Building Bridges

Building Bridges was one of the core themes from our 2024 Leadership Summit for Women Leaders in Education in the UAE region. This theme resonated with us all as organisers as we exist in an increasingly fragmented society and we work in a system that can sometimes feel very divided.

I reflected on our other theme of Breaking Barriers here. For me the two ideas are intrinsically linked – we need to simultaneously break down the barriers that inhibit us whilst building the bridges that enable and empower us.

I can remember hearing Dr Jill Berry talk about leadership journeys years ago about building the bridge as we walk it – sometimes the path is not there, or it is not clear, so we need to move forward and have faith that it will appear.

So how do we build bridges within our team, within our organisations and within our communities?

Collaboration and partnerships have been central to my journey as a leader. I like joined-up thinking and I thrive when I am working in spaces that are coherent and cohesive. I like to build and sustain relationships that are in service of all parties involved.

Here are 5 things I have done to build bridges between different people and ideas:

• Social contracting – as a coach I always contract with my clients, but this has not been something I have experienced regularly from my own line managers and team leaders. I built it into how I led individuals and teams so that we had an explicit agreement about how we were going to show up and hold each other accountable.
• Partnership mapping – as a school leader I was frustrated when I was contacted by multiple people from one organisation so we created a tracker to confirm who was going to hold each relationship with key partners, this gave my SLT ownership over these relationships and reduced the amount of comms going both ways.
• Community mapping – as a DHT I was responsible for key relationships in our community when it came to feeder schools and community groups, and as I progressed to HT this was extended to faith groups. I am a visual person so I found that a physical map that I colour-coded kept me intentional about existing relationships and the ones we needed to establish and nurture.
• Strategic networking – as a strategic leader the partnership mapping and community mapping activities then feed into me being strategic about who we are connecting with. I believe that we need to regularly audit who we are collaborating with and identify gaps, then actively close them. When I have relocated and transitioned between roles/ employers I have spent time working out who I need in my network, I have built the virtual bridges before I have arrived in the physical space.
• Strategic thinking – as a DEIB trainer, we explore the concept of ‘groupthink’ and how we need to create the conditions for healthy and productive cognitive dissonance. We need to build bridges between different ways of thinking and communicating. I support leaders and their teams in considering this for their own team dynamics, but I am also thinking about it for my work as a leadership development consultant, coach and trainer, and in our work as DEIB trainers. We need to build bridges to create alignment to ensure we have a shared vision and a collective commitment, but we also need space for challenge as we do it.

My final thought around building bridges takes me to reflecting on burning bridges. Sometimes collaborations, partnerships and relationships need to end as they are no longer serving us but how do we do this in a clean way? We need closure and a firm boundary, but we also need to be able to coexist without disharmony.