Steve Taylor With Robin Hood Multi Academy Trust

Intro: [00:00:02] Welcome to Daring To, a podcast that finds out how CEOs and entrepreneurs navigate today’s business world, the conventions they’re breaking, the challenges they faced, and the decisions that they’ve made. And lastly, just what makes them different.

Rita Trehan: [00:00:19] Well, welcome to Daring To. I’m so excited, we’re starting 2022 with a difference because 2022 is going to be a great year. My first guest on the podcast this year is Steve Taylor. Steve is the CEO of a Multi-Academy Trust – and we’ll tell you what that is shortly -Robin Hood Academy in Birmingham. And that’s Birmingham in the UK, for our worldwide listeners.

Rita Trehan: [00:00:44] And, Steve, I’m delighted to have you on the show because we’re starting 2022, where are they different, where are the passion, because we’re bringing somebody from the education sector. And, boy, business leaders are going to learn something from listening to your story and what they can learn from what you’ve achieved as the CEO of the Robin Hood Multi-Academy Trust.

Rita Trehan: [00:01:04] So, let me begin. I don’t know, when I was at school, most head teachers, like heads of schools, told me that they start their school and they knew at a very early age that they wanted to be a teacher. I can remember when I was five, having all the kids around me because I’m a bit of a control freak and I wanted them to listen to me reading a story to them, even if they didn’t want to listen to it.

Rita Trehan: [00:01:28] But you got your passion from a zoo. Like, I know? Is that right? Like, can you talk me through how does going to a zoo, like, instill this inspiration and desire to, number one, enter the education sector and, second, being such a leading light at the top of your profession. So, go on. For those people that are thinking about what they want to do with their career, is the answer to go to the zoo?

Steve Taylor: [00:01:57] Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, first, I’m going to say thanks for having me. And I just want to start by saying that I think the education sector, particularly in the UK – I can only speak for the UK – has got a lot to learn from the corporate sector. So, I think it’s both ways. Yeah. So, this is in a zoo in Australia.

Rita Trehan: [00:02:17] It gets even better, doesn’t it?

Steve Taylor: [00:02:19] Yeah. Well, I think I never knew what I wanted to do growing up. I didn’t particularly love school. I certainly didn’t love A-levels and further education. And so, I left school and I was a little bit lost to what to do. So, like many people of that school age, I got a part-time job, and got in late, and went to bed late.

Steve Taylor: [00:02:40] But I had a desire to go to Australia, so I flew out to Australia. And, really, with not many plans and got there and felt incredibly homesick and a little bit out on a limb, really, which as a 19 year old knocked me a little bit. Anyway, long story short, I stayed with a family and the family had a three year old daughter. And I got on really well with her. I’d always got on well with children growing up and, also, people with special needs and things. I considered going and working with people with Down Syndrome previously.

Steve Taylor: [00:03:17] And so, I was lost to something to do one day and the lady said, “Why don’t you take my daughter to the zoo?” So, I took her to the zoo. And it was one of those light bulb moments in life. I’m at the zoo and as I was sort of interacting with her and really enjoying the experience, it kind of hit me and I thought, “I know what I want to do. I want to become a teacher.” It’s all clicked. It’s kind of taken me to go to Australia to figure it out. But that’s what I’m going to do.

Steve Taylor: [00:03:47] So, you know, I booked a return flight for two months time, got on a plane, came home, and I got into university. And from there, the rest is history, really. But all because of going and living in Australia.

Rita Trehan: [00:03:56] And its history where you’ve made some really important strides, I think, in sort of thinking about education and helping sort of schools and the education sector itself. Think about the role that education plays and the role that people within the education sector have in terms of their own personal development.

Rita Trehan: [00:04:22] So, look, you started your career, you started in a school, and you tell this story, which I read about, which hit me right in the core because I thought of all the CEOs that I know across different business sectors. And when I hear their stories, a lot of what you talked about really resonated. And it was this kind of like, here you are in this role and everybody judges you. You have this high expectation. Like, the kids are judging you. You’re a good teacher. The rest of the teachers are judging. You’ve got all of the government structures that are judging you on performance. Here you are, this young.

Rita Trehan: [00:05:05] The school that you went to in Coventry had been run by somebody that they’d been there, I think, 20 something odd year, 29 years or something. You were four at the time. Four at the time when they first started there. And here you come in, this young chuck, full of ideas, full of ambition. That’s pretty scary. But that’s something that probably a lot of leaders face, isn’t it? How do you deal with that sort of fear and apprehension?

Steve Taylor: [00:05:35] Well, I think partly it comes down to what drives you, isn’t it? I mean, for me, I always wanted to go into leadership in education. When we talk about being judged by all of those different external factors, that’s the same in any organization, I think the biggest factor that judges me more than anything else, though, is me. And I think that if you’re internally built that way, that’s a massive pressure to deal with.

Steve Taylor: [00:06:03] I think when I went into the headship role at the age of 33, I went in with a massive amount of naivety. And I think when I look back now, I think really being naïve was really good because going in and asking questions without any sort of alternative agenda, just because I didn’t know, was really useful and set me up ready for transforming an organization that had been pretty stale at the time. Just to be clear, that’s not the organization I work for now.

Rita Trehan: [00:06:36] Yes. Yeah. No. This is your first sort of school that you worked for.

Steve Taylor: [00:06:42] Yeah. It gave me a real driving force to move things forward. And a lot of that was done with naivety, which meant that I did some things that maybe others wouldn’t have done just because I’ve not come across it before. And I think, ultimately, that was a strength. But it also meant that I made a few mistakes and put people’s noses out of joint occasionally inadvertently.

Rita Trehan: [00:07:07] You talked about taking risks and learning from failures has been something that’s really important to you. Can you tell us a little bit about, number one, Robin Hood? I don’t know. I think about Robin Hood and I think about the story, Robin Hood. But it’s actually a school. For our listeners, many people won’t actually know what a Multi-Academy Trust is. You’re the CEO of that Multi-Academy Trust. So, tell us a little bit about Robin Hood. I mean, really, is it really called Robin Hood?

Steve Taylor: [00:07:35] Well, a Multi-Academy Trust – for people not in the UK – it’s a group of schools run together as a charitable organization. So, we’ve got about 2,000 pupils spread across four schools. We’re about to go to six and become two-and-a-half thousand pupils. But in terms of Robin Hood Multi-Academy Trust, our offices are based – this is going to sound terrible – by a roundabout in Birmingham. And the roundabout is called Robin Hood Roundabout. And our first school that the trust began as is what is called Robin Hood Academy.

Steve Taylor: [00:08:12] And so, we were saying we’d love to be able to say to you guys that it’s because this was the furthest realms of Sherwood Forest and all of this element. I think the reality, it might be that the school was near Robin Hood Roundabout, and it’s been named because of the geographical location to a roundabout. That inspired it.

Rita Trehan: [00:08:34] Well, it’s the little things that make a difference, right? But actually within the school, if you think about it, it’s like on the sector of like around a roundabout in an area. But you’ve done some really creative things in there that if I think about organizations today, particularly in 2022, what we’re seeing post-COVID and across the world, there is this real demand for think differently, act differently, be differently.

Rita Trehan: [00:09:04] Your voice about being different in the education sector was happening before COVID, back five or six years ago, you were talking about that it’s time for the education sector to make a difference. And, perhaps, the way we’ve been thinking about education is thinking about how well a particular school does or the pupils within that school. You were kind of pushing the boundaries quite early on. Tell us a little bit about your thinking around that.

Steve Taylor: [00:09:33] I think there’s loads of good people out there doing some really creative thinking. But I look at education and I think sometimes kid’s performance driven, isn’t it? You know, in the UK where performance tables. And I think what that does is, historically, not everyone, but a lot of schools and a lot of organizations linked with education, they want to have the upper hand to get the best outcomes for their pupils. But of course, that’s going into a league table against many of the schools and organizations. And it gets to me.

Steve Taylor: [00:10:07] It gets to me because I think that, you know, I’m accountable for 2,000 children in my organization. But the reality is that, if I care about education because it’s vocational, I don’t want to make a difference to children’s lives. It’s not just about 2,000 children. With Robin Hood MAT, our view has always been trying to create a wider ripple in education more than we are entitled to. So, punching above our weight because we’re only a small organization. But I want us to make a bigger difference.

Steve Taylor: [00:10:39] And that means that during COVID, our small team – and we’ve got some really great people on it who do some tremendous work – we built some resources. Because we’re partnered with a school in China, so I saw they’re in lockdown. I phoned up the school in China, and I asked them what it was like to be in lockdown. This was like early February before the UK had gone into lockdown. And off the back of that, we decided to build a lot of resources. And so, we were ready. As soon as we went into lockdown, all of our resources are ready.

Steve Taylor: [00:11:11] But education in the UK, generally, probably hadn’t seen it coming in the same way. So, we offered them out and they weren’t really big across the UK, hundreds of schools are using them and some schools globally. What we said about that was, we would allow people to take our logo off all of the resources we created, and it’s just about making it better. And so, I think it’s not about pushing our name out there with these resources. It’s about these are our starting point. Can anyone build on them?

Steve Taylor: [00:11:40] And I just think in education, sometimes people worry about putting their head above the parapet and they think that they might be seen as having this big ego. Whereas, I see it with this, we’ve done a lot of thinking around something. We’ll put it out there. And if people can better it and improve it, then that’s great. That’s what we want them to do. This is a start. And can they build on it? So, that’s been our view and vision.

Steve Taylor: [00:12:01] But it all comes down to, can we make a bigger difference? Because what I really want to do is, I want to look at myself in the mirror and know that I’ve done the very best that I can do in leading the organization and I want to make a difference.

Steve Taylor: [00:12:15] And I have to say, when we went into lockdown and we started having other schools using our resources, I phoned up my dad to tell him when I was driving home from work one night, and I started crying, which is going to sound wimpy. But I started crying down the phone.

Rita Trehan: [00:12:30] Oh, now, why do we think that sounds wimpy? It doesn’t sound wimpy at all. It sounds like you’re human. You’re just showing some humility and humbleness.

Steve Taylor: [00:12:38] I started crying down the phone to him, and it was because I realized at that moment I’d hit a career goal and it had just dawned on me. I always want to try and make a bigger difference to education. And at that moment, at a time when education, when we were needed, we stepped up because of the team that we’d built. And, you know, it made me so proud, but it also made me cry. And I think part of that is to due with the pressure of the role as well.

Steve Taylor: [00:13:06] Because what you said to me about we believe in taking risks and learning from failures, and I do believe in taking risks and learning from failures. But I’ve got to be honest with you, I hate it when we fail. I hate it. I’m worried about being found out all the time and someone saying, “You’re just not really good enough and on your bike.”

Rita Trehan: [00:13:25] I imagine. I know I felt that myself as a leader during the course of my career. I still feel it every day in the business that I run of you’re responsible for a lot of people. You want to do the best. The fear of failure is always, like, in the back of my mind. But turning it as a positive to say what you learn from that seems to be something that you have kind of grasped and are sharing. So, this idea that you brought to life sort of saying you were ready pre-COVID, if you like, with this, I think, you call it pair and share, which I love.

Rita Trehan: [00:14:05] I mean, it’s almost like the open systems environment, isn’t it? We’re open systems and you’re doing that for the education sector. Isn’t that something that needs a bigger voice? I mean, how do we get other people to understand this importance?

Rita Trehan: [00:14:22] We did some research last year that said connection and collaboration in leadership are absolutely critical to people being the best that they can be. And it sounds like connection and collaboration is something that you’re kind of pushing. Are open systems concept in the education sector in the UK? Come on, are you kidding me? Really?

Steve Taylor: [00:14:45] Yeah. Exactly.

Rita Trehan: [00:14:48] Talk about it because it’s like you’ve made it happen.

Steve Taylor: [00:14:51] That’s exactly what it’s about. It’s encouraging people. The thing about education is people do worry about putting their name up as being a specialist or an expert. So, I think for education to move on where it needs to go, the next few years needs to see all schools and organizations where they’ve done fantastic and amazing work, and brilliant paperwork, and systems to support their children.

Steve Taylor: [00:15:20] I’d like to say that every school publishes on their own website or in a centralized format more of their resources for others to go and take and use. Take the logos off because it’s not about that. And share that best practice. And it is exactly like that in terms of the open system format, where, what we are trying to do at this moment in time in its initial phase, is modeling it. We’ve just launched at the moment Podcast CPD 2.

Rita Trehan: [00:15:46] Yeah. Please talk about that.

Steve Taylor: [00:15:48] That’s a curated podcast because, you know, there’s loads of podcasts out there at the moment. There’s so many that is so easy to miss them, isn’t it? So, we were looking at Podcast CBD 2, and we’re thinking at a time during the pandemic, how do we target people who are interested in learning but don’t have a lot of time when schools and organizations are going to be pushing a lot of health and safety regulation and a lot of training is going to be on compliance? How do we push it?

Steve Taylor: [00:16:19] And so, I thought, “Well, why don’t we curate a list of podcasts?” Some of which we’ve created, others we’ve been on, and others listened to. And that we listen to them a little bit like a book club.

Rita Trehan: [00:16:31] So, is this within the trust that you have or do you [inaudible] anybody?

Steve Taylor: [00:16:36] We pushed out nationwide. We’ve got 400 leaders from across the UK signed up for it. And then, after a couple of podcasts, we do a Zoom where we bring in one of the guests we’ve interviewed and then we put people into breakout rooms and we create networks. So, our thinking around that was, one, people would get to do the learning in their own time, when they’re driving to work, washing up, walking the dog. So, it’s bite size chunks when it’s convenient to them.

Steve Taylor: [00:17:04] But, also, we think connecting and articulating your learning is so important that you make it concrete and you take on board other’s views. And in my view, what we really want to do is start to allow people to make connections and network with other people that they wouldn’t usually meet. And so, if off the back of Podcast CPD 2, some people listen to our podcasts and think they’re great, some think they can be better in other areas, I don’t care as long as they’ve got an opinion.

Steve Taylor: [00:17:33] But what I really want them to have is, when the program is finished – and it’s 11 weeks – I want them to have three or four people nationwide they can call on that they would never have met before. Now, if we do that, that’s an ultimate success because what we’re then doing is we’re pushing forwards networks that are going to last a lot longer than this concept. Which means people are going to be more informed and they’re going to be better at their jobs and make a wider difference to education. So, that’s really the vehicle that we’re pushing it out in.

Steve Taylor: [00:18:00] I mean, we’re learning a lot along the way. I’m doing an MBA at the moment, which is where I met you through it. And as part of that, this is a research project as well so we can make sure it’s as well informed and we can really kick it on to the next level after this.

Rita Trehan: [00:18:15] I mean, it’s pretty cool if you were like somebody young right now thinking, like, “I thought about going into the education sector. But I don’t know, it gets bad press. Is it a career for me or whatever?” I mean, it sounds like you’re making it almost like a startup kind of organization environment. It sounds pretty attractive to somebody that might be thinking about the education sector. I mean, how do you position something that is so vital for the development of people of the future and getting them to think about education as a career that has so many avenues to it and so much entrepreneurship to it?

Steve Taylor: [00:18:57] Well, I think that sometimes when we say to people, go into teaching. The teaching status across the world, in some countries, it’s valued. In others, it’s a lower status. It’s valued in the UK. But I think when you’re saying to people these days, “Go and become a teacher,” I think we need to get it and make it clear to people that it doesn’t have to be for life. You know, you can be a little bit more fluid with your career than that.

Steve Taylor: [00:19:25] You know, I’m 43. I’m running Robin Hood MAT. Am I going to be a CEO of an educational group of schools until I’m 65? Absolutely not. Because I want to know that I can go on and be tested in other areas and have I got transferable skills. And so, I think we make going into teaching and education more appealing to people by almost releasing the pressure a little bit.

Steve Taylor: [00:19:51] Don’t think about it as an entire career. Think about it as some amazing skills you’re going to develop. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t go on and transfer that into something really amazing in the corporate sector. I just think that education and going into teaching, in the past, it’s been a little bit blinkered because people go in at the age of 21 and they leave at 60. And, often, they’re tired and worn down because it’s quite an attritional career.

Steve Taylor: [00:20:16] But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can make a difference to children’s lives. You can kick on and really help organizations move forward. But then, you can go and try something different. That’s what I’m interested in doing because, from my own wellbeing, I’ve got to have another avenue in the future that I can go down to see am I a one trick pony or can I go and do something in a completely different field?

Rita Trehan: [00:20:43] It sounds like to me that you are, like, articulating something that a lot of people are talking about right now. Like, we’re hearing about mass resignations, the big resignation crisis that people are rethinking their lives and what they want from them lives sort of maybe spurred by the COVID crisis and what that has created and people’s thinking about it.

Rita Trehan: [00:21:04] But this concept of career experiences as opposed to a career, I mean, how can we get sort of like the private sector and the public sector to be thinking about that more broadly? I mean, you’ve managed to get sort of people thinking about collaboration and connection more broadly across the education sector to say it’s not about calling. What’s your views on how we might be able to make career experiences through the lenses of private and public sector as something that’s real, it’s really doable, and actually maybe what people are looking for right now?

Steve Taylor: [00:21:41] Well, I think we missed a massive gap in terms of, you know, corporate social responsibility in the corporate sector. I think there are loads that do a tremendous job. There are some organizations that probably missed a trick a little bit.

Steve Taylor: [00:21:56] I’m lucky enough one of my close friends is higher in Pepsi, and I go running with him three times a week. And we talk leadership, and we talk about insight into how his organization is run, and we talk insight into how my organization is run. And I think that the collaboration between education and the corporate world I don’t think it’s built a lot. I think in the UK it’s really flimsy. I think there are so many opportunities missed.

Steve Taylor: [00:22:31] And, often, when we look at corporate social responsibility into schools, you know, I’m thinking banks and different elements, maybe improve the the campus or the building, it might be to do something with the children. But I think that in terms of staffing, you know, giving people an opportunity to see what education looks like from the corporate sector on their careers, and also giving teachers the opportunity to look outside of the education sector, I think, is an absolute untapped reserve that we’ve got to start to explore in much greater depth.

Steve Taylor: [00:23:04] And I think if we can do that, we would see partnership in terms of corporate and education working together. But, also, those career steps, I think, would be a little bit easier and they’d be a little bit less regimented. And it would open up people’s minds to the fluidity of where careers can go.

Rita Trehan: [00:23:23] Could you imagine? I mean, I was just thinking about your concept of taking all the things that you’ve learned, all the resources that you’ve put together, like, putting them out there for everybody to sort of share nationwide around education, which is what Robin Hood Multi-Academy Trust has done. We’ll call it MAT, the MATs – short term – so that people know what a Multi-Academy Trust is.

Rita Trehan: [00:23:45] I mean, if you were to imagine a corporation, say a Pepsi as an example, took their logo off and actually shared their resources with other corporations. Imagine what that network might look like. And yet it’s not that inconceivable to apply this concept about making a bigger difference, which is what you started to do at Robin Hood. Applying that concept maybe it isn’t as difficult as people might think it could be, right? There could be some things they could learn from doing that.

Steve Taylor: [00:24:21] Yeah. I agree. I do wonder sometimes – well, I think I know I’m idealistic in my thinking in terms – because whenever people are creating, when we’re doing this co-creation of concepts and when we’re building materials, deep down isn’t it that a lot of people actually want credit for what they’ve built? For people to know that they were the first creators of something that was fairly original?

Steve Taylor: [00:24:49] How we get past that? Actually, even in the education sector when people build stuff, they’ve put a lot of time and effort with their teams. So, taking logos off is a bit of – and I’ve got to be honest with you –

Rita Trehan: [00:25:02] Scary, right?

Steve Taylor: [00:25:03] Yeah. When we first started doing it and I put it on Twitter, we had some people on Twitter who had got followers of like 40,000 and 50,000 people. They took our stuff. They put it onto their own stuff. And they pushed out themselves as if they’d made it themselves. And I was encouraging that. I was encouraging that for schools. Well, how do you fight it is that some people were going to push it out and almost take credit for making it? And I had to overcome how that made me feel because, actually, we’d put thousands of hours into that work.

Rita Trehan: [00:25:41] How did you overcome that feeling? Because that’s a very true and valid feeling that a lot of people have? Like, as an entrepreneur having entrepreneurial insight or innovation, the buzz comes from having created. But then, to see somebody just perhaps kind of like not recognize that, how do you deal with that conflicting emotion of wanting to share in it, to be open, and yet this feeling of like, “Yeah, but it was my baby.”

Steve Taylor: [00:26:12] Well, I think that I’m going to give a really honest answer because there’s two part. The first part is to really look at the reason why we’re doing it. And the reason why we’re doing it was because we wanted to make a wider difference. So, it doesn’t matter whose logos on it. If it’s out there and more people are seeing it, the ultimate aim is helping people out at a time when they are nothing. And so, the more people that have that, the better. So, the first step was I got to get over myself a little bit, and that is the important thing.

Steve Taylor: [00:26:42] But the second part is – and this is the really honest answer – I saw a couple of individuals on Twitter who were marketing it as they develop themselves and were using it as a vehicle to increase their followers, as I did. So, I’m not talking about schools using it, but someone who is trying to get a trajectory of pushing themselves further up.

Steve Taylor: [00:27:04] I just got in touch with them. I messaged them and said, “I see you’re using our stuff, and that’s fine. But just be aware the driver for this is to get it out to as many schools and children as possible at a time of need, not just to rebrand and sell as something that another individual has created.”

Rita Trehan: [00:27:25] So, I think that’s a really powerful lesson. And, listeners, as you listen to that, go back and just replay that if you get a moment. Because there’s some really powerful learning in that, which is, when there is something that’s uncomfortable but actually needs to be brought to the surface, do it in a constructive way but be transparent about it. And what you just shared and thought like, “To be really honest, here’s what I did,” was transparent leadership in its truest form. So, I encourage you if you are a leader today listening, go back and just listen to that and then think back to how transparent are you being as a leader right now? And maybe there’s a little nugget there that you could learn from.

Rita Trehan: [00:28:09] So, let’s talk about you as a leader. So, most leaders during COVID have experienced some kind of change or reflection or, I don’t know, some kind of epiphany. Maybe not in the case, I don’t know. But what’s your experience? How do you feel? Do you feel different? Do you feel the same?

Steve Taylor: [00:28:32] I tell you, it’s been a roller coaster. An absolute roller coaster. And I’ve been through a whole range of emotions. At the start, I felt education, when we were doing lockdowns, I felt that if you’re in public service, you have to step to the fore and you have to make a difference. And I felt it’s not on the same level, obviously, when countries go into war in World War II and things. But when education was asked to remain open and keep going during those lockdowns, I felt a sense of pride because we were needed and we stepped up.

Steve Taylor: [00:29:07] And so, for that, that was a massive career. And I felt that education needed to forge the way ahead and make the biggest difference possible. So, there were highs there. I think as we progressed into more lockdowns and we had staff absences, budgets – I mean, we’ve got about an £8 million budget – supply, teachers, and all this sort of stuff, covering classes because we had staff illness, it then started to become attritional. And when we started to realize, I’m just saying, we’re going to return to normal doesn’t mean it’s going to be the case, nor should it.

Steve Taylor: [00:29:45] But there have been times when I’ve been massively, massively tired. And I don’t think that’s different for anyone in any role or sector because I think we’ve dealt with some elite problems. We’ve been very reactive in our thinking. What we’re trying to encourage our leaders at the moment is, if you’re reactive in your thinking for long enough, you’ve got to be careful your default mode doesn’t become a reactive thinker. We want all of our leaders in our organization to be strategists. We want them to look to the future with hope, and to be empowered to make a difference, and not to feel as though we’re always reacting to the Omicron variant or the Delta variant or these sides of things.

Steve Taylor: [00:30:27] So, I think it’s been a roller coaster. I think there are times when – if I’m honest with you – I’d quite like to go and buy a little cottage in the middle of a field with no internet, no Wi-Fi, and just a wood burner and a little library. And I’d like to go and cut myself off from civilization.

Rita Trehan: [00:30:45] You can’t do that because Robin Hood Multi-Academy Trust needs you. And all the kids and the wider community, we need leaders like you to be pushing.

Steve Taylor: [00:30:59] I think it’s normal to feel it.

Rita Trehan: [00:30:59] Yeah. Of course, it is. Absolutely.

Steve Taylor: [00:31:01] I think with leadership, personally, when the going gets tough, I have to have exit strategies for myself. It’s just how I deal with pressure. And the reality is that, very rarely do I ever take an exit strategy. But knowing that I’ve got one, knowing that I’ve got out.

Steve Taylor: [00:31:25] I think the other thing to say is that, if you go into something, you absolutely love it, and you believe in what you do, and you believe that it’s making a difference, and it’s vocational, you have to be really careful. Because you’ve been so guilty of this, your personality – you the individual and you the leader – becomes so entwined. That’s great when things are going well. What concerns me is when things don’t go well, can you separate out the two?

Steve Taylor: [00:31:50] Because, of course, if my organization fails and I am found out, it doesn’t mean I’m a terrible person, does it? It just mark me that I’ve got it wrong. And trying to separate those out, I think, that’s something that I’m constantly battling with all of the time. Because if you care, trying to say that something is just a job, it’s not always the easiest thing to do, is it?

Rita Trehan: [00:32:14] So, I think there’s so many lessons that leaders can learn from that. There’s sort of the fragility of leadership. It’s fragile. It’s lonely being a leader sometimes. It can be a lonely job. It’s incredibly rewarding when it reaches its pinnacle of that feeling of that connection with what you do and how it delivers.

Rita Trehan: [00:32:38] I mean, you have a staff around you, how do you encourage the young leaders within your organization to really grow and develop? You’ve talked about some of this. I mean, pair and share blew me away. Like, 150 people across different organizations getting involved and paring and sharing and learning. Internally, what are you doing? Because, you know, there’s a lot going on, not just in the UK, but around the world. There’s a lot of focus on education.

Rita Trehan: [00:33:07] You know, kids are suffering too. Let’s not ignore them in this ecosystem. It’s hard for them to be in and out. Our formative relationships are formed at an early age. How are you helping your organization and the leaders both guide themselves, but the individuals who they’re serving?

Steve Taylor: [00:33:29] Well, I think that, firstly, we believe in distributed leadership. So, my central team that I work with, a good number of them are way better than me in terms of what they do. I’m fortunate I’ve got a great team. We really try and we’re pushing out at the moment heat experiences for our leaders. We’re trying to systematize that we push them into some experiences that push them well outside of their comfort zones, and we call them heat experiences.

Steve Taylor: [00:34:05] And we’re trying to build those into their performance management systems because we want to see how they operate when they’ve got their back to the wall, that’s when you do your greatest learning. So, we’re trying to make that our focus moving forwards.

Steve Taylor: [00:34:18] The other thing that’s happened, it wasn’t by design, it was by luck. When we went into lockdown, I decided that we were going to set up a collaborative group within only Robin Hood MAT. I was going to call the group Call To Innovate. And so, I emailed out every member of staff in the trust and said, “We want to create some wider resources and we want to make a bigger difference to education. Do you want to come and join us on some of the Zooms with this to be part of this team who are going to be doing this level of thinking? You won’t get paid any extra money for it. It’s going to be in your own time and it’s going to be after a hard day’s work during remote education. But if you’re interested, we’d love to have you with us.”

Steve Taylor: [00:35:02] So, we sent that out to our staff across the organization. And, you know, 50 people signed up for it and joined our Call To Innovate teams. And what we did then was, we built some really tight skillsets and put them into collaborative working teams of about five and had flat stretches in them. But they would take it in turns lead in that structure.

Steve Taylor: [00:35:24] And what we saw was, actually, there were some people who we had totally not understood just how effective they were and we hadn’t understood just what skill sets they got. And so, we saw loads of great leadership come out of that purely because we’d given people the opportunity to make a difference to the greater good. And they stepped forward and they were unbelievable in it.

Steve Taylor: [00:35:47] So, that really taught me that, actually, whilst we talent manage and look in our organization for up and coming leaders, sometimes just giving people some great opportunities, there are people who stepped forward to maybe aren’t envisaged, but they really made a difference. And that really showed me that, actually, sometimes you’ve just got to have the faith to give people some of the opportunities and see how they run with it. And this concept did that. So, that pushed out this belief with us that distributed leadership and giving people opportunities is just so important, which sounds obvious. But sometimes it’s funny the vehicle to do that, isn’t it?

Rita Trehan: [00:36:25] It’s a massive sort of reflection on the fact that, actually, just asking people, there are people often dying to be able to showcase or contribute what they’ve got. But finding the right avenue for it when things are very structured are often not possible. And yet what you created was an environment that said like, “Hey, come tell us what you can do.” And people have stepped up to that.

Steve Taylor: [00:36:51] So, again, I think there’s a lot of similarities and sort of innovations that both public and private sector can learn and listen to the calling, which is loud and clear in the world today of people saying they want to make more difference. They want their skills to be utilized. They want people to know what they’re capable of doing.

Steve Taylor: [00:37:13] And maybe this Call To Innovation concept or this kind of ecosystem lab that you’ve created is really at the forefront of things. I mean, the more and more you talk about the work that you and the team have done at Robin Hood MAT is really on the edges of innovation.

Steve Taylor: [00:37:35] I don’t know many schools, for example, that offer Mandarin from nursery school age. I mean, I don’t know, when I was at nursery school, there wasn’t that on offer. I mean, that’s pretty innovative. Where did that spark from? There’s just like oodles of innovation that seem to be pouring out of the Academy Trust.

Steve Taylor: [00:37:59] The guy I took over from Richard Hunter, he was really innovative. And I can’t take any credit for introducing the Mandarin. He introduced the Mandarin. And it’s brilliant when you see it because we’ve got kids in nursery that are learning nursery rhymes in Mandarin. And by the time they leave in year six, 11 years old, they’re halfway towards a GCSE standard by the time they go off to secondary school.

Steve Taylor: [00:38:28] So, you know, I think that what I got from Richard and the thing is I inherited an organization that thinks that way because of the work that Richard Hunter and his predecessors had done. And as a result of that, really part of it is the enjoyment of thinking differently, doing things differently, isn’t it? And, you know, going into boundaries that others maybe haven’t done before.

Steve Taylor: [00:38:54] I think, if you can get an organization doing that in education – there are some that do it really well – often, we’re a little bit institutionalized. We operate within certain parameters and think that we’re tied to how we have to operate. I think it can be a lot more fluid than that, and we enjoy the chase of trying to do something totally different.

Steve Taylor: [00:39:16] So, yeah, we also have kids. One of the kids said to us, “I want to send a rocket into space.”

Rita Trehan: [00:39:24] Why not?

Steve Taylor: [00:39:24] So, rather than the teacher, say, “You can’t do that.” We designed the rocket on a 3D program CAD drawing. We’ve got a 3D printer, we printed out. We hired a weather balloon. We put a GoPro on it. And we sent the rocket up on to the edge of space and filmed the curvature of the Earth. And that’s because a teacher listened to a child when they said, “I want to send a rocket in space.” And the first thing they didn’t say was, “Well, we can’t do that.” But they said, “How can we do that?” And I think that that’s so important to have that organization where people are taking kids [inaudible].

Rita Trehan: [00:40:03] It’s not the know, it’s the how. Jeff Bezos, if you are kind enough to listen to the Daring To podcast, or, Elon Musk, if you’re listening, there was a young lad in school in Birmingham in the UK, where the school encouraged a young child to create a rocket and send it to space. So, if you’re looking for any ideas, look no further, Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk. I hope you’re listening. And who knows what else they might learn from you?

Rita Trehan: [00:40:38] Steve, I would love to continue talking to you but we are close to time. I do want to end – before asking you to share your details with people – two things, you said one of your favorite quotes was, “Limit is like fears are often just illusions.” I found that a really inspiring quote. Tell me how that applies to you. It’s not yours, you said you think it comes from a film, it may come from Will Smith, I don’t know. But “Limit is like fears are often just an illusion.” Give an example.

Steve Taylor: [00:41:13] Well, I’m not sure. So, I think as we grow with Robin Hood MAT, we look to the future and we look at can we become bigger. Not because we want to become bigger by numbers, but because we want to make a bigger difference. But with each growth phase comes risk, doesn’t it? And I think we’re trying to encourage ourselves that as we look to the future, we don’t become hamstrung by the fact that we might just fail. Because, in my view, if you’re going to go on and become truly exceptional, you’ve got to be prepared to put it all on the line, haven’t you? Not recklessly, but you’ve got to be prepared to take the biggest risks to get to where you need to get to. And from that just might come great learning.

Steve Taylor: [00:41:58] And, personally, I love listening to Steve Jobs’ inauguration speech at Stanford, because when he talks about looking back and connecting the dots, and that sometimes at your lowest ebb, you might do your greatest learning. I think that is just so important because that’s how I ease pressure on myself. Which is, it might all go wrong but maybe the making of me is in it going wrong. Just as long as I can flip it, I’ve got some positive to come out of it. If we’re daring to go into an area that we’ve not done before.

Rita Trehan: [00:42:29] That cycle. And as I ask all my guests, I ask them to finish with a daring to moment, so something that they are daring to do, daring to have done, or daring to hope will happen. What’s your daring to moment?

Steve Taylor: [00:42:43] Well, I think professionally, not in the near future, but in the medium term to long term, I’m daring to save my skills that are transferable to go into a different sector to see what learning I can do. And knowing that if that doesn’t work, I’d come back to the education sector more informed, more enlightened, and a better leader of education. But just daring to take the blinkers off and look further afield in the future.

Rita Trehan: [00:43:12] That’s brilliant. And, Steve, if people want to know more about the work that Robin Hood Multi-Academy Trust is doing and they want to know more about you, what’s the best way for them to do that? Like, LinkedIn, Twitter, social media? Share some details.

Steve Taylor: [00:43:28] I think Twitter, if you want to get in touch with me personally, it’s @tambotaylor, that’s T-A-M-B-O-T-A-Y-L-O-R. That’s my granddad’s nickname, Tambo. A bit sad but there you go. That’s my Twitter handle. And then, if it’s Robin Hood, it’s @robinhoodtrust. And if you want to know more about Robin Hood, you can go on www.robinhoodmat.co.uk and [inaudible].

Rita Trehan: [00:43:49] That’s brilliant. Thank you so much. We’ve started 2022 with a great podcast. Some massive learnings for people, I think, leaders everywhere. And your insights are inspirational, I think, to both the public and private sector. So, thanks very much. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Steve Taylor: [00:44:09] Thank you for having me.

Rita Trehan: [00:44:11] Thanks for listening. Enjoyed the conversation? Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss out on future episodes of Daring To. Also, check out our website, dareworlwide.com, for some great resources around business in general, leadership, and how to bring about change. See you next time.