Emma Watton

Please could you tell me your name, your role and the university you work for?

My name is Emma Watton and I work at Lancaster University Management School. I’m the Programme Director of our Executive MBA programme which runs here in the UK and also in Malaysia and Ghana.

Please could you tell us about your role and remit at the University?

So, my role at Lancaster is really to oversee the programme. I coordinate all the aspects of, for example, teachers and tutors on the programme, student experience, recruitment to the programme, making sure that the students are able to complete, looking at things like career opportunities for them, alumni engagement, so a whole range of things, and I have to have a really strong set of skills around networking, both internally with different aspects of the University, and also externally with stakeholders, also partners for our international programmes and the organisations where we recruit our students from.

How did you come to work in higher education?

I started work over 30 years ago now and back in those days I wanted to be a bank manager. So, I left school and I studied my Chartered Institute of Banking qualifications, which was the qualification you needed to become a bank manager, and so by the age of 28 I was a bank manager in the Yorkshire area and I had a portfolio of business customers and they were small businesses and I was their bank manager for all of their day to day banking needs.

So, that career I suppose now, when I look back on it, really gave me a strong foundation in a range of business skills and so I carried on doing that and I was in banking for 15 years and then I was in my early 30s and I thought, well, maybe I want to do something else. So, for about four or five years I became self-employed and I was a consultant to the financial services industry and, again, that was really interesting, I really enjoyed it. I did a lot of leadership development training for other financial services staff, covered different areas of the country, different organisations, really liked it, and then I had a bit of a shift.

I moved up to the Lake District, which is where I live now, and a lot of my work was in different parts of the country and I got a little bit tired of travelling and living out of a hotel room and then I saw a part-time job come up at the University of Central Lancashire and it was a project manager role on a European-funded project. And so, I applied for that and I did a couple of projects that were along those lines and then I took a role at the University of Cumbria. That was in 2007 again.

Initially I worked on a European-funded project and the projects were working with small businesses and so I fitted my skills as a bank manager, working in the small business sector, so that was really helpful. And then I suppose the transition point for me in terms of getting into a more senior role was I did the maternity leave cover for a colleague at the University of Cumbria and she was the faculty enterprise manager. So, that role was a much more senior role, overseeing 14 staff and actually ensuring that all of those projects that were running through those staff were delivered on time and on budget. So, quite a lot of responsibility.

I reported to the Dean and so I did that for a year and then what I did, when the lady came back from her maternity leave, we actually did the role as a job share and, in fact, I’ve done a piece of research with that lady into the benefits of job sharing for women to get into senior leadership roles. And so that became quite a significant change for me. And then just over six years ago I moved to Lancaster University and my role now is a little bit different. So, I’d say it’s a sort of hybrid role between some aspects of teaching but also still professional services in terms of management the programme that I look after.

Would you say your role is rewarding and meaningful?

So, I absolutely love the role that I do now and I often think if what we can do through our teaching is to make a small difference to perhaps an individual and the way they work, then the longer term benefit to not only their role, their organisation, the communities and societies in which they live will be improved. So, to perhaps give you an example, I work as a guest lecturer on a module at Lancaster called Future Global Leaders and all of our undergraduates students, irrespective of which subject they do at the Management School, they all take that module.

And so inspiring them to perhaps look at leadership from a different perspective and the difference that they can make from not necessarily having a formal role but just through whatever role they’ve got, we can all do small everyday acts of leadership, then to me that then makes a difference. And they will at some point manage people in the future and so what you set in stone now further down the line will hopefully make a difference. So, for me that’s what being part of the community at Lancaster means, the difference that we can make for future generations.

Please could you highlight the standard development opportunities you’ve had?

So, I’ve been really fortunate in my career in higher education to be given some quite unique opportunities, I feel, and for me it’s always about embracing some of those opportunities. They might not necessarily seem a perfect fit at the time but I’m a great believer in saying yes and seeing where it goes. So, when I was at the University of Cumbria we had a new partnership and it was to develop an online MBA and it was a completely new initiative and because I hadn’t done an undergraduate degree, I’d gone to do my banking qualifications, I felt slightly that I’d missed out a little bit.

So, they wanted somebody to be a sort of dummy student on this programme, so I volunteered. I did an online MBA. I would probably have been late 30s, early 40s when I did that, and it was a massive thing for me, to undertake it, but it became really rewarding. And now I feel the role that I have as the Programme Director of the Executive MBA, I feel I can empathise with students who are returning to study as mature students. They’re working fulltime, studying part-time. That’s exactly what I did. I think that was a really good opportunity for me. I’m also now doing my PhD and that’s come about, obviously, because of the role that I’ve got at Lancaster and it’s really important to me to continually develop myself. So, that’s been really important.

Also, at Lancaster you’re really encouraged to go to conferences. I’ve been to professional services conferences. I’ve also been to academic conferences and that’s a really good way to get to know good practices happening in the sector. I think that’s a really rich opportunity as well. So, I just try and embrace as many opportunities as I can, really, just to kind of see what else is out there.

Please could you tell me of any notable opportunities you’ve had in terms of support and experiences?

I suppose some highlights for me is I quite often volunteer to mentor students. So, this year, for example, in the current crisis that we have with the COVID-19 situation, our fulltime MBA students are all working online and that’s quite a new experience for them. Last week a call was put out for some volunteer mentors to work with small groups of students over the next few months to perhaps act as a point of contact for them, if they are unsure about something or they just want to talk to someone. So, I volunteered to do that.

I’ve also worked with Advance HE which is one of the HE bodies in the UK and abroad and I’ve started working with them doing some sessions on some of their webinars. So, there was one about leading with humanity, how we can get more humanity into the HE sector. I participated in that one probably about a month ago. And so I think those are some of the opportunities that you get when you work in higher education.

It’s always interesting. You don’t quite know where some of these opportunities might come from and I think the great thing about, for example, having a populated LinkedIn profile and putting up links for things that are going on, I think that’s sometimes how people find you, and so those sorts of things, they do take a little bit of time but I think they’re important in terms of your career and being visible.

How do you think working in higher education compares to working in a commercial environment?

So, I suppose for me, I’ve been working in both the private sector, the public sector and I’ve also been self-employed. So, I have seen quite a few different ways of working, I suppose. I’m also a guest lecturer at the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership. So, that’s working with organisations like Save the Children, the Red Cross, so a very altruistic set of organisations there. And to me I think there are some similarities and differences between them.

So, this is a sort of simplified version, really, but I think the private sector is much more fast-paced, you’ve got perhaps a very different way of working. Quite often you have things like key performance indicators. It’s maybe a short-term view in terms of ways of working. Public sector, obviously, is quite different.

When I first went into HE I really found it quite amazing, that you had quite a few levels of approval to go through, for example, to make a change on something whereas in the private sector that would have been quite a straightforward process. So, things like that seem quite different. I would say it probably took me about a year of working in a university setting to make that adjustment.

So, yeah, I think now, at the point where I am in my career, I don’t envisage changing again. I think I’m going to stay with HE, certainly for the next ten years or so. That’ll almost get me to retirement, so I can’t see myself changing. Because I think for me at the moment, it really offers me the best of both worlds. It’s challenging, there’s lots of opportunities but also it feels a really supportive environment in which to be employed. And so, for where I am just now, it’s a really good fit for me.

Please tell us about your experience of the facilities on campus for university life/wellbeing?

So, at Lancaster we’ve got a really nice park-style campus. We’re about three miles outside of the city but that means there’s a lot of green space. So, we have a woodland trail. Quite often I’ll go for a walk at lunchtime with a colleague and we just do the woodland trail walk which takes about 30 minutes. So, that’s really nice.

We also have some really good sports facilities on campus and one of the highlights for me at Lancaster is we do a charity triathlon every year in September and it’s a team triathlon. So, I can’t swim, so that would mean normally I couldn’t do a triathlon but I can either do the running leg or I can do the bicycle leg and so you get a team together and it’s really good fun. We have staff doing it, we have students doing it and every year we raise about £10,000 for the local hospice. So, that’s a great thing to do on campus.

We also have concerts. So, I’ve been to music concerts on campus. I’ve also been to some of the talks with guest speakers that we have. I went to a really interesting talk a few months ago by William Hague and he was talking about artificial intelligence and what that might mean to society. So, it was very different to the William Hague that you see, when he was a politician, on the news but a really good opportunity just to hear somebody like that speak.

I think those are sort of some of the things that stand out for me as opportunities. Being on campus, you get the best of both worlds. It’s almost like being a permanent student. But as a member of staff you can access these opportunities as well.

What have been your career highlights whilst working in higher education?

So, that’s a really tricky question, just to single one thing out. I’ve been quite lucky. So, the work that I did at University of Cumbria was recognised through a vice chancellor’s award. So, that was really quite nice, to get recognition for something like that. There’s things like that on the one hand but then, on the other hand, for example, just having an email from a student that maybe has something’s happened to them career-wise or something like that and they connect that with you.

It can be two or three years later and they send you an email and they say, oh, thanks so much for what you did and this is what it means to me and this is what I’ve now done. Those moments can be really significant as well. And just last weekend I had an email from a student in Ghana and she’d sent me some photos of her little girl that was born in January.

Because I’d kept in touch with her and I wanted to know how she was doing and she sent me some baby photos of her daughter, those sorts of things are the things for me that become highlights. So, actually it’s some of the more day to day things that really help you think what you do. It makes a difference and means you’re up ready to go the next day for another day’s worth of work.