How to Build a Consultancy | A Conversation with Michael Iannini

As a consultant, you need to have a strong voice, you need to be an advocate, and in advocating for others, you're asking lots of questions because you generally are coming from a place where you want to see people succeed. Hey everyone, I'm Shane Leaning. Welcome to Education Leaders, the chart-topping leadership podcast for school leaders just like you. As an organizational coach, I've helped thousands of leaders across the world lead with greater confidence, make better decisions, and create winning teams.

And on this show, we explore some of the strategies that are going to help you achieve your goals and transform your leadership. This episode is supported by the Teacher Development Trusts and the International curriculum Association. Stay tuned to learn more. My guest today is Michael Iannini.

Michael's an author, he's a leadership development facilitator, and he's co-founder of Peersphere, where he engages educators in different peer learning communities. He is passionate about middle leadership, his book, hidden in plain sight, realising the full potential of middle leaders is a foundation of a lot of his leadership development work. But we're having a slightly different conversation today. Michael's actually giving some brutal honesty about the realities of going independent as an educator.

We're talking about everything from financial instability that hits you when you leave a stable teaching job, to some harsh lessons that you might learn along the way. And he really does share some brilliant insights on working with schools as clients. So if you are thinking of making that leap, or at least a little bit of intrigued as to what working adjacent schools look like, I think this episode is for you. Let's jump in.

You go from having a stable job, a full time salary, you're not worried about paying the rent or eating, you're taking advantage of all those holidays, and you know, you're booking your trips nine months in advance, all of a sudden you step into this new world and you don't know how much money you're going to have next month. Where you are accustomed to booking a plane ticket six or nine months in advance, you're worried about doing it a few weeks before, but then you lose out the benefit of the cost difference and all of a sudden now because you don't know how much money you're going to make the next month, you're probably a little timid about buying any sort of ticket until you have some confirmed work. So that's probably the harshest reality going from education into consultancy. It's funny, isn't it?

Because stability is something you almost take for granted when you're in education. And of course that comes with all the challenges that education brings, but usually it's pretty stable job, stable salary, especially for those working in the international world. You know what's coming. And so taking that leap, I remember, and it's just like, oh, right.

Let's see what I earned this month and then the next month and then the next month. And I don't know. I was a bit fortunate because I moved into quite a few part-time roles when I left my full-time occupation. My background and specialty was in early years and language acquisition.

So when I prepared to make that move, it was very natural because I had actually taken a couple part-time roles that still allowed me to do early years, curriculum development, working in language acquisition, primarily in early years as well. My bases felt covered, but at the same time, there's this other harsh reality that even if you do have some type of stable revenue, now it's how you manage your time. And that becomes the next big problem because you don't have a timetable. You have to create your own timetable with what works for you and your clients.

And ultimately what works for you doesn't always work for your clients. Yeah. I'd love to come on to that, managing your time for personal advice more than anything Mike, because I'm terrible at it. But let's just circle back.

You said about part-time roles. I'm wondering, do you think the best path into kind of going independent is to start off with some kind of side hustle or thing on the side? Do you think that's the best way to start? I do.

And to be frank, a lot of things that I learned outside of education, and especially in terms of recruitment and career progression, was that you really need to have your next job before you leave your current job, because there is no guarantee that a sabbatical will be rewarded with a better job. In fact, you don't know what you're going to be returning to when you go on that sabbatical. And for many people leaving teaching, it seems almost unethical to be doing any other kind of work. It almost feels dirty in a way.

But to that, I would say you're probably doing a lot of work on the side that you just don't realize and you're not leveraging effectively to prepare you for consultancy. For instance, I'm a CEO for PeerSphere. I started this with my partner, Ewan Bailey, four years ago. But to be quite frank, the whole idea of it began well before the pandemic.

I get asked quite regularly by people saying, hey, I want to do what you do. What's the best way to start? And I've told them the same answer for years now is that the best way to get started is you need to start professionally networking. You need to put yourself in situations where you're getting to meet more people, you're getting to speak in front of people.

It might be a conference presentation, but if you don't get that conference presentation, don't let that inhibit you. Find opportunities within your school to give presentations because you need to perfect that skill. You need to perfect that art of being able to teach teachers, which is very difficult and the best place to do it. The best development ground is actually probably in your current role.

But now, interestingly, there are people in their current role and the reason they do want to consult is because they want to do something else. Case in point, my wife, I remember in her last job, she was going back and forth about whether or not she should get a master's in learning support, stay within language acquisition. Could she combine the two because she really wanted to move into a position where she was more directly supporting students' needs and not just from a language acquisition point, but she really was motivated and quite inspired by getting to work with children in a much more intimate fashion, especially those that had learning support needs. But in her current role, that wasn't an option.

The only way she was able to move and switch into that lane was number one, getting some sort of credential for it and or number two, getting the opportunity to move into that rule, which there was no guarantee of, so she felt kind of stuck. To that point, she ended up moving more into leadership for EAL, to which now she's the head of EAL for whole school. But, you know, a lot of people get stuck because they're waiting to get the job that they want premised on the fact that that's what they want to do for the rest of their career. They fail to create the opportunity for themselves.

And so coming back to this idea about why peer sphere is so important to me is number one, I wanted to create an opportunity for educators to be able to more naturally network and grow their professional networks and learn from each other. But number two, this type of learning requires very special people that are familiar with those educators' needs, their background. So for instance, if it's a maths peer learning community, you need somebody in particular, say, whether it be the primary middle or high school maths department, that understands how you need to negotiate the challenges within that type of role, collaborating with colleagues such that when you come into that community, there's a host that's facilitating the interactions amongst the members, making it more natural, I should say. So, I mean, actually, Shane, for you, knowing that you started up your educational leaders community, this is incredibly important to think about.

You have leaders across the world that are going to have very different needs because of their different contexts, their different levels of leadership, you had said even before we started this call about wanting to tap on the shoulders, some ambassadors. So I would say to you, if you really wanted to grow your community approach, you need to identify ambassadors that are addressing specific needs of different members of your community. Broader communities are very difficult to run only because you jump into that community. If you don't see anything you want, you get out.

Who knows the next time you'll go back into it. So for us at PeerSphere, we try to create very unique communities to ensure that members that are joining have a lot in context, right? But to this point, the secret sauce is the host. The secret sauce is the ambassador.

Now here's a question for you. Why do you think these ambassadors are doing this? Why do you think they're giving up more of their time so that they can, I don't want to say lead a community because the first thing I tell people to do is don't lead your community. Otherwise your community will rely on you to disseminate all the content.

But how do you put yourself at the periphery of that community and encourage those interactions? So my question to you would be, why are they doing this? And what support do they need? It's funny that because I think this circles so nicely onto what you should be doing if you're thinking of making the move, which is you talked about networking, doing presentations, doing other things.

To answer your question, I almost come back to my transition into this kind of independent world. And before I left my previous role, I wasn't doing a side hustle. I wasn't doing anything that was money-making, but I was active on social media, I was doing a lot of presenting at conferences. I had this podcast, for example.

So these were things that I was in, but the reason I was doing them was because these were things I was passionate about. I wanted to grow and I wanted to develop. And I assume that these people who are doing brilliant work for your spaces have a similar drive, like they're getting something out of it, right? Yeah.

And that's the point. And you and I both know this about change management. If you really want to drive people in some sort of direction, they have to want to go there. And for those that are in the middle of the middle leaders, they have to see the merit and also believe in that direction because they know they're going to have to pull some people along.

So what's in it for them, right? I like to always use this acronym with them. W-I-I-F-M. What's in it for me?

We need to always be constantly asking that question for those that were asking to serve us. So for our hosts, what's in it for me? Well, we started the journey with PeerSphere knowing how important the host was, because in our early days, we were doing other types of peer learning communities. But the feedback came back right away that, Hey, this was great, but I enjoyed the breakout conversations more than I did the actual presentations.

And in the very early days, it was very presenter led with very little discussion and having it be online, that turned a lot of experienced educators off. Maybe those that were less experienced or new into a role appreciated that because it was a form of learning, but those that were more experienced were actually turned off by it. So what I did at that point is I tapped a few of those experienced people on the shoulder and said, Hey, look, I noticed you didn't show up to that meeting. You know, they shared with me their feedback.

I asked them, Hey, you know, just out of curiosity, why are you joining this community? What do you hope to get from it? And is there a way that I can leverage your experience in such a way that it contributes to the community's energy? Well, through that conversation, what I learned is quite a few of these people wanted to raise their own profile.

It wasn't just for networking. They wanted to go into a community, not only learn with peers that were at a similar level of experience, but also go in and drop ideas, test their own ideas and see how they fell on different schools. And over time we realized how important it was to have a host that enabled people to bring that experience into the community. And even more so those people that wanted to share that experience really wanted to be hosts.

So over four years, we created a pipeline of hosts because number one, we identified hosts that demonstrated good facilitation skills, much like yourself. Like you're amazing at getting people to talk. Number two, when we started looking at what was going on in the community, we looked at the main contributors and we realized those were people as well that really got energized and enjoyed that sort of community environment. And they were getting a lot of experience out of not only how to interact, but also how to provoke.

And so, you know, our fourth year on a lot of those types of members have now become hosts. But it's just recently that has dawned on me that, all right, we know what makes a great host. We know that hosts are central to our success and we know how to identify prospective hosts in our communities, but are we truly supporting our hosts for what they want to achieve? And this is where of late, you know, with Claire Pete, I've asked her to help me develop this, an entrepreneurship program where it's like, there are certain hosts that are doing this, that are investing this extra time.

And it does take extra time. Even though we support our hosts immensely, we give lots of training, they're still being asked to spend time outside of school to plan and to host these meetings. But we want to go one step further. We don't want to just create a space for people that want to be consultants.

We want to help develop them to be consultants. Now, catch this within peer sphere. One of the things we really want to do is create a space for hosts to mentor community members and use that as an opportunity for those hosts to develop their own coaching skills. So with Claire, who, as you know, is a credentialed coach and somebody that facilitates coaching programs, what we're asking her to do next year is saying, Hey, there are hosts that are able to come in, organize, and create a great meeting atmosphere.

But there are some hosts that want to go a step further and they want to connect with members directly and help them with specific professional inquiries or challenges. So how do we help them develop those skills such that they can provide a more unique and personalized service, if you will, to specific community members, all in service to developing their own portfolio. And it's a program we want to run. So we don't want to make it like implicit.

Hey, by being a host, you get to do this thing, we're going to make it explicit, such that we can help them be able to track the work that they're doing, provide additional guidance and training to support them, to be able to support individual members or even small groups of members more effectively. This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association. Now I've been working with the ICA for quite a few years, but they've been around for 30 years and they've been around championing quality, unlocking potential and improving learning in international schools right around the world. I really, really love that at their core is a model for improving learning.

And this model is focused on the learning experience and they have tons of great curriculum materials, PD resources, and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours. So if you're interested, and I really do recommend you check them out, head over to internationalcurriculum.com. Today's episode is supported by the Teacher Development Trust.

TDT's associate qualification in CPD leadership is so perfect for international school leaders. It's fully accredited and it's delivered online over 10 months. In it, you'll create an actual CPD, that's a continuing professional development strategy for your school based on research that shows well-planned PD, improves pupil outcomes and teacher attention. And I actually did this program myself.

And hands down, it's some of the best professional development I've ever done. So much so that I am delighted to be co-delivering this special Asia cohort, which starts in November. If you want to learn more, go to tdtrust.org or click the link in the show notes.

Within your own education business, you've grown over the four years. And it seems like a lot of your growth has been to do with responding to feedback and asking questions of the people you're serving. It makes me think, you know, when you first go into thinking, okay, I'm going to set up, I'm going to set something, I'm going alone, you've got an idea of what you think is needed, but it sounds like what you're saying is actually the key is to get asking, to get asking good questions, because maybe it's not quite what you imagine. I mean, has it been very different from what you first imagined to what they actually needed in the end?

Yeah. So even like when peer sphere was launched or even any projects, even prior to that, I unfortunately sometimes took the track, I was asked to do certain projects or to come in and run certain in-service programs, and I immediately came in with the answer. And you can imagine what that's like when a consultant comes in with the answers and doesn't ask enough questions. So early, early doors coming to the table with too many answers because that's what I thought people wanted, not asking enough questions and falling short of meeting the expectations of, I would say a majority of the audience, you're never going to get the whole audience.

I won't sleep when I know I didn't get, say, 24 out of 24 middle leaders in a workshop totally engaged with me. But I also know the reality that I can't get 24 out of 24, but I should definitely hope for at least 16. Right? And falling short of 16 probably suggests I didn't know enough about the people I was coming in to work with. So, you know, coming back to

these early days of consulting, thinking you know the answers because you did that job, thinking you know the answers because you've learned from your own mistakes is really the wrong approach. You need to have more questions and answers. Yes. And it's because of that context.

I like, by the way, your almost two thirds rule. I think that's useful and it's helpful for us as well to get that dose of realism because we're all our worst enemies sometimes, like beating ourselves up about, oh, I didn't capture that person or I didn't capture that, but two thirds, that seems a bit more useful. Mike, I'm wondering, you know, I'd love to ask you a question because we're talking here about, you know, for example, some of your work, you're going into schools, you're working directly with schools. Interestingly, when you go into, you know, the business of education, while you might be targeting working with teachers or whatever, often the gatekeepers of schools or the schools become the clients.

That's the nature of working in education. So I'd love to know what frustrates you about working with schools as clients. You know, what's nobody talking about here? So I got to be careful.

I have a project I'm currently working on and I hope I don't regret this, but this project is very typical of a lot of the work that I do. I'm being asked to come in to work with a team and the person that's asking me to come in is obviously the head of that team and the information that I'm given is based on all of their assumptions. And early doors, again, I probably would have taken all of those assumptions, every information given me, and I would have planned completely around that, just assuming that this person knows what their team needs, who these people are. Now, it's fair to say about 50 percent of what you're being told is going to be true and accurate, but 50 percent is going to be shaded by their own experiences with these team members.

So when you think about just how we perceive people in terms of our own lens from our own behavioral traits and how we perceive others that might have behavioral traits that are in conflict to ours or just different, we create narratives about them that might not be very true. And as a facilitator, you need to have a narrative for each person that is true, not an average of the group. Because going into a workshop and just relying on an average or a 50 percent truth could be very damaging to your reputation, especially because then you look like you're coming in and really selling the message of that group's leader. And that's where things can get really uncomfortable.

So in this current project, I remember as it started, I had to be quite brave and I had to push back on quite a few assumptions. And as we were devising the agenda and knowing the history of the team, I really stood my ground and I was completely willing to lose the project. But I really felt that there needed to be more time for team building, even though this is a team that had recently formed and had, you know, at least half of a school year together that they themselves had not formed. There were so many indications that they themselves didn't trust each other, weren't holding each other accountable, weren't communicating effectively.

So to come in to this team meeting and try to help facilitate the business of strategic planning, which was ultimately the goal, I realized could never happen. There needed to be some foundation built first. And for this particular team leader, it just didn't seem like there was time for it. Like we needed to get on with the business.

And I said, look, if you try to push the business prior to building the foundation, it's all going to fall apart. And true to that point, and because of trust in my reputation, my agenda was accepted. And of course, before I do any sort of facilitation, I do focus interviews with each participant, especially at this level for strategy. I want to have a good sample of stakeholders and all those stakeholders, 10 out of 10 validated my concerns that, you know what, there wasn't trust, people weren't being held accountable and communication was really one directional.

So as a facilitator, I need to create an environment where people feel brave to surface their own voice in a room where they're used to being spoken to. Yeah, this speaks to something I think really powerful about working with schools, consulting in a way is that the easy route is to just have the meeting with the school leader who says, you know, this is the challenge and just not an degree and say, okay, I'll do something with that. But the problem is by doing that is on two levels. It sounds like one, I mean, there's an ethical challenge in doing that, like if it's the right thing, but two, you know, the impact of your work just might just be zero because it's just been pitched entirely wrong.

And it's reminding me with the work I do with work collaborative, and we have a double diamond model, the very start of the model for organizational change is identifying that the challenge that's been identified is just a perceived challenge and it's a perception usually of one person. And the first step is interrogate in that perception and understanding it. And then I love you move that on to, do we have the foundations to then build a change in? And maybe sometimes that means actually having to say, do you know what, we can't progress any further at this because there's some foundations that are missing. That means our

work is not going to set. Yeah, a hundred percent. Like before you can diverge right from that critical juncture of being able to challenge those assumptions, you need to have some type of foundation. And I'm not just talking about norms, but the participants in that process, they need to understand how to communicate at that level.

And when we start talking about strategy, it's so important to start the process by asking the questions that people are afraid to ask. And if they're afraid to ask, that is suggestive of something else. And so how do you as a consultant, will you be brave enough to basically say to a client that is a hundred percent sure of how it's going to work? Because this is how it worked in my last school, or this is how it worked on my last team to be able to go to them and say, I don't think that could work. I think we

need to test those assumptions before we go in with what you're expecting to be facilitated. And to be honest, my early days as a consultant, I didn't say no, I said yes to everything. Well, it speaks back to the original thing we were talking about, right? Stability, you know, you've just left a stable job and now you're in this kind of in stable.

So of course the temptation or the reality sometimes is that you're going to need to say yes. But it's funny, like I think many leaders who I've spoken to who have done things for a long time of said similar things, you know, eventually that doesn't stick. It's not sustainable for a business and it's not sustainable for you doing the work that you love either, because you're just going to get dragged down. I'm going to go off script a little bit and I'm going to also share a frustration I have with consultants, especially new consultants. And it

was something I was guilty of. I'm not sure if you're going to be able to agree with this or you want to confide as well. But early days, I repackaged a lot of other people's content premised on the fact that that's what the school wanted and delivered it because it hit all the right key words for what was being asked. And so by repackaging other content that I had gotten from other places and trying to assemble it and to deliver it into a new school context often failed as well. And I

see a lot of consultants do that. And I'll give you the best example of it is adaptive schools. You get a lot of people coming out of the higher tier international schools. And when I say the higher tier, these are the ones that have been around for 30, 40 years, the not for profits that have million dollar PD budgets. And so their

staff are, you know, they get amazing PD, they get amazing resources. And when they're ready to go on that consulting journey, what they do is they repackage what was given to them, not understanding that what might have worked for them at these larger, well-established schools that were incredibly well-supported isn't going to work at a smaller school or even effectively what could be another larger school. And it's really frustrating just to know that somebody went in and delivered adaptive schools. And I think adaptive schools or solution tree and these other organizations would agree with me that you just can't come in with a piece of the adaptive schools because you want to talk about difficult conversations. You can't

just come in with a part of Jennifer Abrams work because again, it's about difficult conversations and, and you want to give them a three hour workshop because that's what they're giving you the opportunity to do. And that's what you're getting paid for. It's a disservice to the people that created that content. It's a disservice to the people that are receiving that content.

And if you're going into a context where you only have three hours or one day or two days, you really need to develop your own content. That's very specific to that context and those users needs. So another thing that I would say to consultants is just don't think you can take what you've been given and deliver it for a fee. Yeah. And you'd be

surprised how many people do that. Yeah, I hear you. And I guess it comes from a few places. It's what you know, or you've seen it successful, like you've said, but I guess that also speaks to experience. If you're

planning on going independent, know that if you've just worked at one school or a couple of schools, that experience, you know, is just of those contexts and how are you going to learn and get to know other contexts? Well, it sounds to me like what you've done. Mike is a lot of listening, a lot of asking questions to get to the point where you can understand their needs. And then you can make your good quality decisions from there.

I would say my first few years, I repackaged, I delivered polished programs with very little effect. And that's what actually caused me to write my book is after probably five, six years of delivering middle leadership programs and delivering a lot of them. And I'll be quite honest, doing quite well financially. And to find that I was having very little impact. I was

maybe only really impacting 10% of those that were in my programs because I was delivering content that was, again, very polished, should have a very high impact, but was not appropriate to the audience or to the context that they were working in. And so I wrote the book because I was frustrated. And I wrote the book because I was complaining about senior leaders just thinking they could pull people in to solve problems or to expose middle leaders to a little bit of knowledge or information. And ultimately, I said, I'm done. I don't want to do

this anymore. I want to move on to some other area, which really became peer sphere. But as far as the facilitation work goes, when I wrote the book, I found a voice. I wrote the book to senior leaders to complain about how they were using me and why the work I was doing was not effective.

It wasn't meant to be like, hey, this is my fault. This is your fault. But it was like, hey, I acknowledge what I've been doing wrong. And this is how I feel it will work. But I

don't think you'll let me do that. I don't think you'll let me challenge you. I don't think you'll let me bring you into the workshop room. I don't think you'll let me challenge the status quo for how middle leaders are selected or how teams are put together. So what's the

point? Here's the book. If you're willing to try something new, this is why you should do it. But then in writing the book, I found my voice. And

then in terms of finding that voice, I was able to more effectively advocate for others. And by being able to advocate for others, I was able to bring that voice into the workshop. And then all of a sudden, I started having much better influence over a much larger group of my participants. I always got good evaluation scores on my workshops, but then the comments were so much different afterwards in terms of how people were responding. And so

I guess if we come back full circle and you had asked me this question earlier about what frustrates me, especially with the senior leader side of it was that as a consultant, you need to have a strong voice. You need to be an advocate and in advocating for others, you'll find yourself being able to create much more authentic materials. You'll find yourself being able to connect with more people in your workshops. And again, as you've already suggested a few times in your questions as an advocate, you're asking lots of questions because you generally are coming from a place where you want to see people succeed.

Wow. What a conversation that was with Michael. A few things really struck out for me first, that harsh reality check about financial stability, going from knowing exactly what's coming in each month to wondering if you can book a flight. Well, that's no joke.

And it's something I don't think we talk about enough when encouraging people to follow entrepreneurial paths in education, something that I've certainly felt. But what really got me thinking was Michael's point about coming in with answers instead of questions. I in the early days was guilty of this myself thinking I knew what schools needed as I worked in schools. But the reality is that 50 percent of what you're told by school leaders might be true. The other

50 percent is filtered through their lens, filtered through their assumptions. I also thought that two thirds rule was quite helpful as well. You know, aiming to connect with two thirds of people in a workshop that you're delivering rather than beating yourself up about not reaching every single person is maybe a little bit kinder and healthier on yourself. And finding your voice through advocacy, that really resonated. When you

stop repackaging other people's content, that really genuinely advocating for the people you're working with. Everything changes. Your materials become more authentic, your connections become deeper and ultimately your impact is much better. You can find Michael, learn more about peer sphere and all the great projects he's working on using the links in the show notes. Education leaders

is hosted by me, Shane Leaning. Big thanks to the show editor Pete McGill and for the original music by Guillermo Silva. And thank you so, so much for tuning in today. If we don't speak before, I'll see you here next week. If

you want to learn more about the brilliant work of the teacher development trust and the international curriculum association, you can find them using the links in the show notes.