Today is apparently World Honey Bee Day. This is also the time of year when the beekeeper is busy, manging the hives and making sure that the bees have the necessary frames to build their stocks of honey. As I was cleaning out the garage, therefore, over the weekend, I noted the absence of all the supers and frames that usually fill the space. My partner, who is the beekeeper, had moved them all off to supplement his various hives across North Worcestershire. This made me think back to a presentation that I gave, as Head of College, to the senior leadership team almost ten years ago when I was working in Birmingham University.
The talk was remembered by my colleagues for the fact that I illustrated part of it with images from Peter Greenaway’s Pillow Book and they were somewhat taken aback that I was illustrating a talk on the future and vision of the College with images of naked men (albeit that they were painted with text, and it was the variety and multiplicity of textuality that I was actually trying to illustrate). For me, one of the more fruitful images came at the end when I was talking about the role of Head of College. Having set out a vision of interdisciplinarity and cross cutting themes across the College, I suggested that the role of the Head of College was to be that of the beekeeper, an image of leadership that I am not aware of coming across in any other context.
The principal point of the beekeeper in this image, at least in my presentation of it, was that the beekeeper does not attempt to direct the activity and purpose of each and every bee. A hive contains a community, a range of different roles, each working together focused on their own particular activity to achieve a common goal, the production of honey and the maintenance of the hive over winter. A beekeeper does not tell any of the bees how to do their job, or direct specific groups of bees to do this, or do that. A beekeeper cannot even tell the foraging bees where to go to find honey. The hive can be placed in such a way that certain blumes are more likely to be foraged or control the timing of the addition and removal of frames such that they coincide with the blossom of individual trees. However, to achieve a specific kind of honey – lime honey, cherry blossom honey, or whatever – is very difficult in the natural environment and takes a particular kind of skill.
The role of the beekeeper, therefore, is not to micro-manage. The beekeeper primarily controls the environment for the bees, maintains the hive, expands the number of supers as they are filled, remove them as the season ends. The beekeeper protects the hive from predators and, by careful observation, controls the work of the queen and other members of the bee community. It is this ‘framing’, or ‘facilitating’ work that is key to the role of the beekeeper. It is also their job to find a market for the honey and to let the world know how wonderful the product of this, or that, particular hive might be, to prepare honey, wax and other products for shows, recognising that the work they are promoting is not their own, but that of bees who have a mind, or minds of their own.
As with the beekeeper so with the Head of College, or Faculty, in the academy. Their role is not to micro-manage, to tell each academic what they are supposed to do and how they might achieve it. The role of the Head of College is to provide the right environment, to set the scene, to enable and facilitate, to make possible the collaborative and creative work of the academic community for whom they are responsible. This takes a particular series of skills from financial management, quality control, support for grant applications etc. etc. The specific set of tasks is probably endless and often does involve working with estates to provide the right physical environment as well as a space that is conducive to work.
The Head of College must also be aware of the relations between the different elements of the wider academic community and cannot neglect any one of them. Whether it is the academics, or the students, or the professional services staff, the most esteemed professor, or the departmental receptionist. Each has their own unique, but special, contribution to wider productivity and it is the Head of College’s task to be aware of the specific needs of each one, providing the right environment for all of them to flourish.
It is often the task of the Head of College, like the beekeeper, to have a special responsibility to market or promote the work of the hive, the community as a whole. It is the Head of College’s role to represent the College at meetings of the University’s senior team, and to represent the University position to the College. However, even beyond that, the Head of College should be involved in promoting the work of the College (and all its various members) to the widest possible audiences; other academics, potential students, the wider public and perhaps even the media. The work that is being promoted, like the beekeeper, is not that of the Head of College, but that of all the individual, and collective, members of the College, with no one individual excluded or preferred.
That, I suggested, was why I would always liken myself, in that role of Head of College, to the beekeeper. An interesting allegory, but like all metaphors, probably one that it would be unwise to push too far…
Martin Stringer Quartet 