Nick MacKenzie shares insights from his conversation with Professor Sir Steve West, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West of England, Bristol, and chair of the national taskforce on student mental health.

"No one can. No one can make this better. All you can do is your best."

An 18-year-old said that to his father. His father had led a university for nearly twenty years, chaired Universities UK, and was about to take on the national work on student mental health. He was also, at that moment, standing in his garden in the middle of COVID, crying.

In the latest episode of our #EdInfluence podcast, Nick was joined by Professor Sir Steve West, who still tells that story. It still makes him emotional. That, he says, is exactly the point.

It was during COVID-19. UWE Bristol had an on-campus hospital - 320 intensive care beds, the Army and the NHS working alongside university staff. Steve was there throughout, sleeves rolled up. One afternoon he was cutting the grass and started to cry. His son, 18 at the time, came outside and asked why. "Because I can't fix this," Steve told him. "I can't make this better for people." His son stopped, put his arm around him, and said: "But Dad, no one can. No one can make this better. All you can do is your best."

Steve shared that story with his staff. It landed because it was unscripted and because everyone was living the same thing. He still tells it, and it still makes him emotional. That, he says, is the point. Leadership has to find a way of connecting and being emotionally intelligent and not being afraid to show vulnerability.

The conversation moved from there into storytelling, team-building, crisis preparedness and student mental health. It was honest throughout - the kind of discussion where someone with two decades in the role is still willing to say "I still get tons wrong."

If you don’t believe it, why would anyone else? 

Steve is clear that the first rule of leadership communication is authenticity.

In a large university, one message has to reach communities with very different lived experiences, different drivers, different fears. You get one shot, Steve says, to convey enough that connects with enough people to get the followership you need. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you have to find multiple different ways in. The learning is that it has to be natural and believable - and you have to be prepared for challenge. People want to engage, but they want to engage in a meaningful way.

When the message is difficult - and across the sector right now, many are - the aim isn't universal agreement. It's understanding. "People may not like the message, may not align to that message," Steve explains, "but what you have to do is get enough understanding in order to make it happen and to demonstrate that you're doing it for the best of intentions." That requires emotional intelligence: understanding the ecosystem your organisation sits in, and caring enough to show it.

For education leaders, the practical question is how. Steve's answer starts with the people around you. Before broadcasting a difficult decision, test it. Have people at the table who will offer genuine challenge rather than easy agreement, because hard choices create different consequences for different groups. "That's not that helpful," he says of advisers who simply tell you not to worry, "because you know that's not going to be the reality."

That means diversity of thought - not just in principle, but in practice. People who will examine consequences early, before the glare of public reaction. Steve draws on his surgical background: no clinician succeeds alone. If the cleaning staff haven't done their job, if the instruments aren't sterile, things go wrong before the surgeon picks up a scalpel. The same applies in a university. Operational details and overlooked roles can determine whether strategy survives contact with reality.

The dream team and the Sunday football team

Steve has been building teams for decades, and he's candid about the range. Sometimes you get what he calls the dream team - "everybody knows what they're doing, they know how other people are going to react, they know what they're leading on, what they're supporting." He compares it to watching world-class football, where every player understands not just their own role but the movement around them.

Then there are the other times. "It's a bit like watching my sons do Sunday football when they were growing up, where every player on the pitch runs after the same ball." Every leader, Steve says, will recognise both versions. And every time you add someone new, you rebuild the team, because a new dynamic arrives.

What often gets neglected is the maintenance. The facilitation, the time together, the housekeeping. "When it works, it's efficient, it's effective, it really does transform," Steve says. "When it doesn't work, a lot of that energy dissipates into fixing stuff after the event." He's had the whole spectrum, and so has every leader he's spoken to across every sector. It's not peculiar. It's what happens in complex organisations.

"Pause to go faster"

One phrase from the conversation stands out. Steve's leadership team uses the words "pause to go faster" as a shared cue. Anyone can call it. When the group is in a huddle, working through something at speed, someone will say: "Hang on, just pause, pause to go faster here."

It works because it fractures the momentum. "The problem with teams is they just get into the moment," Steve explains, "and then they get into, 'Right, we've got to go this way faster,' and then you know there's probably not going to be a good ending to that, but you're swept along." Having the courage to interrupt that is, he says, quite special when it happens.

The underlying question is simple: how urgent is this, really? Most of the time, Steve argues, the issues aren't a burning building. There's time to ask "are we sure?" before moving to the next step. When you do, you sometimes get very different outcomes.

It's striking how naturally this connected to something a previous guest, Lucy Easthope, had raised: the "startle factor" and the idea that help isn't coming. Nick put that to Steve.

"Help isn't coming" would be a good way of describing the reality, he said. Universities are going to have to find their way through the challenges they face. Government is not going to intervene - it can't, it wouldn't be appropriate, and it hasn't got the resources. "So we've got to find the solutions."

That self-reliance has a harder edge when you apply it to crisis preparedness.

The first 24 hours is the easy part

Steve sees mini-cycles of crisis in universities, punctuated by the occasional big wave. The risk register probably names it - cyber, pandemic - but he questions whether institutions truly rehearse what those events would mean. Public sector organisations, the police, the army: they train hard in simulations. Higher education is getting better, but there's a gap.

The bigger gap, though, is recovery. Most universities could manage the first 24 hours of a major incident. The part that gets missed is what comes after. "Where's that left us? How long are we going to be in this state? How do we recover and how do we move forward?" Steve says that's where very little time is spent. "We're part match-fit, but we're not completely match-fit."

He points to recent cyber-attacks on Marks and Spencer, Co-op and Jaguar Land Rover - organisations knocked out for months. What would that look like for a university that has moved almost everything to digital? "We don't have the papers anymore," he says. "We got rid of it because that was inefficient and ineffective." There's something uncomfortable in that. The efficiency that made things better in peacetime becomes a vulnerability in crisis.

"Boy, have we got a mess to sort out"

The conversation ended somewhere unexpected. Steve described a recent evening with a group of 14 to 16-year-olds at Bristol's annual Heroes celebration - young people from deeply disadvantaged backgrounds, recognised for turning their lives around. He sat with four of them for an hour after the event.

They talked about the environment and sustainability. About artificial intelligence and its impact on people and the planet. About social media. They got into politics, capitalism and communism, the life course and how you reinvent yourself when there are too many unknowns. These were teenagers. 

They asked Steve hard questions about education's role in transforming lives. "They care passionately about each other," he says.

That morning, Steve had been with a government minister. He told them the same thing. "Boy, have we got a mess to sort out because we're not doing a very good job at the minute of giving them hope and giving them opportunity that makes sense." He paused. "That's our job. It's this generation, my generation, that needs to do it. Nobody else is going to do it."

What lingers after this conversation is something quieter than the big themes. It was Steve saying, after more than 20 years as vice-chancellor, that every day is still a different day. That he's still learning, still getting things wrong, still finding the same feeling he had as a clinician when a patient got better or a student suddenly understood something for the first time.

"All you can do is your best." His son said it while standing in a garden during a pandemic. It's not a leadership framework. It's not a theory. 

When did you last pause to go faster?

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#EdInfluence is Browne Jacobson's podcast series exploring the human side of leadership with some of education's most inspiring figures.

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