Why sending leaders on courses isn't enough . . .

Most of the education leaders I work with are passionate about empowering their teams to do great work, and they really want to nurture leadership in their schools. They know that distributed leadership motivates people and helps them to feel ownership of developments. It makes school improvement sustainable and eases the burden on the head/principal as the load is shared more broadly.

There are many ways that we nurture leadership in the education sector: encouraging people to undertake leadership courses, giving people the opportunity to try new things, releasing leaders to network externally etc.

These are all great, but they're not likely to lead to really effective development and growth unless the leaders concerned are also having regular 1:1 meetings with their line manager, and that the value of those meetings is respected by all parties.

As a Head, I felt I had the most impact when I was supporting other leaders in this way, really unpicking difficult problems together and helping them manage their workload. The other development activities they were doing made more sense when they could debrief and talk through their learning.

It’s pretty basic really, just sitting down together and talking things through, but there is quite a skill to getting these meetings right. A few things that I found really helped included:

1. Having a clear agenda. You don’t want to be springing any nasty surprises on the leader you are working with. If you want their full participation in the meeting then make sure they know what the meeting is for, and how it will be run, and let them feel that they can add to the agenda if they have something important they want to raise.

Some agenda items you might want to consider (in no particular order):

What are you working on this week?

The main things I’m working on at the moment are . . .

Things I’d like some support with

What do you need support with right now?

Progress on things we said we would do last time

What’s going well at the moment?

Where are we at with our top 3 priorities?

2. Meeting regularly. If you only meet infrequently, you won’t get a sense of momentum. You might miss key moments on their leadership journey that would have benefited from a debrief. Also, if your meeting together is the first thing to get cancelled when something difficult happens or an emergency crops us, there will be a sense that you don’t really value this person.

3. Being prepared to talk about difficult things. If you aren’t prepared for it to get uncomfortable at times, then maybe nurturing leadership isn’t for you! It goes with the territory. If there’s feedback to be given, it’s better to do it as close to the event as possible, and with kindness and compassion. I love the expression, ‘clear is kind’. Skirting round an issue tends not to work. If you’ve been having open and honest meetings for a while, you’ll have built up a good working relationship, where it’s much easier to discuss accountability. If you’d like to explore managing difficult conversations in greater depth, I’ve created a workbook, which you can access for free by following this link.

4. Keeping the thread running through. You don’t need to make detailed notes, but make sure there is something written down that indicates the actions you are both going to take as a result of your conversation. Make sure you start the next meeting by checking back on whether things have happened. If it was you that didn’t manage to get something done, hold your hands up and accept it. Model the honesty. Be prepared to apologise. Making mistakes as a leader and accepting them is where growth happens for you and how you build trusting relationships with others.

5. Listening to understand, not to reply. Don’t feel like you need to have the answers, give the person space to talk things through. Sometimes in doing that, solutions will emerge that will really work for them.

6. Asking good questions. Be curious and don’t make assumptions. Try to ask open questions that don’t lead the person in a particular direction or steer them on a path you want them to go. A great resource for leaders is ‘The Coaching Habit’ by Michael Bungay Stanier, which describes 7 really effective questions that can be great in 1:1 meetings like this.

If you don’t currently have 1:1 meetings with your leaders, maybe think about how you could introduce it gently, and in a non-threatening way. If you already do it, that’s great, but maybe there are some strategies here that could make them more effective. There’s enormous potential in these meetings for you to grow as a ‘coaching leader’ and for other leaders to learn and develop, bringing greater success to your organisation.

‘Nurturing leadership opportunities’ is one of the 5 behaviours I cover in my online resource - ‘Being a Coaching Leader’. It consists of a library of short videos and PDFs, designed to help you to bring a coaching ethos into the leadership in your school/organisation. Find out more and sign up here.