The CIO Globe Magazine - Elite Cover
Name- Tao Jiang PFHEA
Degination- Associate Professor of Marketing Practice
Company- University of Leeds
The Power of Belonging in Education: Tao Jiang’s Leadership Journey
In a world where education is often measured through grades, outcomes, and career progression, Tao Jiang believes there is a deeper question that deserves equal attention: Do people truly feel seen, heard, supported, and empowered to succeed?
With more than two decades of experience in UK higher education and over ten years of prior experience in the international industry, Tao Jiang has built a leadership journey around this very question. Her career reflects a thoughtful transition from the corporate world into academia, bringing with her a strong belief that education should connect theory with real-world experiences while creating environments where people can genuinely belong.
Today, her work focuses strongly on student-centred education, equality, diversity and inclusion, cultural intelligence, partnership, and leadership. Her approach is rooted in a simple principle: talent exists everywhere, but access, confidence, clarity, and opportunity are not always equally distributed.
From Industry Experience to Academic Leadership
Before entering higher education, Tao spent more than a decade working within a multinational OEM, overseeing marketing operations in Asia. Her industry experience shaped her understanding of how learning becomes meaningful when it influences decisions, behaviours, and outcomes.
When she moved into UK higher education, she carried this practical perspective with her. For Tao, education should not exist separately from the world students are preparing to enter. Teaching becomes more impactful when learners can understand how theory connects with businesses, organisations, communities, and real-world challenges.
Her industry background also influenced her leadership philosophy. She believes that successful change cannot simply be imposed through instructions. People are more likely to embrace change when they understand its purpose, trust the process, and feel supported throughout it.
This has led Tao towards collaborative leadership, co-creation, industry engagement, live projects, advisory work, and consultancy—approaches that help keep education relevant in an increasingly complex world.
Making Inclusion a Leadership Discipline
For Tao, equality, diversity and inclusion are not simply themes to be discussed; they are disciplines that must be reflected in everyday decisions and systems.
Her own experiences of living, studying, and working across cultures have given her a personal understanding of how language, confidence, cultural expectations, and unwritten rules can affect a person's ability to participate and progress.
She recognised an “inclusion gap” particularly through her work around personal tutoring and student transition into higher education. The challenge was not necessarily a lack of ability. Instead, some students lacked access to clarity, networks, culturally safe environments, and the confidence to navigate unfamiliar systems.
This understanding encouraged Tao to focus on removing barriers rather than expecting individuals to simply adapt themselves to existing structures.
Her perspective has gradually evolved from supporting individuals to helping shape systems, policies, practices, and organisational culture. She believes inclusion cannot depend solely on goodwill; it must be embedded into the way institutions operate.
Redefining Student-Centred Learning
Tao's understanding of student-centred learning extends beyond giving students choices. It means creating meaningful opportunities for students to have voice, agency, responsibility, and support.
Through her work around Students as Partners, she promotes principles including authenticity, inclusivity, reciprocity, empowerment, impact, and fair attribution. For Tao, partnership should be genuine rather than symbolic, with students and staff working together as meaningful contributors.
This can involve co-designing initiatives at an early stage, establishing transparent expectations, creating feedback mechanisms, and ensuring student contributions are properly recognised and compensated.
Her philosophy is not about assuming that students are always right. Instead, it is about recognising students as individuals and designing educational systems that respond to their humanity with fairness, clarity, and respect.
Creating Communities Where People Belong
Some of Tao's most meaningful moments come not from formal recognition but from hearing students and colleagues describe what a sense of belonging means to them.
For her, these experiences demonstrate that inclusion is not simply created through policies. It is built through everyday interactions, support, trust, and care.
Her leadership has also involved navigating sensitive situations, supporting people through challenges, creating respectful communities, and developing opportunities for colleagues—particularly women—to build confidence and leadership capacity.
Much of this work happens quietly. It may involve creating community guidelines, organising meaningful events, supporting professional development, or building bridges between staff communities and institutional priorities. Yet these seemingly small actions can contribute to significant cultural change over time.
The Quiet Work Behind Lasting Change
Tao's leadership demonstrates that sustainable change often depends on work that happens behind the scenes.
One example is her involvement in developing Students as Partners Guidance for the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence. The process involved extensive consultation, beginning with staff discussions, followed by alignment with colleagues across the institution and committee review. Further consultation with a Lead Student Partner, student researchers, and partners helped ensure that student perspectives were meaningfully incorporated.
For Tao, this type of collaborative process is essential. Change becomes sustainable when people have the opportunity to contribute to it and understand how their perspectives influence the final outcome.
Excellence Grounded in Empathy
Tao does not view academic excellence and inclusion as competing priorities. Instead, she believes they should strengthen one another.
Her leadership approach combines high expectations with psychological safety, supported by transparency, communication, feedback, and mutual respect.
She recognises that higher education can be demanding for both students and staff. Inclusive leadership therefore involves paying attention not only to what people say, but also to what may remain unsaid—who is quiet, who may feel excluded, and which existing practices unintentionally create barriers.
For Tao, empathy does not mean lowering standards. It means creating the conditions in which people have a fair opportunity to meet high standards and contribute at their best.
Cultural Intelligence and the Future of Education
Having worked across Asia and the UK, Tao has seen how cultural context can influence communication, participation, leadership, authority, and perceptions of opportunity.
This has strengthened her belief in Cultural Intelligence, or CQ, as a practical leadership capability. It is not simply about being aware of cultural differences; it is about developing the ability to work effectively across different perspectives and environments.
She believes that potential is universal, while confidence and access are not always so. When people feel that they belong, they are more likely to ask questions, take risks, participate, and contribute fully.
This belief continues to influence her work across student success, staff networks, cultural intelligence, and responsible management education.
Measuring Success Through Lasting Capability
For Tao, success is ultimately about what remains after the immediate project or initiative is complete.
It can be seen in students who become more confident in navigating their futures, colleagues who feel supported, and systems that make fairness more natural rather than exceptional.
She also measures impact through sustainability. If a process can continue without her involvement, if it reduces invisible labour, and if it creates a clearer pathway for the next person, she considers that meaningful progress.
Recognition may be valuable, but lasting capability in others is the deeper measure of leadership.
Building More Equitable Education Systems
Looking ahead, Tao believes that more equitable education requires institutions to design for belonging rather than simply providing access.
This includes making hidden expectations more visible, helping people understand academic and cultural norms, and responsibly sharing power through genuine partnerships with students and colleagues.
She also advocates for professionalising inclusion by investing in training, resources, accountability, and meaningful measurement. Partnership, for example, must include appropriate recognition and compensation if it is to remain genuinely equitable.
A Legacy of Operational Inclusion
Tao hopes her legacy will be one where inclusion becomes operational—embedded into curriculum design, assessment, student partnership, professional development, and leadership rather than treated as a separate initiative.
She wants students to experience partnership as a normal part of education, becoming co-creators rather than simply recipients of knowledge. She also hopes to help create stronger communities for women and under-represented colleagues where support, opportunity, and belonging are tangible.
Her advice to future educators and leaders is straightforward: identify one real barrier, listen deeply, and build relationships and coalitions to address it.
Meaningful change, she believes, is rarely about one dramatic action. It is consistent, collaborative, evidence-informed, and grounded in purpose.
Turning Belonging into Possibility
Tao Jiang's journey reflects a leadership philosophy built around people, purpose, and possibility. From her early experience in international industry to her work in higher education, she has consistently sought to connect opportunity with meaningful support.
Her story demonstrates that inclusion becomes powerful when it moves beyond intention and becomes part of everyday practice.
Through student partnership, cultural intelligence, collaborative leadership, and a commitment to equitable systems, Tao continues to advocate for learning environments where people can contribute, lead, and succeed without having to spend additional energy proving that they belong.
For TheCIOGlobe Magazine, her journey represents an important perspective on the future of education: excellence is not simply about achieving more; it is also about creating the conditions in which more people are able to participate, grow, and make an impact.
