Phil Denton After a short break, Leadership Relay returns with a brand new interview. It’s with Headteacher, Phil Denton. Phil is the headteacher of a Catholic High School in Ormskirk. After a chance meeting with the then Tranmere Rovers manager, Micky Mellon, Phil embarked on an exciting leadership project. The project involved Micky and himself meeting and being involved in leadership discussions with a number of football managers including Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Mike Phelan and Sean Dyche. He also went about leading aspects of his new school like a football club. This project has culminated in Phil co-authoring a book alongside Micky. The book will be out next year and proceeds from the book will raise money for the Lenny Johnose ALS fund. Leadership Relay would like to thank Phil in giving up his time to speak to us in what is an extremely busy time for all headteachers. Thank you Phil. We hope you enjoy the interview as much as us! |
The Interview
LR - What has been your journey to becoming a headteacher?
PD - At the age of 18, I worked in an Outdoor Centre before, during and after University, so I got interested in Education through doing that.I went to the States and travelled for a bit and eventually found my way into teaching. I taught in Wigan, Rochdale and Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia I got lots of leadership opportunities and progressed quickly. I came back and went on the Future Leaders Program, as it was then, as a fast track program.
Then I went to be a Deputy Head, before I had a step down in title to become an Assistant Head it was more of a sideways move to work in a much larger school and eventually, I became a headteacher. The work in the Outdoor Centre was important as from a young age I was responsible for groups and I had further responsibilities. It was fascinating to see an Outdoor Centre with a really strong culture and it was there where I first became interested in replicating that sort of culture in a school.
LR - Did you have a main subject when you taught?
History. Many headteachers seem to be historians, it seems to be a popular one. I love being a headteacher. I really enjoyed the other senior leadership roles, but being headteacher is brilliant. It's intense and the breadth of the job is incredible from looking at the building, to the kitchen, to teaching and learning, relationships between your staff, structures, human resources, PR; it’s everything! In education sometimes, I don't think that leaders get the credit they deserve from those outside education.
LR - Did I read that you were also a scout at a Scottish Premier League Club? Is there anything you can take from that experience back to education?
PD - Yes, I do a bit of first team scouting. It’s incredible the detail you can get down to when you’re looking at stats. I don’t think there is anything you can take back. I find that it’s a great release and I think you do need that release. It’s a completely different world to sit and watch a football match, looking at a couple of players and you’re not thinking of anything else.
I find that it’s a release and a bit of escapism really. It’s a funny role scouting, you’re a bit like a spy, but everyone knows you’re a spy because you're sitting in the scouts table and you’re scribbling things down and you don’t care what that score is. It’s a strange experience because you’re not caught up in the emotion of the game. It’s enjoyable and I find it quite relaxing.
LR - What are your thoughts on setting the vision and culture within a school?
PD - You have a vision of what you want your school to be like. Here, because of the area and the ambition of the parents and the students, we could have a really ambitious vision, but we also needed a bit of an altruistic element to it as well. Our vision is to offer a world class Catholic education for children who want to make the world a better place. So we’ve got those two elements.
Once the vision is set out, you have certain principles that you work to. Even the children will refer back to it in school. There was a leak in the roof at school and the number of children that said ‘that’s not very world class is it.’ It’s a language you can use to hold yourself to.
The values we have are Love, Faith and Hope. What we mean by Love is that we have the highest standards for children and we don’t accept certain behaviours that don’t allow them to excel. We have Hope for everybody and Faith because Catholicism runs through the school and it is the culture of the school. When you’ve got that, they’re your principles. The language we use is really important and we have to keep hammering that language. So we keep mentioning the phrase ‘world class’ all the time and keep talking about making the world a better place in assemblies.
It’s amazing, when you’re a head, how much you affect the other people in the school. When I started, I couldn't believe how my mood changed everything in the school. I know that many headteachers will say the same thing. If you come in and you're tired and grumpy, you’ll find there will be more problems throughout the day. It’s a bit of a cascade and domino effect. If you’re positive and mean what you say, it’s amazing the impact that can have on the whole school.
LR - How did the meeting with Micky Mellon come about?
PD - I went to watch Tranmere play Stevenage away. I stayed with my wife at a hotel just outside Stevenage. We went for a meal out and when we got back to the hotel, the Tranmere team bus was there. I saw a couple of players around the hotel and I had a chat with them and congratulated them on promotion. In the morning, I went to the gym in the hotel and I met Micky there. There were only the two of us there and we got chatting about everything from football, leadership, history and Ernest Shackleton. We talked for about three hours.
At the end of our chat we exchanged numbers. We arranged to go out for dinner with a few of the Tranmere staff. We talked about working on a project. We’d been sharing books for a month or so and Micky mentioned he’d always had an idea about writing a book about the first 100 days. This was just before I was about to start my headship. So it was suggested that we write about the first 100 days and that I would run the school like a football club, so we did!
LR - I listened to your webinar with Micky and Drew Povey (see the link at the end of interview to listen) and I heard you mention the 100 days. I’d never really seen this before, but now I seem to see the idea everywhere. I saw a book the other day about the first 30 days and I guess that is the same kind of idea.
PD - There are books about the first 90 days in business. We thought it would be fascinating to see it from a football managers point of view because it is such an intense business. If the managers don’t get it right, then they’re sacked. They could be sacked in 50 days, whereas you get longer in other industries.
LR - So what type of things did you do in school to run it like a football club?
PD - That’s a good question. The first thing we did was to look at the ‘dressing room.’ So Micky asked me ‘what’s your dressing room like?’ So we started to look at the different characters in the staffroom. This is where myself and Micky complemented each other quite well because I already had a good idea about it.
We looked at who are the stable performers? Who are the people who are going to do a great job everyday and within reason get on with anything we might suggest which would improve the school? There is a good bank of those people who are either your pioneers or your early adopters.
You get to a tipping point and those are the people who dictate whether something will be embedded or whether something will fall by the wayside. Micky said ‘they’re like your captains. ’He used the analogy of Roy Keane with Alex Ferguson. Those are the people who dictate the mood of your team if you’re not there and they’re your ‘cultural architects.’
We looked at who the ‘captains’ are. Some of them were popular with different groups of people. So I worked out that I had a specific number of people and needed to get their thoughts on something, particularly in the early stages, before I’d go with an idea or before I'd say something. I generally found if they were on board with it, everyone else would be. You have those people who are anyway, they are usually really positive and up and at it sort of people.
Then you have the people who are waiting to see what the ‘cultural architects’ are going to say. If they say it’s a good idea then everyone else goes along with it. You will probably always have one or two who are the ‘laggards’ at the end who think that everything you say is rubbish! Once you’ve got the majority on board, you decide what you’re going to do with them. You try and work with them and take on board their views, make them feel more affiliated with what you’re doing. With some people, that has taken two or three years.
With most people, it was either instant or it took three or four months. The first 100 days were really important. Then we talked a lot about principles, what are the principles of the school? We have principles like being ambitious with the students, making sure your data is on time, being respectful with each other, working as part of a team, those types of principles. We translated those into be ready, be respectful and be safe.
LR - Sir Clive Woodward had a ‘black book’ where he covered all of his expectations. He used to set a topic for discussion and get the team to set a teamship rule. All of this information was in a book. Have you broken it down to be clearer and easier to remember?
PD - So be ready, be respectful and be safe are the 3 simple rules. Most things we do are in 3s. In terms of the vision, the vision and principle is to be a world class school. There are times when people are, subconsciously, waiting to see if you mean it or not. For example, we had some big structural changes that we had to make. We had to change the structure to change the teaching in the school. When you do those things, you really reinforce it and you show that you really mean ‘being world class’.
Staff know what we're trying to achieve. When staff are looking at something, whether it be more time, more resources, additional staffing, sometimes they’ll throw that back at me. They’ll say things like ‘if we want to be world class’ and it’s right that they’re challenging me on it, it's brilliant. I will sometimes say that to them too ‘if we want to be world class, we’re going to have to do this.’
The language is so important. Sean Dyche calls them ‘sticky words’ and this is when you’ve got people who start to throw those words back at you.
LR - Are there any other things you do?
PD - Everything we did was about getting a better picture of what we wanted to achieve. We wanted to improve performance by knowing the students inside out. This was around the ‘Love’ aspect of our values. This is when we care about every student and you’ve got to find out all about them. When the data comes in, we know what we do with it now. It is all focussed around that Love for the student and how they can improve. We’ve got a new data system in order to make it clear to everyone how to use it because it wasn’t always clear. Previously, only one person knew about the data in a specific subject area, but now everyone knows it.
This was very much around the football principle of analysing the results, analysing the matches and then improving on that. We’re constantly trying to improve. It’s based around a ‘Kaizen’ culture of always looking to improve. Whether you call it Kaizen or marginal gains, whatever you call the process, in order to be world class, you’ve always got to be looking to get better.
We celebrate people who are looking to get better all the time. Like anywhere, your highest performers are always looking to improve. What they do is never just enough. We celebrate when we get wins too. More than we did before. That is a crucial part of football. You’ve got your analysis, constant improvement and one of the things I neglected was celebrating wins. We didn't celebrate wins enough and I still don’t think we do. We don’t really pat ourselves on the back or say ‘this is going really well’ as much as we could do.
LR - On the subject of praise and patting yourself on the back, I find that fascinating. Steven Gerrard has talked about it. He talks about his time under Rafa Bentez and Rafa was famous for not saying ‘well done.’ Rafa would rarely praise him, but he also says that was the best football he played in this career. If Rafa had been different with him, would he have reached the same level of performance? I always think that would be a good question to ask him.
PD - Collectively, we ask our staff and the best way to find out how to be with people is to ask them! We do quite a lot of staff questionnaires. We’ve also got a really positive union presence where they’ll tell me if there are any issues or if there is something we can get better at. They’ll also say if they want a bit of acknowledgement and for most people, I don’t think it’s ‘thank you’, I think staff prefer time.
We’ve had lots of celebrations this term. We brought cakes that said ‘thank you’ on them. We’re also having a Friday breakfast every week when we’d previously have a debriefing. Now, the Leadership team take the students and staff have bacon butties, a social chat and catch up. That is a thank you for all of the hard work that people do.
What we’ve found is our union reps will not really come to us and say ‘people don’t want to do that or that is outside the union guidance’ because we don't really do it. We talk about items along the way. We celebrate when we’re doing well and we all try to acknowledge each other. Some people don’t need it. I can see why Steven Gerrard might say that. In football, when you get to a certain level, that is just what you expect from people. Football is very different at the very top level because you’ve got 50,000 people saying well done and there is also the media side of things.
One of Micky’s celebrations for Tranmere was something simple like going for a pint on the way home from an away game. He said that was incredible. In the changing room they were talking about it ‘let’s get this pint, come on.’ He said it was a brilliant experience. They all got off the bus and they had a drink on the way home. They had a good laugh, they’d won. It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. It can be just a bit of time - ‘go and do something for yourself’ and you know that people will work just as hard, but also will feel appreciated.
LR - Can we talk about the book? Is it about all of your experiences of meetings with various leaders in football?
PD - It’s a blueprint really for your first 100 days. Chapter 3 starts on Day 1. Chapters 1 and 2 are getting ready for Day 1. We’ve tried to do it in a linear way. We talked about the themes that come up along the way. It’s a narrative. So you could pick it up and say ‘I’m just starting a new job.’ You could also say ‘I want to change the way I do my current job so I’m going to restart with the first 100 days.’ You could pick it up and flick through it or you could say, for example, ‘I’m struggling a bit with the culture here’ and read through the culture chapter. We did a chapter on your own well-being about managing yourself. This was about how you can look after yourself in that kind of role as it can be a lonely role for some people.
It talks about what Ole Gunnar Solskjaer did when he first got the job on the first day and what he did in his first 100 days. Sean Dyche discussed what he did about developing a culture at a club. The narrative takes you on different themes as you go through. The final chapter is how Micky employed the lessons we learnt at Dundee United. It refers back to lessons in the book and tells you how he implemented those in his first 100 days.
You can read more about the project here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/54633843
You can listen to the webinar with Phil Denton, Micky Mellon and Drew Povey here -https://vimeo.com/45807541
If you enjoyed this interview, you can see interview Number 7 here. It's with National Performance Director of British Swimming, Chris Spice - https://leadershiprelay.weebly.com/chris-spice.html
PD - At the age of 18, I worked in an Outdoor Centre before, during and after University, so I got interested in Education through doing that.I went to the States and travelled for a bit and eventually found my way into teaching. I taught in Wigan, Rochdale and Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia I got lots of leadership opportunities and progressed quickly. I came back and went on the Future Leaders Program, as it was then, as a fast track program.
Then I went to be a Deputy Head, before I had a step down in title to become an Assistant Head it was more of a sideways move to work in a much larger school and eventually, I became a headteacher. The work in the Outdoor Centre was important as from a young age I was responsible for groups and I had further responsibilities. It was fascinating to see an Outdoor Centre with a really strong culture and it was there where I first became interested in replicating that sort of culture in a school.
LR - Did you have a main subject when you taught?
History. Many headteachers seem to be historians, it seems to be a popular one. I love being a headteacher. I really enjoyed the other senior leadership roles, but being headteacher is brilliant. It's intense and the breadth of the job is incredible from looking at the building, to the kitchen, to teaching and learning, relationships between your staff, structures, human resources, PR; it’s everything! In education sometimes, I don't think that leaders get the credit they deserve from those outside education.
LR - Did I read that you were also a scout at a Scottish Premier League Club? Is there anything you can take from that experience back to education?
PD - Yes, I do a bit of first team scouting. It’s incredible the detail you can get down to when you’re looking at stats. I don’t think there is anything you can take back. I find that it’s a great release and I think you do need that release. It’s a completely different world to sit and watch a football match, looking at a couple of players and you’re not thinking of anything else.
I find that it’s a release and a bit of escapism really. It’s a funny role scouting, you’re a bit like a spy, but everyone knows you’re a spy because you're sitting in the scouts table and you’re scribbling things down and you don’t care what that score is. It’s a strange experience because you’re not caught up in the emotion of the game. It’s enjoyable and I find it quite relaxing.
LR - What are your thoughts on setting the vision and culture within a school?
PD - You have a vision of what you want your school to be like. Here, because of the area and the ambition of the parents and the students, we could have a really ambitious vision, but we also needed a bit of an altruistic element to it as well. Our vision is to offer a world class Catholic education for children who want to make the world a better place. So we’ve got those two elements.
Once the vision is set out, you have certain principles that you work to. Even the children will refer back to it in school. There was a leak in the roof at school and the number of children that said ‘that’s not very world class is it.’ It’s a language you can use to hold yourself to.
The values we have are Love, Faith and Hope. What we mean by Love is that we have the highest standards for children and we don’t accept certain behaviours that don’t allow them to excel. We have Hope for everybody and Faith because Catholicism runs through the school and it is the culture of the school. When you’ve got that, they’re your principles. The language we use is really important and we have to keep hammering that language. So we keep mentioning the phrase ‘world class’ all the time and keep talking about making the world a better place in assemblies.
It’s amazing, when you’re a head, how much you affect the other people in the school. When I started, I couldn't believe how my mood changed everything in the school. I know that many headteachers will say the same thing. If you come in and you're tired and grumpy, you’ll find there will be more problems throughout the day. It’s a bit of a cascade and domino effect. If you’re positive and mean what you say, it’s amazing the impact that can have on the whole school.
LR - How did the meeting with Micky Mellon come about?
PD - I went to watch Tranmere play Stevenage away. I stayed with my wife at a hotel just outside Stevenage. We went for a meal out and when we got back to the hotel, the Tranmere team bus was there. I saw a couple of players around the hotel and I had a chat with them and congratulated them on promotion. In the morning, I went to the gym in the hotel and I met Micky there. There were only the two of us there and we got chatting about everything from football, leadership, history and Ernest Shackleton. We talked for about three hours.
At the end of our chat we exchanged numbers. We arranged to go out for dinner with a few of the Tranmere staff. We talked about working on a project. We’d been sharing books for a month or so and Micky mentioned he’d always had an idea about writing a book about the first 100 days. This was just before I was about to start my headship. So it was suggested that we write about the first 100 days and that I would run the school like a football club, so we did!
LR - I listened to your webinar with Micky and Drew Povey (see the link at the end of interview to listen) and I heard you mention the 100 days. I’d never really seen this before, but now I seem to see the idea everywhere. I saw a book the other day about the first 30 days and I guess that is the same kind of idea.
PD - There are books about the first 90 days in business. We thought it would be fascinating to see it from a football managers point of view because it is such an intense business. If the managers don’t get it right, then they’re sacked. They could be sacked in 50 days, whereas you get longer in other industries.
LR - So what type of things did you do in school to run it like a football club?
PD - That’s a good question. The first thing we did was to look at the ‘dressing room.’ So Micky asked me ‘what’s your dressing room like?’ So we started to look at the different characters in the staffroom. This is where myself and Micky complemented each other quite well because I already had a good idea about it.
We looked at who are the stable performers? Who are the people who are going to do a great job everyday and within reason get on with anything we might suggest which would improve the school? There is a good bank of those people who are either your pioneers or your early adopters.
You get to a tipping point and those are the people who dictate whether something will be embedded or whether something will fall by the wayside. Micky said ‘they’re like your captains. ’He used the analogy of Roy Keane with Alex Ferguson. Those are the people who dictate the mood of your team if you’re not there and they’re your ‘cultural architects.’
We looked at who the ‘captains’ are. Some of them were popular with different groups of people. So I worked out that I had a specific number of people and needed to get their thoughts on something, particularly in the early stages, before I’d go with an idea or before I'd say something. I generally found if they were on board with it, everyone else would be. You have those people who are anyway, they are usually really positive and up and at it sort of people.
Then you have the people who are waiting to see what the ‘cultural architects’ are going to say. If they say it’s a good idea then everyone else goes along with it. You will probably always have one or two who are the ‘laggards’ at the end who think that everything you say is rubbish! Once you’ve got the majority on board, you decide what you’re going to do with them. You try and work with them and take on board their views, make them feel more affiliated with what you’re doing. With some people, that has taken two or three years.
With most people, it was either instant or it took three or four months. The first 100 days were really important. Then we talked a lot about principles, what are the principles of the school? We have principles like being ambitious with the students, making sure your data is on time, being respectful with each other, working as part of a team, those types of principles. We translated those into be ready, be respectful and be safe.
LR - Sir Clive Woodward had a ‘black book’ where he covered all of his expectations. He used to set a topic for discussion and get the team to set a teamship rule. All of this information was in a book. Have you broken it down to be clearer and easier to remember?
PD - So be ready, be respectful and be safe are the 3 simple rules. Most things we do are in 3s. In terms of the vision, the vision and principle is to be a world class school. There are times when people are, subconsciously, waiting to see if you mean it or not. For example, we had some big structural changes that we had to make. We had to change the structure to change the teaching in the school. When you do those things, you really reinforce it and you show that you really mean ‘being world class’.
Staff know what we're trying to achieve. When staff are looking at something, whether it be more time, more resources, additional staffing, sometimes they’ll throw that back at me. They’ll say things like ‘if we want to be world class’ and it’s right that they’re challenging me on it, it's brilliant. I will sometimes say that to them too ‘if we want to be world class, we’re going to have to do this.’
The language is so important. Sean Dyche calls them ‘sticky words’ and this is when you’ve got people who start to throw those words back at you.
LR - Are there any other things you do?
PD - Everything we did was about getting a better picture of what we wanted to achieve. We wanted to improve performance by knowing the students inside out. This was around the ‘Love’ aspect of our values. This is when we care about every student and you’ve got to find out all about them. When the data comes in, we know what we do with it now. It is all focussed around that Love for the student and how they can improve. We’ve got a new data system in order to make it clear to everyone how to use it because it wasn’t always clear. Previously, only one person knew about the data in a specific subject area, but now everyone knows it.
This was very much around the football principle of analysing the results, analysing the matches and then improving on that. We’re constantly trying to improve. It’s based around a ‘Kaizen’ culture of always looking to improve. Whether you call it Kaizen or marginal gains, whatever you call the process, in order to be world class, you’ve always got to be looking to get better.
We celebrate people who are looking to get better all the time. Like anywhere, your highest performers are always looking to improve. What they do is never just enough. We celebrate when we get wins too. More than we did before. That is a crucial part of football. You’ve got your analysis, constant improvement and one of the things I neglected was celebrating wins. We didn't celebrate wins enough and I still don’t think we do. We don’t really pat ourselves on the back or say ‘this is going really well’ as much as we could do.
LR - On the subject of praise and patting yourself on the back, I find that fascinating. Steven Gerrard has talked about it. He talks about his time under Rafa Bentez and Rafa was famous for not saying ‘well done.’ Rafa would rarely praise him, but he also says that was the best football he played in this career. If Rafa had been different with him, would he have reached the same level of performance? I always think that would be a good question to ask him.
PD - Collectively, we ask our staff and the best way to find out how to be with people is to ask them! We do quite a lot of staff questionnaires. We’ve also got a really positive union presence where they’ll tell me if there are any issues or if there is something we can get better at. They’ll also say if they want a bit of acknowledgement and for most people, I don’t think it’s ‘thank you’, I think staff prefer time.
We’ve had lots of celebrations this term. We brought cakes that said ‘thank you’ on them. We’re also having a Friday breakfast every week when we’d previously have a debriefing. Now, the Leadership team take the students and staff have bacon butties, a social chat and catch up. That is a thank you for all of the hard work that people do.
What we’ve found is our union reps will not really come to us and say ‘people don’t want to do that or that is outside the union guidance’ because we don't really do it. We talk about items along the way. We celebrate when we’re doing well and we all try to acknowledge each other. Some people don’t need it. I can see why Steven Gerrard might say that. In football, when you get to a certain level, that is just what you expect from people. Football is very different at the very top level because you’ve got 50,000 people saying well done and there is also the media side of things.
One of Micky’s celebrations for Tranmere was something simple like going for a pint on the way home from an away game. He said that was incredible. In the changing room they were talking about it ‘let’s get this pint, come on.’ He said it was a brilliant experience. They all got off the bus and they had a drink on the way home. They had a good laugh, they’d won. It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. It can be just a bit of time - ‘go and do something for yourself’ and you know that people will work just as hard, but also will feel appreciated.
LR - Can we talk about the book? Is it about all of your experiences of meetings with various leaders in football?
PD - It’s a blueprint really for your first 100 days. Chapter 3 starts on Day 1. Chapters 1 and 2 are getting ready for Day 1. We’ve tried to do it in a linear way. We talked about the themes that come up along the way. It’s a narrative. So you could pick it up and say ‘I’m just starting a new job.’ You could also say ‘I want to change the way I do my current job so I’m going to restart with the first 100 days.’ You could pick it up and flick through it or you could say, for example, ‘I’m struggling a bit with the culture here’ and read through the culture chapter. We did a chapter on your own well-being about managing yourself. This was about how you can look after yourself in that kind of role as it can be a lonely role for some people.
It talks about what Ole Gunnar Solskjaer did when he first got the job on the first day and what he did in his first 100 days. Sean Dyche discussed what he did about developing a culture at a club. The narrative takes you on different themes as you go through. The final chapter is how Micky employed the lessons we learnt at Dundee United. It refers back to lessons in the book and tells you how he implemented those in his first 100 days.
You can read more about the project here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/54633843
You can listen to the webinar with Phil Denton, Micky Mellon and Drew Povey here -https://vimeo.com/45807541
If you enjoyed this interview, you can see interview Number 7 here. It's with National Performance Director of British Swimming, Chris Spice - https://leadershiprelay.weebly.com/chris-spice.html