We interviewed Sheena Warman, (Professor of Veterinary Education and Academic Director for Teaching Excellence in the Faculty of Life and Health Sciences) about the process of becoming a Principal Fellow and she shares an honest account of what she learnt, how it helped her practice and the aspects that were challenging.
If you’re interested in becoming a Principal Fellow, please come along to the in-person workshop at Frenchay Campus (UWE) on 23rd April. You can see more details and register via this link.
BILT: How did you find the process of becoming a Principal Fellow?
Sheena: It wasn’t easy… It was quite a long, drawn-out process from the point at which I started thinking about it, probably being nudged by other people.
I went to a couple of workshops quite early on, started to try and pull the evidence together and then other projects and things got in the way and it fell by the wayside. The pivotal moment for me was a cross-universities workshop that Bristol hosted with colleagues from a few other institutions and they brought in some other Principal Fellows.
One of the people that had been brought in was Professor Sarah Baillie, who I’ve worked with a lot in the past, and actually she started to make me more accountable to myself and the institution in terms of ‘you need to get this done, set yourself some deadlines and get it done’ and she helped me cut through the noise to identify what my stories and my strengths would be within the application.
Finding your three key stories that you want to tell is harder than it sounds, because you want to pull quite a few different things in. You need to be able to show that impact on students.
A lot of the work I’ve done is around staff development, but I needed to be able to evidence the impact on students themselves. A lot of my influence has been within Veterinary Education internationally at quite a large scale, but the focus of Advance HE is very much on Higher Education more generally and your wider institution.
I’ve had leadership roles within the institution as well and the tension for me was, yes, I sort of set the agenda, set the scene, nudged, influenced, set up processes that would help people create positive change and deliver better outcomes for students. But it’s that classic sort of impostor syndrome thing of ‘I didn’t actually do the work that led to this improvement in an NSS score’ or something.
But on reflection, the roles that I’d had had set things up in a way that meant people could then do that stuff and had shared good practice and had that impetus for change and that support for change.
So it was that shift from being very comfortable owning what I felt I’d physically done myself, versus – from a strategic leadership perspective – feeling a sense of ownership of the things that I’d put in place to help other people succeed for their students. That was a real shift in my thinking over time as well, and a lot of that actually didn’t really happen until I submitted my first draft and got feedback. The first draft didn’t get accepted. There were some lovely positive comments, but they wanted to see more of that ‘how did you make things happen?’ and better understanding of the contexts, the two different contexts I was working in as well.
Once I had that feedback, there was an opportunity to have a one-to-one meeting with a senior member of the panel that judged the applications and that was really useful. You know, like any bit of feedback, isn’t it? Especially when you’ve put a lot of work into something over the holidays because that was the only time I had the headspace to do it. I did try and create a few writing days within working hours, but, you know, inevitably other priorities get in the way. So, it was a big personal commitment to have done it, and then you get the feedback, it’s not there yet. And so, you then need a bit of wallowing and self-pity time before you then sort yourself out and go and talk to somebody. But that was a really useful conversation and very helpful.
I could see, you know, where the strengths and weaknesses were, but I could also see a way of reframing things, which came back to that, just because I haven’t physically done the granular work myself, doesn’t mean I can’t claim it, I suppose, as having set the strategic direction and supported people to get there. So – it was a process, a long one – but I got there in the end.
BILT: How many years did it take you in total?
Sheena: Oh, I don’t know when I first started thinking about it. Probably 3 years, three or four maybe. In terms of the actual sorting myself out and doing it, probably a year from going, right, this is happening this year.
The other thing that helped was in my annual review with my Head of School, I said, ‘I want to do this this year’. And he was like, ‘you need to do this this year because you said you were going to do it last year and you didn’t. So, you need to do this for the institution, for the school, for you. You just need to get this done. Book yourself some writing days’ – which I did, but inevitably, you know, maybe managed 1/4 of them. And so, I had that permission from my Head of School to put some of my time and effort and energy into it and that helped as well. But it’s, yeah, it’s not a quick, it’s not something you knock up in a weekend.
Sometimes it is just about saying ‘this is going to happen. I’m just going to prioritise it above other stuff’. And for me it was getting the table, I can’t remember what it’s called, where you list your main achievements. And I think what I did in the end actually was I had post-it notes of all the things I wanted to include and I clustered them together to try and tell my 3 main stories.
That’s quite helpful as well, because I think sometimes in your own personal development, with the projects that you pick up, with the things that you prioritise within your roles, with the changes that you influence, you’re so in the thick of it. You know what your institutional or your school strategy is, or where you’re trying to go with that project, but sometimes you don’t understand your own ‘and why?’ terribly well.
It’s not until you go, ‘actually, it’s interesting, these are the things I really enjoy doing and the things I gravitate towards’. It’s almost your own personal strategy in reverse being informed by, well, ‘this is what I’ve done, and this is the satisfaction I’ve had and the difference I’ve made.’ And that said something about me.
I wouldn’t have figured some of that stuff out without going through what was quite a long and, at times, quite painful process. But I learned a lot about my own leadership style and what motivates me in doing that.
BILT: You’ve kind of answered this one already really but how did it make you reflect on your practice and experiences?
Sheena: Yeah, I think, I suppose three different things, like I said, about understanding my own motivations for what I enjoy making a difference to. I love supporting students through transitions and how I have set things up to help that happen and it’s those sorts of projects that have often attracted me. Thinking about the impact I’d had in ways that I hadn’t thought about before. You know, it was a step removed because I was leading, directing, steering, vision setting, rather than necessarily implementing or even developing.
So thinking about impact from that step-back and then some of the feedback I had was very specific. They wanted me to give some more specific examples and how it influenced practice in other institutions. They wanted to know the shape and size of those institutions. They wanted to know how I created impact. So how did I get buy-in? How did I promote collaboration? How did I manage the challenges with the effect of influencing and improving student outcomes?
They wanted quite a lot of detail about my own approaches and processes around strategic leadership, which I didn’t really think were interesting. But that’s what was missing from my first draft that they did want. And it does bring it to life.
BILT: What would you say to anyone thinking of applying to become a Principal Fellow?
Sheena: I’d say: go for it, but don’t underestimate the size of the task. It’s a process. It will need writing and rewriting and redrafting and reframing, or at least it was for me, other people might be more efficient with that.
Get yourself a mentor and have that mentor hold you to account for deadlines. Otherwise, because it is something that essentially feels like it’s for you, which it isn’t just for you, it’s for the institution as well, and the learning you get from it will have positive downstream effects on the people that you lead and on your students. But because it feels like a slightly selfish activity, it doesn’t tend to get prioritised. But if you have that accountability to your Head of School, or to your mentor, or to someone else and also someone else that you can just kind of bounce ideas off.
What I found really helpful was to ask a couple of colleagues who knew my leadership roles quite well and say: ‘What do you think I’m good at? What difference have I made? If you had to just give a couple of examples of things that I’ve done that have made a difference, what would they be?’. Because sometimes that outside perspective brings a different perspective to you than you were necessarily thinking yourself. And again, I think it helps gets you past that: ‘Well, I can only claim responsibility for the stuff I’ve physically done and implemented myself’.
At Principal Fellow, it’s about strategic leadership. You’re not expected to be doing the doing of the project. It’s how you’ve set it up. So other people’s opinions can be helpful there. Just give yourself enough time, be realistic with your deadline and stick at it.
It’s difficult because it’s not just about getting the badge; it’s the thinking that you have to do to get there that is important.
I was at times quite resentful of the time, because it felt like I was just doing it to get a badge, which, you know, I recognised was useful for the school and for the institution and, you know, in theory useful for me, but that certainly wasn’t the driving motivation for doing it. And it’s only with hindsight that I can see how useful the process itself was.
BILT: How do you think the experience of becoming a Principal Fellow has helped you going forward?
Sheena: I think it’s helped me understand my leadership better, what drives me, how I lead, the bits of what I do that sometimes, you know, the processes around my leadership and how I interact with people, how I set people up to commit to actions and support them to achieve them.
It’s helped me understand what drives me, and the bigger things that make some projects sing to me and other projects feel like things that are less interesting. It helped me understand my own leadership better. And it’s good for, you know, for the wider University having as many Principal Fellows as we can. It’s useful for TEF. It just shows that commitment.
The support from BILT was amazing as well. You know, Ros [O’Leary, Head of BILT] gave me quite a lot of help with drafting and redrafting.
I buddied up with a colleague as well who was submitting hers around the same time and we were able to bounce ideas to and fro and share some of the pain as well.
I think that has been useful both for me personally, but also building relationships across the university. And then, you know, the whole point of the Advanced HE Fellowships is impact on students and student outcomes. And the more you understand yourself as a leader, the more able you are to drive forward changes; everything we do is aimed at improving student experience and student outcomes, isn’t it? So that is the ultimate, the ultimate impact.
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