By Rachel Gannon Head of School of Design, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University
What I valued most was the way the course framed leadership not as something external to creative practice, but as part of it. As an illustrator and designer, that reframing was invaluable.
I joined the inaugural cohort of the CHEAD Creative Leadership Programme last year, three years into my role as Head of School of Design at Kingston University and having recently returned from maternity leave. When I saw the course advertised, it felt like an opportune moment for me to think properly about the kind of leader I wanted to be, rather than simply picking up old habits and rushing back into the role.
For many of us within the sector, leadership has become a significant part of our roles. From module leaders to senior leaders, ‘management’ type activities within universities have proliferated, and many positions originally understood as purely academic now carry elements of line management, direction-setting and accountability. I came into the HE because of my love of my illustration practice and the joy I get from educating, and I welcome any opportunity to understand leadership within these paradigms. What this programme presented was time with colleagues keen to do this work, to think seriously and critically about leadership as theory and practice, as a site for innovation and creativity, and to understand it as part of our collective practice as artists and designers.
The programme, curated by Ve Dewey, whose own career spans Mattel, Adobe and the Design Council, had a contemporary, future-facing sensibility. Its critical spine was Ve's Compass for Creative Leadership, a values-based model built around four Cs — Cyclical, Community, Care and Craft — designed as an alternative to conventional management frameworks, reorienting leadership towards something more connected, regenerative and culturally rooted, fitted to the realities of those participating in art and design higher education.
The programme was thoughtfully structured, combining in-person residentials at different partner institutions (in our cohort's case, Manchester Metropolitan University, Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Westminster) with online ‘fireside chats’ featuring international academics and creative leaders. Substantial reading, reflective exercises and weekly activities were provided alongside the live sessions, and we were asked to reflect at the end of each week. A final project asked us to reimagine a specific area of our role our role by applying the programmes tools, perspectives and practices. The resulting presentations from colleagues took on a plethora of creative forms and methods, from systems thinking to artifacts to storytelling, and demonstrated the truly transformation effect of the programme.
Academia can, at present, feel like a hostile operating environment given the pressures on the sector. What this programme did well (and what shouldn't be underestimated) was to create a real sense of psychological safety and community among the group. That collegiality mattered as much as the content: it's hard to think honestly about change, systems, cultural or economic, without first feeling safe enough to be open and honest about the challenges we are all facing.
What I valued most was the way the course framed leadership not as something external to creative practice, but as part of it. As an illustrator and designer, that reframing was invaluable. We were asked to articulate our core values and priorities, and given practical tools and frameworks, around listening, trust and advocacy, to put them into action.
The programming offered a diverse range of perspectives and approaches; while not every perspective aligned neatly with my own, each offered something critically generative to draw on. Particular highlights of the programme were Professor Shelley McNulty, co-leading with Dr John Maeda, introduced the idea of practice-led leadership, leadership that draws on the mindsets of creative practice (experimentation, iteration, collaboration) to guide teams, and that leans into who we are as practitioners rather than defaulting to management-by-numbers. Her provocation to lead through creativity, rather than manage creativity, has stayed with me. Joanne Jørgensen brought a distinctive perspective shaped by her work at Nike's Materials Innovation Studio and, more recently, teamGlue, and her training as an executive coach. Nicola Watkinson's (managing director, The City UK) session on advocacy, strategy and stakeholders was a practical a sharp take on value propositions and on how you effect change by understanding what other people have at stake.
Running through all of it was a foundational shift in how we were asked to think about leadership itself: from authority to inspiration, from binary decisions to comfort with ambiguity, from avoiding mistakes to learning from them, from prescription to improvisation when the moment calls for it. Through the programme, I came to understand leadership itself as a creative practice; a site of invention, care and responsibility.
Beyond the content, the programme has left me with a genuinely valuable long-term network of colleagues from across the UK; people thinking about the same challenges, from different institutional vantage points, who I hope to stay in touch with. I'd recommend it without hesitation to anyone stepping into, or already living inside, a creative leadership role in HE.