Everyday leadership – five ways that potential Senior Fellows applicants might articulate influence

In recent mentoring conversations with colleagues who are working towards Senior Fellow applications, it occurred to me that people can often struggle to articulate the ‘how’ of their influence when it isn’t aligned with a formal leadership role or title. Writers of Senior Fellowship claims often use language like ‘worked with’ or ‘shared with’ to try to convey the means through which they have disseminated good practice or influenced colleagues outside of structured spaces like team meetings, working groups, panel meetings or formal mentoring relationships.  

That got me thinking about the spaces and places where less formal (but still impactful) influence might take place, and how we might engage in ‘everyday leadership’. A bit of reflection on the many Senior Fellowship claims that I have mentored (and a review of potentially helpful literature) has led to the following suggestions for how potential Senior Fellowship applicants might conceptualise how they have disseminated practice or influenced others. These suggestions (with some ‘starter for ten’ references) are intended to be helpful in prompting thinking rather than being exhaustive, and I would be really interested to hear other thoughts.  

1. Teaching conversations – there is a recognition that informal, everyday conversations about teaching can have a very real impact on solving pedagogic challenges and enhancing practice. However, I’m not convinced that potential Senior Fellowship applicants recognise this as potential influence so I have started recommending Joy Jarvis and Karen Clark’s Conversations to Change Teaching (Critical Publishing, 2020) as an excellent resource to help colleagues to articulate the range of ways in which conversations might play a part in how they influence others.  
    
2. Natural Mentoring – Many colleagues who apply for Senior Fellowship have done some kind of mentoring and want to include it in their claim. That mentoring is often part of a formal scheme such as a ‘buddy’ scheme for new staff, support for promotions applications or a scheme that supports people to claim Advance HE Fellowship. There is also a good deal of informal mentoring that goes on in HE, where people aren’t given the title of ‘mentor’, but are generally able to articulate how they supported colleagues. However, ‘natural mentoring’ is, perhaps, a stage further removed from formal mentoring since it emerges more naturally, often through a tacit process where the mentee identifies someone that they feel can offer the support and advice that they need. Neither party might explicitly recognise the relationship as a mentoring one, but the literature suggests that such natural mentoring relationships can be more enduring, deeper and more impactful than those that are formally or informally arranged by a third party. Much of the literature on natural mentoring has emerged from the youth work context, but I would suggest that similar relationships often seem to emerge in HE where staff frequently have to navigate complex organisational cultures and tacit rules, and benefit from guidance from someone that they can easily identify with. One article that considers the role of natural mentoring in an academic context (albeit within schools) is Kraft, Bolves and Hurd’s piece in the Economics of Education Review called “How informal mentoring by teachers, counselors, and coaches supports students’ long-run academic success” (2023). 
    
3. Peer Relationships – Kram and Isabella (1985) identify ‘peer relationships’ as another alternative to mentoring, and perhaps a different way of articulating and understanding how some ‘natural mentoring’ relationships might emerge. In their article, “The Role of Peer Relationships in Career Development” in The Academy of Management Journal they note that “peer relationships offer an important alternative to conventional mentoring” (116), and may be one way that colleagues influence the practice of others. Whereas formal leadership or line management roles are necessarily limited, staff are likely to have a whole range of peers that they may turn to for advice or support instead. This provides an opportunity for sharing good practice that some colleagues may not necessarily recognise as part of their leadership practice. The article also identifies a range of peer relationships, potentially supporting SF applicants to articulate the type of support that they have offered and how it has influenced practice.  
    
4. Followership – It might seem a little counter-intuitive to suggest that followership might be one way that colleagues have exercised their influence, but much of the followership literature recognises the agency of followers, and the impact that followership can have on the success of various approaches to leadership. One such piece is “Followership in Higher Education: Academic Teachers and their Formal Leaders” by Billot et. al in Teaching and Learning Inquiry (2013). The article conceptualises “followership as a continuum from acquiescence to co-construction” (101) and notes that many staff in academia do not hold formal leadership roles, nor recognise themselves as leaders, but might nevertheless exercise influence as followers. The article could be a helpful starting point for colleagues by helping them to articulate how their situation in relation to formal leaders (for example their place within a distributed leadership model) might create space for them to exercise influence.  
    
5. Critical friendship – In their article “The role of the critical friend in supporting and enhancing professional learning and development” in Professional Development in Education, MacPhail, Tannehill and Ataman recognise that the notion of a ‘critical friend’ has traditionally been a rather ambiguous one. However, they go on to explore how support and critique might variously feature in ‘critical friendship’, where the term “implies that these two ideas need to complement one another for the role to be properly expressed” (2023: 602). For those who are exploring how they have influenced others, the ideas and vignettes provided in this article might provide further insight into how the notion of being a ‘critical friend’ might legitimately be conceptualised as a developmental approach that has impacted practice.  

I am in the process of trying these ideas out with some of the Senior Fellowship applicants that I am mentoring, but can see that they might have potential to be helpful to colleagues, and hope they may be to others too.  

Claire is an Associate Professor at the University of Chester and leads the Academic Practice Team in the Centre for Academic Innovation and Development. Claire has worked in academic development in a range of universities in the UK, and has particular interests in supporting novice teachers and pracademics to develop their pedagogic practice.