Helping people feel at home
With Professor Jo Richardson
Jo’s career was not planned from the start as an academic career. She started as a housing practitioner working in the public sector, such as a national professional body, a housing association and a local authority. Eventually, Jo entered academia via the professional services route with a role as manager for a research centre. The encouragement of an empowering line manager enabled her to get involved in some teaching and join a part-time PhD.
Her role at the time required her to gain consultancy funding to renew her year-long contracts. This was a strong motivator and excellent training for her to enter an academic role, as she was already devising different projects, accessing funding, and implementing delivery. She collaborated with multiple external stakeholders, so she built a deep understanding of knowledge exchange, getting her to grasp the ethos of the impact agenda early on.
Her research niche developed from her early practitioner experiences and consultancy projects. Her passion and curiosity about the issue of homelessness had been fuelled early during a gap year as a student volunteering in New York for a homeless charity. This experience and later work as a practitioner anchored her interest in applied research, asking real-world questions that matter to society. Her grant capture strategy was one of “mixed economy”, relying on funding from many different sources. This allowed her to build a significant grant portfolio, and she became a Professor in 2014.
Her next professional step meant stepping into more significant leadership shoes. Again, as with her initial line manager support to do a PhD, she was supported at this stage by the encouragement of peers and her head of department. She now sees her role as a university leader as contributing to the success of others – making them feel at home in the academic space – through working closely with early career researchers and embracing actions that support the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion agenda.
More about Jo
Professor Jo Richardson is Associate Dean of Research for Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University and Professor of Housing & Social Inclusion.
Her expertise on homelessness and methodological stance in co-production have created solid and value-based foundations for her leadership style.
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking:
Where is your curiosity driving you in your research journey right now?
If you trusted your “open-hearted curiosity”, where would this take you professionally?
What are the gaps in your professional skills and portfolio?
Some reflections to ponder based on my discussion with Jo
Reframing her writing time as a “hobby”
All conversations with academics address the challenge of time and a culture of overwork. For senior academics committed to supporting others in navigating the research environment and successfully transitioning while maintaining a semblance of balance and well-being, many professors are likely to admit, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Jo is one of these academics who admits openly that addressing the challenge of balance is something they have still not mastered and are still working through. Being a senior university leader means being perceived by some as a role model. Many senior academics may not feel like role models as they know that the reality of their everyday lives may not look like the perfectly managed and balanced image they wished they could give. Whilst they want to inspire the next generation to carry on behind them, they know that how they managed their career may not provide the shiniest model to others.
For her, the strong sense of purpose in doing work that she feels matters illustrates the ambivalence of what balance means for many academics. Jo gives an exciting example of having found time to be off work for a 46-day walk for a homeless charity.
With the complexity of her role as a senior leader in her institution, finding time for her research and writing is an ongoing battle. For her, it has been important to reframe what her writing time needed to be about. Instead of feeling the guilt of always working, even when she is off work (weekends and holidays), she decided that her writing was not just work; it was her hobby. She realised that writing and being focused on a single task, such as writing during periods off work, was something she cherished. Not only did this reduce her stress (she measured this via an app!), she felt that it nourished her.
Reframing her writing time as something she consciously and intentionally chose to engage with, not just something she had to do for work, brought some ease and alleviated some of the guilt of always working. Of course, this approach may not fit with other people’s way of wanting to lead their academic lives. We all have to find our way of navigating the space, but deciding how we frame a situation and experience is essential to enacting our choices.
o Do you have a professional activity that you need to “reframe” to feel more in control?
o What is the smallest shift you can create in your busy schedule to create a space of control?
o Could you bring this idea of single focus to a task that will re-energise you?
Defining leadership style
Jo reminds us that leadership does not appear when we get a role that is considered a “leadership role.” We certainly should not wait for a formal leadership role to experiment with our leadership. I often say in my workshops that leadership is a mindset, a desire, and a willingness to take risks and take action when we see challenges that have not been addressed.
Jo defines her leadership style as “servant leadership”, which involves a lot of listening, signposting, and holding space. She is keen to bring people together in communities and sees herself as a champion for others. She knows that individuals will excel in different ways and that becoming an academic is not a single track. Helping early career researchers find the pathway to progress in ways that will work for them is an integral part of her role.
There are many theories about different leadership styles, and some scholars have criticised the concept of “servant leadership” (see here) as one that may not favour women and people from minorities. Hearing Jo describe her leadership approach, I feel that this is certainly not her case, as EDI principles and an emotional-intelligent approach to working are at the core of what she aims to do. That’s why labelling leadership style can be problematic. The label we assign to our leadership may not be what the theories describe.
When I run leadership workshops, I am often reluctant to introduce leadership theories and get people to assign themselves a specific label. Instead, I much prefer to invite people to imagine and create their own leadership models that adapt and constantly evolve instead of fitting themselves into the quadrant of an academic theory.
o What keywords and values define your perception of your leadership approach?
o Could you invent your own style of leadership that will help you guide, reflect, and evolve your leadership?
o What are you doing now in your role to stretch your leadership muscle?
Addressing gaps in professional skills
Jo knew that to progress towards a more senior academic role with more leadership responsibilities, she needed to understand where she stood with her experiences and competencies. Auditing what you have to offer and comparing it to the requirements of various more senior leadership roles is an excellent approach to clarifying what may be asked of you when applying for a more senior role.
However, taking opportunities just because you need to gain the skills or experience required for the role you want to apply for or because it will look good for your promotion could be a recipe for unhappy professional experiences. The tick-box approach to professional development is definitely different from the strategy that Jo advocates.
She has taken professional development opportunities when she felt she would enjoy the activities or when they connected to her values, not just because they would look good on an application. However, knowing in more detail what may be expected of us in these applications can allow us to be slightly more strategic in the choices made between lots of different options for professional development.
o When was the last time you reviewed the criteria for a job or leadership role that you would want to apply for in the future?
o What’s missing in your current experiences that would make you a good fit to apply for this role?
o What are the best opportunities to fill that gap, bearing in mind only opportunities you know you are motivated to get involved in, those that will bring you joy and energy, even when challenging?
“just stopping to take a beat and put yourself in another person’s shoes is not a bad way of thinking about making decisions, sharing decisions, inviting as many people as you can into that debate so that decisions are as reflective of a wider population as you can. I think also pointing out the need for that reflective base for making decisions.””
