Apprenticeship diary – week 1
This week I started studying for my Senior Leader degree apprenticeship at the University of Exeter.
’s recent Camp Digital talk reminded me how much I enjoy and learn from the practice of working in the open. I’ve fallen out of the habit in the last couple of years because so much of my work I’ve been unable to share, and I struggle to write in an inauthentic or opaque way! Starting this course gives me plenty of material that I can speak openly about, and I intend to reflect on a weekly basis to cement what I’m learning.
Why this course? Why now?
I’ve been fortunate to work on some exceptionally interesting projects over the last five years, many in crisis response. Our team delivered grants to over 500 local businesses during the pandemic so they could stay afloat while their shopfronts remained closed; we built a data strategy for a new fund that helped those who were rough sleeping get their COVID jabs; I did a short (yet I hope impactful) stint in elections, helping EU voters to confirm their voting rights post-Brexit; and most recently I’ve spent two of the last three years supporting those fleeing war in Ukraine. I’ve been a delivery manager, a business analyst, a product manager, and now a head of product, mostly within the same organisation but with lots of team and role changes along the way.
I have learned so much from these experiences. I am very grateful for the opportunities I’ve been exposed to, and the support I’ve received along the way from peers and mentors.
However, what crisis work rarely allows you to do is stop, consolidate and reflect. Most of this time I’ve felt I’ve been running on instinct. I trust my instincts, my judgment is generally sound, but I can feel the lack of structure will eventually limit what I can do and how well I can support my team.
Therefore, I’ve been looking out for an opportunity to do some structured academic study, and after being bruised by rejection from the civil service future leaders scheme last year, the email from Exeter that landed in my inbox in January seemed like the perfect fit.
Not only did it meet my goals for mixing theoretical and applied learning, it’s also allowed me to carve out protected study time within my existing working hours (there’s no way I could fit studying with a full-time job and band without something giving!), plus I can complete the entire programme remotely.
What did I learn this week?
We had two half-day sessions this week for induction. On day one we did a series of icebreaker-type exercises to get to know each other. It was a pleasant surprise to hear about the huge variety of workplaces and roles people do; most of the events and conferences I go are either Government- or profession-specific, so it’s fantastic I’ll get to spend time with people from entirely different backgrounds and learn from their experience too. I also discovered that there are three other people from MHCLG on the programme who I’ve not met before as they’re in different parts of the organisation, so I’ve set up a group chat for us to stay in touch.
On day two we had our first lecture, on the topic of Pierre Bourdieu and his work on the factors that contribute to individuals’ career success. Bourdieu was a French sociologist in the 1960s-1980s and he developed his ‘field theory’, that stated:
(Capital x habitus) + field = practice
Where capital is a mixture of economic capital (e.g. born into money, educated at a top school), symbolic capital (e.g. working at a widely recognised institution, holding a prestigious job title), social capital (having a broad and engaged network of contacts) and cultural capital (Bourdieu described this as being well-versed in poetry, opera and literature but in the modern context this relates more to being well-informed about your industry, new technologies, the economic.and political context etc).
I was particularly interested in the concept of habitus, which describes the (mainly) unconscious things we do to fit in within our environment. This might be the language we use, how we dress, when we laugh or smile in conversation, when we keep straight face, how we speak to our superiors. All these things that eventually become second-nature once we’ve learned the social norms, but done wrong can result in being labelled a trouble-maker or non-conformist.
We often say to new starters in the Civil Service that it’ll take a while to acclimatise to some of its expectations and idiosyncrasies, and I wish we could instead make our environment more mouldable and accepting. The system must have some order else it would constantly be in flux with every starter and leaver, but perhaps culture can be a little more flexible? I don’t have the answer here, I am pondering out loud as I type!
So, lecture 1:
Interesting content ✅
Relevant content ✅
Nuance ✅ I particularly liked how our lecturer talked about the application of management theory, that it shouldn’t be considered dogma or rules to follow to the letter, rather that these concepts and models are ways of understanding complexity. These are tools to reflect and refine our own practice rather than templates.
Coming up
Our first module doesn’t start until September, although we’ve been given plenty of reading to do and some small assignments to complete. I’ve started with ‘The Promises of Giants’ by John Amaechi, which I’m finding is an approachable starting point and not too jargonistic, and I have ‘The five dysfunctions of a team’ downloaded to read next.
