Holly’s down-to-earth style and commitment to high standards. I was curious about how she would be in her new role, as Principal. How you occupy the ‘top’ role has a big impact on the college culture.

As I listened to Holly, I was struck by the apparent fear in the college of making mistakes.

Holly had gently tried to encourage a more interactive culture, with space for questioning and ideas. My work was intended as an accelerant, working with the College Leadership Team, seventeen managers working across different areas of the college. My proposal was to hold three group workshops over five months, backed up with coaching. There had been no recent leadership training.

I noticed that Holly was hesitant about the scope and intensity of the work and at one point in our discussions she proposed trialling a single workshop and seeing how that went.

Holly: I was nervous. If leadership training doesn’t work well, it can demotivate and, looming large in my mind, make the principal look a bit of a numpty! I vacillated. Was this the ‘right moment’? Was the game worth the candle?

John: I could understand Holly’s apprehension and the feeling of risk. And I sensed that reviewing after one workshop would signal a tentative commitment so I was relieved Holly took the risk and came behind the whole programme.

 As a starting point, I observed key management meetings, based on the principle that if you want to understand a system, then you should watch it at work.

A first half-day workshop followed: managers worked together on an urgent question facing the college, with one important difference. We mixed up people’s normal roles. This switch of context generated insight and empathy about the challenges that others face. The approach is based on the research of systems theorist, Barry Oshry, who distinguishes four key spaces or contexts in organisations. Each context is characterised by a specific set of conditions or forces. These contexts, of which most of us are unaware, are a significant shaper of behaviour within organisations. The framework offers a distinct way of ‘seeing’ the dynamics of any human system: team, organisation, family, community, country, globally.

The four contexts are:  

o Top space: characterised by accountability, complexity and uncertainty.

o Bottom space: characterised by vulnerability (decisions made elsewhere, often at higher levels of the system, influence the lives of those in bottom space in major and minor ways)

o Middle space: characterised by being pulled and pushed between the conflicting demands, needs and requests of different individuals and groups.

o Customer space: characterised by varying degrees of neglect, where customer needs are frequently not being heard or met.

The framework illuminates the conditions and distinct challenges that apply in the different parts of the organisation: top manager, middle manager, worker teams and customer spaces. Through this increased mutual understanding, the quality of partnership is strengthened across the system.

The framework also offers a map of the shifting, dynamic nature of our relationships. Top, middle, bottom and customer are relational spaces which we all move between. For example, a Principal who is positionally ‘top’ with respect to the College system can also be in other interactions: in the Bottom relational space, on the receiving end of (and vulnerable to) new directives from the Department of Education; in the Middle relational space, caught in the middle of a conflict between two groups; and then in the next interaction Customer, reliant on a provider to tailor the needs of a new IT system to the college’s needs. In each relational space there are powerful possibilities and predictable pitfalls.

It is an eye-opener to realise that the complex, often confusing nature of organisations is not just personal (about you or them) and neither is it purely related to your specific context (sixth form colleges), it’s also systemic: the latent creativity of human beings at any and all levels of the system and the reactive, self-limiting patterns we humans fall into, despite our best intentions.     

Holly: The task was designed to be fast-paced and demanding, thereby activating people’s everyday reflex responses. Strikingly, everybody waited to be told what to do by the ‘top’ managers. And curiously, with the clock ticking, the first priority of managers was to do a ‘wellbeing check’ on staff. In the debrief, a few people spoke frankly about the way the dynamics in the exercise mirrored behaviours in the college.

Differentiating the contexts of ‘top’, ‘middle’, ‘bottom’ and ‘customer’ provides a powerful heuristic for learning about an organisation. As much as I don’t love the language (it’s not a snug fit for education, faintly crude!) these concepts reliably open up multiple perspectives, showing how we can be habitually blind to others’ experiences.

John: The first workshop was followed by 1-1 coaching sessions with each manager. In private, people opened up about historic experiences which had left people hesitant to speak up and deferring decisions upwards for approval. 

Holly: It became clear that ‘psychological safety’ was an issue for us. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson has defined this as “a shared belief held by members of a team that it’s OK to take risks, to express ideas and concerns, to speak up with questions and to admit mistakes… it’s felt permission for candour”. Since she first wrote about it, a slew of papers and articles have suggested that it is critically important. Google’s ‘Project Aristotle’, which looked at 180 different teams over a four-year period, found psychological safety was the one thing that mattered more than anything else when it came to the performance of teams.

John: Given that psychological safety had emerged as important, it was critical that in opening the second session Holly was open about her learning in her role as principal, and shared candidly what she felt she needed to do differently. Unless the leader takes risks - makes herself vulnerable - it is unlikely others will follow.

Holly: I spoke about my desire to lead more skilfully, holding back my impulse to leap in, take over and shape things and ‘be the saviour’, a behaviour which shears people of the accountability they need to flourish.

The full day workshop was intense, but showed us our patterns in a way that was both funny and impossible to deny. In the afternoon the team opened up and started to talk openly about a number of important things for the first time as a whole group of managers. It was cathartic. I noted a palpable change of atmosphere in the college in the days that followed, like the release you find after a tropical storm breaks. I felt grateful that people took the risk to speak up. More than grateful: I was surprised, and a bit humbled.

Our Ofsted inspection followed soon after that second workshop. Fresh from thinking about ‘psychological safety’, I was positive that good teamwork could not happen where people were fearful of blame. I said to staff: mistakes are made in high pressure situations, don’t worry. I made clear I valued endeavour and honesty over any ideal of flawlessness. There were moments during the inspection when I still felt the urge to take over, worrying my leaders might struggle. But I restrained myself, knowing that this would dent their confidence. I needed to trust. I’m glad I did: the team did well.

In the third session, John introduced a framework for having candid, difficult conversations: a practical how to application of speaking up and listening up.  We followed up with a peer coaching system amongst the managers who took part in this initial training.

In a second cycle in this current academic year 2024/25, we extended the training to all line managers. We’ve taken a planned and an emergent approach to this work: a college’s culture is a living phenomenon, revealing its patterns in the everyday, and we adapt and respond as we go.

John: There’s a paradox at the heart of this approach to leadership and learning. In order to create a more distributed leadership culture there is a pivotal role for senior positional leaders:   they need to be ready to look clearly and deeply at how they exercise power, individually and collectively. In my experience the readiness to inquire into our use of power is relatively rare and yet this is the seed of a new possibility. Without that inquiry there is no sustained change possible within hierarchical systems.

Holly: I have done my best to set the stage by talking to staff about the links between psychological safety, learning and a more distributed leadership culture. Psychological safety is often misunderstood. It isn’t about coddling people – in fact it’s being able to be a bit more spiky and more challenging as questions and concerns can be raised with less fear. The push for high standards then becomes more about service and less about egos. Psychological safety also feeds through to students. The idea that making mistakes is a part of learning, that articulating a challenge to the group is a positive thing to do, that awkward questions can be powerful: all of this is rich food for A level students.

There is appetite here to pursue this course, communicating more openly about how we reach higher standards whilst making space for mistakes. We’re building a culture where people find it easier to speak up (and listen up) in service of the students and the college.

Now in mid-2025, I can see I wasn’t mad to leave my lovely colleagues and friends (though I still miss them) and that working as a principal, and working with the idea of psychological safety, has also been good for me. I’m willing to listen more, see what emerges and have become more open to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned more as a result. I’ve felt less pressure to know it all, and in exposing my own ignorance, felt less like an imposter.

Living now in this part of the country, I also have a freezer full of wild garlic pesto. It’s a bit spiky too.

Holly Bembridge can be contacted here at King Edward VI College for any questions or further conversation. If you’d like to talk to John Watters about how to bring this approach to your college you can reach him here or through https://livingleadership.org.uk.