In this paper, Nic Beech reflects on his career journey from academia to becoming a vice-chancellor, emphasising the importance of equality, diversity, inclusion, and respect (EDIR) in leadership. Influenced by personal experiences, he highlights the transformative power of education and the value of collaboration and inclusion in institutional change. Nic’s leadership philosophy centres on learning from diverse perspectives, promoting social justice, and fostering community engagement. His initiatives have advanced EDIR in higher education through policy reforms, partnerships, and co-leadership with students. Nic underscores the responsibility of universities to empower students, engage with broader communities, and drive societal progress through inclusive practices.

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Prologue

My purpose in this article is to offer a reflection on a career that has taken me from being an academic to head of a school of management to faculty dean and on to vice-chancellor positions. While this journey might appear smooth or planned, in reality it has emerged through a mixture of taking opportunities, experiencing dead-ends, getting rejections, but trying to keep learning and adapting. For quite a period of my career there was a prevalent assumption that if you were a decent researcher you would have the ability to take on leadership roles (although you might take some persuasion because of the impact it would have on your research). There was little or no training in management or leadership and it was not uncommon for these activities to be classified as ‘administration’ as though they were of low value or to minimise the role, ‘just appoint good people and let them get on with it’ was not an unusual attitude.

Business schools are an interesting background for a career in higher education (HE) leadership in part because our research and what we teach our students ought to have some relevance to HE leadership but equally because of the rich critical/analytical tradition in UK business schools which used to hold management/leadership practice (especially in HE) at arm’s length. While leadership roles were not always seen as the best thing to be doing, for me they offered an intellectual challenge and an opportunity to try to take research findings seriously in practice, and equality, diversity, inclusion and respect (EDIR) is a crucial area for synthesising research and practice.

As a white, heterosexual man I have not had to deal with the prejudices and discrimination that impact others. However, I come to EDIR from an ethical and research stance which has been the basis for questioning social structures and practices that disadvantage others. Equally significantly, I have worked with, and learned from, others who have strongly influenced how I inhabit leadership roles, what I try to do, and who I am. I have tried to be a learning leader with enough humility to listen and change myself, and to use what I have learned from others to shape agendas and organisational contexts in ways that improve equity. In no sense do I hold myself up as an example, but I hope the following emergent story might be of some use to others on their journeys. I tell my story in the spirit of trust, including personal details which I hope give a sense of where I have come from and where I hope to get to.

One Generation On

Both of my parents came from single-parent families. Had the provisions for women’s health in those days been better, they would have had two parents for longer. My grandfathers worked in factories and had periods of unemployment and my parents came from what now might be described as a widening participation background. They did not participate, which is not surprising given that less than 2% of the population went to university at that time. My father left school at the age of fifteen with one qualification in typing and went to work as an ‘office boy’ in an accountancy firm. After a spell in the army, he returned to the accountancy firm and started attending night school. Gradually, over very many years he qualified as an accountant. My mother went to work in an industrial chemistry laboratory as a lab assistant and after some time retrained as a teacher and became a science teacher. Part-time, accessible education was crucial to their self-changing and self-actualisation and, influenced by my mother, my father changed his career to teach accountancy in a college of commerce. At this point, he had not been to university and did not have a degree.

I grew up in the 1960s in an old-fashioned, benevolent but gendered household. I went to a state comprehensive school that was decent and included pupils from a range of backgrounds. My experience of school was gendered in that my friends were boys, we played boys’ sports, listened to male-oriented music, and formed bands composed of boys. In the sixth form, the genders were more mixed and I realised that girls also liked music, and politics and were clever, challenging and inspiring.

In the main, I studied subjects I was not very interested in. I quite liked maths and statistics and enjoyed economics, but I really wanted to study psychology at A level, however, it was not available. By the time it came to apply for university, I was unenthusiastic. I had meandered through my A levels but managed to get a place at university studying social anthropology and philosophy.

University and an Epiphany or Two

At university, I joined another band while still playing with my original band at home in the holidays. I had my priorities sorted. I had a grant, which I managed to stretch out so did not have to work (other than gigs, which were fun). But then something unexpected happened. Reading Descartes for the first time, I found myself completely absorbed in logic and metaphysics. I had always liked logic (I now recognise) but once I discovered formal and philosophical logic, I felt like my brain was changing physically. I was completely hooked and spent all of my time in the library. It probably helped that my flat was freezing we had no television and the library was warm, so I was in the library reading and discovering knowledge that was new to me until late most nights.

At this stage, my world was one of logic, but then I read Wittgenstein. Another epiphany. Wittgenstein had sought to explain the world through logic and believing he had succeeded, left universities and became a teacher for years. Later, he rethought and developed a second way of thinking which was still logical but which nested logics in language games which were developed through rule-following practices. And so, to cut a long story short, I became a social constructionist.

An Unguided ‘Career’

After my first degree, I got a studentship to study philosophy further and thus emerged into the Britain of the Thatcherite years as a graduate of philosophy and anthropology with a keen interest in music. I had no idea what to do and a friend suggested that maybe personnel would be the thing for me and I managed to get a job. Subsequently, I went back to university to study personnel and got my first formal introduction to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). This really interested me as a theoretically and empirically interesting subject and as a set of values. My co-students included capitalists, feminists, critical thinkers, and people who wanted to train to get a job, and this cohort helped me challenge myself and my assumptions.

While working in personnel, I was invited to do some tutorials at a university. I really enjoyed the tutorials and the lecturer asked if I was interested in becoming an academic. I was, but thought I had no chance because I did not have a PhD. However, I applied for a job at a polytechnic, expecting to be rejected but to learn from the reasons for my rejection. To my considerable surprise, I was offered the job. Without having meant to, I followed in my father’s footsteps and took the job, and started out as an academic.

It was not what I had thought it would be. Week one was preparation. Week two, term started and I was teaching eighteen hours a week, writing out my overheads every night to deliver them the next day. In addition, I was told that I needed to get my publications out for the Research Assessment Exercise. I asked about doing a PhD and was told it was a good idea. So I registered with the Open University to do a PhD, self-funded and with no time allowance – which was normal at that time.

After a couple of years, I recognised that there were a few universities where the sort of work I was reading was being carried out and one of them was Strathclyde Business School. I was very fortunate to get a job there and started in the early 1990s. It was not what I had thought it would be, but in many ways it was better. I was suddenly surrounded by top-quality academics as Strathclyde was a leading business school in the UK, top-rated in the Research Assessment Exercise, and very focused on what was then called relevance and is now called impact. I eventually managed to get my PhD, but by then my father had died and my mother had Alzheimer’s, and to this day I still carry with me the absence of their approval that I felt might have followed getting a PhD.

Taking Opperchancities

A long-term friend and senior colleague, Robert MacIntosh, introduced me to the term ‘opperchancities’. These are opportunities that you cannot say no to and which will entail a lot of work. At Strathclyde, I had a few opperchancities. At quite an early stage I got the chance to run a major international MBA with 2000 students in nine centres around the world. This meant that I learned a lot about quality, accreditations and also had the chance to influence the curriculum. We were one of the first MBAs to embed EDIR and ethics in the main curriculum. Most of the students were mature and it was a wonderful experience teaching and learning from them. Although introducing EDIR was a struggle in those days, one student sticks in my memory. During a lecture, he was looking away as if he thought everything I was saying was rubbish. Something got into me and I walked up the steps to where he was sitting and asked if he had a problem with EDIR. “Not at all” he replied, “I was thinking about what you were saying, and I agree.” He went on to be very helpful to me in many ways, but the lesson he taught me that day was not to assume that people would oppose, and sometimes people who looked like they would oppose EDIR could actually be supporters and leaders in the field.

Although there were high expectations for research at Strathclyde, there were also high expectations for education and I became involved in accreditations for Strathclyde and then as an accreditor across the UK and internationally. While some people saw these as negative things that took time away from research, I realised they were moments of learning and leverage. It was possible as an accreditor to spot really good staff and encourage them, and to make recommendations that schools had to respond to. It was possible to encourage the mainstreaming of EDIR and ethics in MBAs and business courses, not least because the research in the area was by then showing how important diversity was for team, and organisational performance, in addition to foundational values of fairness in employment.

Having been on the leadership team of the business school, I moved to the University of St Andrews, in part to focus on research that I felt I had underplayed for a few years. St Andrews was a wonderful place to pursue research and high-quality education. I had an ESRC fellowship, so the timing was not ideal when, for various unexpected reasons, I was asked to become Head of the School of Management. I was assured I could keep the ESRC grant going while managing the department and formed a leadership group with two co-heads. After two years, I was asked if I would be interested in becoming Dean of the Faculty. It was a really interesting faculty including economics and management along with philosophy, social anthropology, humanities, divinity, languages and classics. A friend from the leadership team of the School of Management said that I needed a broader canvas to paint on, and I thought he was right and became the Dean.

This put me into a senior management role for the University and because of my enthusiasm I also became chair of the widening participation committee and the diversity committee, and I kept these roles when I moved into a Vice-Principal role two years later. We consistently beat the widening participation target set by the Scottish Funding Council by 150% and gained three Athena Swan awards (two bronze and one silver). In the University senior leadership team, you were still expected to be research active and people were genuinely interested in, and supportive of, your research. My focus had been identity for many years and increasingly it became diversity and identity. The great fortune I had was to be researching issues highly relevant to what I was doing in the rest of my job and many of the theories I was using in research also informed how I sought to inhabit leadership roles with purpose.

Realising it is Down to Us

Half my life ago, in my early 30s, my parents had died much too early, and someone said “you’re the head of the family now.” I felt very unready, however, the motivation to learn, and learning, can be very strong in such highly emotive, identity-changing situations. I am still driven by absences and a sense of duty, as well as the joyfulness of contributing to communities and developing new insights and knowledge. Gradually, I started to realise that I should not be waiting for someone else’s authority to take action, I could just act. I had many conversations with the late Rob Gray, a highly regarded professor of accounting who dedicated his academic life to pushing for environmental change. Our ongoing debate was whether you should push for change from a critical perspective, outside management and leadership roles, or try to build more consensual change from within. I chose the latter but have always been informed by, and respected, the former.

I moved to take up an opportunity at the University of Dundee. Dundee, though very close to St Andrew’s, had a different demographic with more students who came from backgrounds a bit like my parents. During this time I was Provost and this made it easier to make opportunities to build EDIR into how we looked after the academic side of the University. We introduced mandatory training on EDIR for all managers and new staff (a novel move at the time), reviewed promotion criteria to build EDIR contributions and changed more traditional approaches which tended to de-emphasise gendered roles in many universities. We worked in close partnership with the students to diversity in the curriculum. Over three years we gained an Athena Swan accreditation and in the staff survey the proportion of women reporting that the University acts fairly in promotion went up from 46% to 69%.

At the same time, I was Chair and then President of the British Academy of Management (BAM). I made EDIR the central plank of my activities. I made a lot of speeches and every one included key issues about EDIR – either internally with the role of gender and race in our membership, or externally concerning the significance of EDIR research and its ethical and business value. We initiated and led the first multi-university research on black and minority ethnic leadership in the FTSE100. The work was supported by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and the report ‘Delivering on Diversity’ published in 2017 and was influential in organisations far beyond the FTSE100 and a renewed practice guide was published in 2021.

When I started in leadership roles in BAM less than 4% of members were fellows, around 7% of fellows were women and none came from global majority ethnicity. In the executive, one out of seven was a woman. Along with existing and newly elected leaders, we sought to stimulate a culture change that understood diversity as a source of strength and quality. It took over a decade, but during that time we established a series of funded EDIR research programmes both within the UK and jointly between the UK and Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Italy, established a new Vice-Chair of EDIR, produced practice guides on EDIR which are now adopted in a range of learned societies nationally and internationally, established BAM as a contributor to UKRI and other bodies seeking to enhance their EDIR practice, significantly shifted the fellowship to the point where over 30% were women and over 7% were from global majority ethnicity, introduced a new senior category of Companion, which was 50/50 women and men, appointed our first two women Deans of Fellows, and shifted the balance in the executive to 7 out of 11 being women and 2 out of 11 were from global majority ethnicities.

All of this was achieved as a team. The team included professional staff and academics, more experienced and less experienced people and a range of skills. Crucially, it was also a team who supported each other emotionally as there were many highs, but also plenty of rejections and lows, and the community resilience meant that we kept each other going.

Tell Him to Use His Power for Good

I subsequently moved to Middlesex University as Vice-Chancellor. On a visit before I started, a long-serving member of the facilities staff took my wife for a tour of the campus. They got on really well and it became obvious to the staff member that I was not quite the sort of person that he had imagined stepping into the role. He said to my wife, “tell him to use his power for good.” This phrase struck home with me. I had never regarded myself as particularly powerful, but I recognised that what I thought of as ‘painting on a broader canvas’ and trying to help establish a context for people to thrive, was, not unreasonably, seen by others as power, or at least influence. I had been overt about the centrality of EDIR in my approach and in the Middlesex culture this was an easy message as everyone was further down that road than I was. I benefitted enormously from ‘reverse’ mentoring in which my mentors were of different genders, ages, ethnicities, and physical abilities, and they taught me a great deal about other experiences of life and university. We established EDIR as our core principle, built a co-leadership model with students, gained Athena Swan and the Race Equality Charter, and in the senior team we had two women job-sharing a PVC role. In THE Impact rankings, we came 12th in the world for gender equality. Because of becoming a vice-chancellor, other opportunities arose and I became the Chair of Access HE for London, supporting an organisation which ran courses and events for 4000 students yearly from widening participation backgrounds.

My next move was to become the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, a Robbins era (Robbins, 1963) 1960s university. It was set up on the principles of making higher education available to all qualified people and to undertake research that would impact positively on society. It is deeply connected to the city of Salford and businesses from creative and digital to construction and the health service. The ethos is one of social justice and for me, it feels like what I have been working towards all my career.

Reflection

Until I became a vice-chancellor, I had not had a mentor, but I learned a lot from people along the way, some of whom are mentioned above. Much of my learning combined experiential, on-the-job learning (from mistakes and successes, but also from an informal ethnographic approach to listening to everyone I could in the organisations), theory and reading, and collaborative reflection with others. I learned about engaged research with Robert MacIntosh (MacIntosh et al., 2017), and with Sharon Mavin and Sandra Corlett (Corlett et al., 2019) I came to understand the significance of vulnerability in learning. With Paul Hibbert (Hibbert, 2021; Hibbert et al, 2021) I have enjoyed a longitudinal relationship, learning about reflexivity, emotion and leadership with Katy Mason (Mason et al., 2019; Beech et al., 2022) I learned about collaboration beyond exchange.

I also came to understand diversity better through life – playing in bands for forty years, becoming an organist, and organising choirs. I also learned from my family. My wife changed her career from being an auditor to retraining as a counsellor and her deep thinking about her practice has influenced my approach to the impacts of leadership on people (Beech, 2017). Lastly, my daughter, and particularly Judith Butler (1990) have taught me much about gender and inequality.

Postscript

Now in my second vice-chancellor role in a Robbins-era university, I support Thomas and Hendrick-Wong’s (2019) argument that what is needed in society is inclusive growth and that HE can play a part in this through enabling broader participation in university and highly skilled work and through research-rich innovation. Equalising opportunities and helping to reshape institutions and practices of employment are part of this. The social justice ethos is at the heart of what Robbins-era universities were established to do and it is foundational at the University of Salford. As we go through the process of consultation and forming our new strategy, ‘Innovating to Enrich Lives’, the purpose of leadership is one of researching, distilling and encapsulating a vision that resonates with the community. The community is diverse and the point is not to gloss over the diversity, but to set out the principles which enable people to develop their contributions and to feel empowered to learn from and with each other. EDIR is central to this. The social justice ethos needs to flow through the themes we research, the way we engage with business and civic society, and our educational design with and for a diverse cohort of students.

What is the role of a leader in this? Having been a business school academic, I am unconvinced by machine metaphors of organisation and the thought that there are levers that can be pulled to drive change, but I think there are things that we can do. It is possible to construct positive discourses that draw attention to the value of what the community is working on, sometimes quietly with individuals assuming that their values might not be shared by others when in fact they are. The more that you operate in general leadership roles, the harder it is to know the depth and detail of any area, but it is possible to listen to people right across the university and carry the message of what people in one area are doing to people in other areas and to encourage collaboration. It is possible to genuinely listen to students, learn from them and co-design parts of the way we operate, and in Salford and Middlesex the students wrote parts of the university strategies. It is also possible to develop university systems, such as the criteria for appointment and promotion to be explicitly inclusive, to set KPIs for EDIR, and to always talk about EDIR and social justice whenever you are giving a speech. You can choose your external partners and the projects you work on and you can be explicit about your own learning. It is part of the role to tell the university story in a way that people can adapt and use in telling their own stories. In the ethnographic style, as a leader, you can listen to how people retell their stories and use these to adapt the organisational narrative to support them in their sensemaking and action.

I started by acknowledging my privileges, but I should also acknowledge my vulnerabilities. Taking an explicitly learning-oriented approach to leadership in which I try to understand people who have different experiences, insights, and backgrounds means that I am often beyond the limits of my knowledge. This can be uncomfortable and when people expect a leader to know everything it can be disappointing for them. However, when we are researching, we are always moving past the boundaries of established knowledge, when we are students, we operate in the areas of uncertainty and when we work on values we care about we seek to continuously improve. So, I hope that being explicit about my learning will encourage others to feel they have a place in a diverse community that benefits from their contributions and learning.

In answer to the question of what I will do next, I aim to help university communities link to others, and I cannot put it better than Jackie Kay, former Makar (the National Poet of Scotland) and Chancellor of Salford: “Everyone should have a chance to have an education – an opportunity to find real change in their lives, to walk into their possible selves. Universities have a responsibility to their students but also to the wider communities they exist in. The idea of breaking down barriers between different disciplines, of starting up conversations and allegiances between them, of making links between the student (and university) community and the (broader) community impassions me” (Kay, 1998: 279). The term ‘university’ is derived from a Latin phrase meaning ‘whole’, ‘entire’ or ‘community’. My preference is to take the sense of that literally.

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References

Beech, N. (2017) ‘Identity at Work: An enquiry-based approach to therapeutically-inspired management’. International Journal of Management Reviews, 19(3) pp.357-370.

Beech. N., Mason, K.J., MacIntosh, R. and Beech, D. (2022) Learning from each other: Why and how business schools need to create a ‘paradox box’ for academic-policy impact. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 21(3) pp.487-502.

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble. Abingdon: Routledge.

Corlett, S., Mavin, S. & Beech, N. (2019) ‘Reconceptualizing Vulnerability and its Value for Managerial Identity and Learning’. Management Learning, 50(5) pp.556-575.

Kay, J. (1998) Trumpet. London: Pan MacMillan

Hibbert, P., Beech, N., Callagher, L., and Siedlok, F. (2021) After the pain: Reflexive practice, emotion work and learning. Organization Studies, 43(5): 797-817.

Hibbert, P. (2021) How to be a Reflexive Researcher. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

MacIntosh, R., Beech, N., Bartunek, J., Mason, K., Cooke, B. and Denyer, D. (2017) ‘Impact and Management Research: Exploring relationships between temporality, dialogue, reflexivity and praxis’. British Journal of Management, 28(1): 3-13.

Mason, K. Friesl, M. and Ford, C. (2019) ‘Markets under the Microscope: Making Scientific Discoveries Valuable through Choreographed Contestations’. Journal of Management Studies, 56(5) pp.966-999.

Robbins, L. (1963) Higher Education Report. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office.

Thomas, H. and Hedrick-Wong, Y. (2019) Inclusive Growth: The Global Challenges of Social Inequality and Financial Inclusion. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing.