Interim Insights - Jo Sullivan-Lyons

Jo Sullivan-Lyons is the interim education and SEND consultant at Barnet Education and Learning Service; as an interim leader, she brings a wealth of experience and insight to the table. We sat down with Jo to delve into her experiences and glean insights into her dynamic role. Here’s what she had to share

What led you to a career as an interim?
I was in the fortunate position of having paid my mortgage off at the age of 53, which allowed me to take advantage of the many benefits of interim work. I was especially keen to broaden my experience in a range of sizes, locations, and contexts of local authorities, as I had worked in London and the Southeast throughout my career. I was also keen to be involved in work at a national level, and working as an interim has allowed me to be involved in a range of national issues relating to education and SEND.

What do you enjoy most about being an interim?
I really enjoy the variety of work that interim work offers both within individual assignments and across assignments. I find this intellectually stimulating and professionally challenging. It means that I keep all aspects of my expertise up to date. Working with colleagues in a variety of LAs means that I am constantly learning and therefore developing as a leader and subject specialist.

What are the challenges you face as an interim, and how important is leadership style?
As an interim, you must be able to very rapidly assimilate and evaluate a great deal of quantitative and qualitative information about the context of the assignment. To be successful, you must be able to understand the culture of the environment you are working in and consciously consider the best leadership style to adopt for each aspect of the role you are undertaking. Interims need to be emotionally intelligent, resilient, and resourceful leaders who can engender trust and confidence in colleagues across the organisation.  

What difference have you made in the organisations you’ve worked for?
I have led on a range of areas that have had enduring impact, including co-producing policies and procedures to raise levels of performance; supporting local areas to critically evaluate their effectiveness and agreeing action plans for improvement, clearly owned by permanent staff as 'business as usual'; stabilised budgets and developed clearly articulated budget management plans to ensure the sustainability of service provision; provided psychological safety, with the benefit of being objective as I am interim not permanently employed by the system,   so that systems can learn from complaints and quality assurance process, embedding a culture of continuous improvement; brought insights from working across numerous local authorities to develop local, innovative solutions to issues, based on evidence from other local areas; and recruiting permanent, high quality staff.

In your current role, if possible, to share, what were the drivers that led to an interim being recruited? And why do you think an interim is the best way of solving that problem in this scenario?
Barnet needed backfill for the Director of SEND and Inclusion so that they had capacity to work on the Change Programme Partnership for SEND, and they wanted my expertise to work directly on the CPP as well. As the CPP is being funded for a limited time, an interim was an ideal solution.

What makes a good interim in your eyes?
I think that interims need to be likeable: rapid, sustainable, and relationship building is fundamental to a successful interim assignment. It goes without saying that interims need to be specialists in their field of expertise, but they also need the confidence and adaptability to apply their knowledge and expertise to novel areas or contexts. While interims need to be focused on delivery of the objectives the client has set, you also need to maintain focus on how the work you are doing will be sustainable and become business as usual after you have left. Interims also need to be able to use their knowledge, expertise, and skills at influencing to make suggestions to the client about alternative ways of achieving the key performance indicators of the assignment; sometimes what the client anticipated would be the way forward may not be ideal.

Interested in making an impact through an interim role?
Contact Nik Shah for opportunities at nik.shah@tile-hill.co.uk or on 07535400434