Twenty-four hours ago, I sat on a panel in front of a room full of aspiring senior leaders, and a woman near the front asked me a question that has been rattling around in my head ever since: "What do you wish you'd known when you first stepped into leadership?"
I didn't have to think long for my answer. It came out fast, a little too honest, and slightly louder than I intended:
"I wish I'd known that I wasn't put into this role because everyone expected me to be perfect, flawless, and already know everything. Stop trying to be that person - you'll never feel like enough, and the exhaustion will deplete you."
The room went quiet for a second. Then a few heads started nodding, slowly, like a wave of recognition rolling through people who'd been carrying the same weight and never said it out loud. I watched a young academic head next to me write something down and underline it twice. I know that feeling. I have been that person, pen in hand, desperate for someone senior to finally say the quiet part out loud.
So here it is, fifteen years and more mistakes than I can count later - the letter I'd write to the leader I was on day one, the version of me who colour-coded her diary and still felt underqualified to be sitting at the senior leadership table.
Dear younger Deputy: nobody handed you that title because you had every answer memorised. They handed it to you because you knew how to think clearly under pressure, treat people decently, and make a call when a corridor full of students, or a room full of anxious staff, or a parent in genuine distress looked to you for one. That's the job. Not knowing everything - knowing how to figure things out, and who to ask when you don't. You spent your first few years terrified someone would discover you were making it up as you went. Here's the plot twist: everyone above you was too. Every single one of them, all the way up to the head. That's not a scandal. That's leadership. It has always been leadership. You just weren't let in on the secret yet.
You will stand in senior leadership meetings and speak with confidence about a policy you learned the finer details of forty minutes earlier, printed out and highlighted in the staffroom over a cold coffee. You will sit across from a furious parent, or a councilman, or an inspector, and nod along while your stomach does something complicated, and somehow the right words will come anyway. You will lie awake replaying a decision you made in the space of a corridor confrontation, wondering if you should have handled it differently. Here is what I need you to know: that discomfort isn't proof you don't belong in the role. It's proof you're growing into one big enough to stretch you. Nobody ever grew comfortable and capable at the exact same time. Pick one to chase. Chase capable. Comfortable will catch up eventually, and honestly, it's overrated anyway.
And here's the thing nobody tells you early enough: we love to wear perfectionism like a medal. "I'm just a perfectionist," we say in job interviews and performance reviews, half-bragging, as if it's a personality quirk rather than a slow-burning fuse. We say it the way people used to say "I just work too hard" - like it's a flaw so flattering it barely counts. Let's be honest about what it actually is: fear, dressed up in a lanyard, telling you your worth is conditional on never being wrong. It's the version of you that rewrites a parent email four times before sending it, that replays a difficult conversation with a member of staff on the drive home searching for the one sentence you should have phrased differently, that treats a single piece of critical feedback from the head as a referendum on your entire competence. That's not high standards. That's a nervous system on high alert, dressed up and sent into the staffroom.
Perfectionism doesn't make you a better leader. It makes you a brittle one. It teaches the people around you - your staff, your middle leaders, the students watching how the adults in the building carry themselves - that mistakes are shameful rather than instructive. Which means they'll hide their own, right when you need them most to come to you early, while the issue is still small and fixable, instead of months later when it's a full-blown crisis with your name attached to the fallout. A staff team led by a perfectionist doesn't get braver. It gets quieter. Teachers stop flagging when a lesson went badly. Pastoral staff stop admitting when a safeguarding concern feels murky and they're not sure how to proceed. People start managing your perception of them instead of managing the actual work in front of them, and that is a catastrophic trade for any school to make.
The strongest leaders I've served alongside weren't flawless. They were honest about not being flawless, out loud, on purpose, so their people felt safe enough to be honest too. I think of one leader I worked under early on, who opened a difficult staff briefing by saying, "I got that decision wrong last week, and here's what I'm doing differently." The staffroom didn't lose an ounce of respect for her. It gained something rarer - trust. Staff worked harder for her, not despite the admission, but because of it. That's not weakness. That's the actual job description, and it's the reframe I wish someone had handed me in year one, instead of a policy folder: excellence and perfection are not the same thing. Excellence says I will do this well and keep learning. Perfection says I am not allowed to be human. Only one of those is sustainable for a fifteen-year career in a school. Only one of those lets you sleep at night, eat a proper dinner before parents' evening starts, and laugh at yourself without it feeling like defeat.
So watch your language, Deputy. When you catch yourself calling perfectionism a strength in the staffroom or in an office chat - catch it out loud instead. Say, "I used to think that too. I was wrong." Say it to the Administration Leader who is white-knuckling their way through an apology for a minor timetabling slip. Say it to the Head of Department who thinks a difficult assessment feedback point means they've failed. Show them what it looks like to metabolise a mistake instead of being consumed by it. You will not lose their respect. You will earn something better - their trust, and their willingness to tell you the truth when it matters most, whether that's a struggling student, a staffing gap, or a mistake they made that needs catching early.
Here's the part I didn't say on the panel because we were out of time: I wouldn't undo the mistakes even if I could. The fumbled first assemblies, the parent meetings I'd handle differently now, the nights I replayed a conversation in the car park before walking into the house because I hadn't yet learned to separate the job from myself - that's the curriculum. Nobody graduates into senior school leadership without a transcript full of it. The version of me who thought she had to have every answer would not recognise the leader I am now, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can pay to fifteen years of getting things wrong in front of staff, students and parents, and surviving it anyway.
So if you're early in this, exhausted, and quietly certain every other deputy or assistant head has it figured out - they don't. I promise you, they don't. Put the armour down. Do the work. Ask the question in the SLT meeting you're afraid makes you look junior. Let the job be hard without letting it convince you that you're failing at it. Let it be imperfect, messy, occasionally humbling, and still entirely yours. That's not the leader falling short of the job.
That is the job.
Wear the exhaustion less. Wear the honesty more. And when someone asks you, fifteen years from now, what you wish you'd known - I hope you answer as fast as I did.
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