Six weeks is a long time. That’s the point.
Effective leadership requires the traveller's mindset: becoming a curious observer in one's own organisation to ensure one keeps changing one's mind.
Leadership
How do we help other people do their best work? Essays on trust, culture, teams, governance and the responsibility of developing others.
65 articles. The highlighted label is each article’s primary category; other labels are secondary tags.
If you want middle leaders to take ownership, stop giving them things to “own”.
True ownership requires solving meaningful questions rather than delivering tasks; leaders should provide clear destinations while allowing tactical freedom.
How do you create a 100-year organisation?
Organisational durability requires products that evolve with time while remaining anchored to values that are strong enough to traverse generations.
Why don’t more Boards visit school like this?
Board immersion days allow governors to move beyond pruned reports and experience the lived, human reality of a school's daily operational life.
Listen at scale. Lead from the signal.
Data synthesis is not strategy; after using AI to scale listening, leaders must use human judgement to identify signals that only they can act upon.
The ROI of a Tablecloth
Small gestures of dignity are not soft extras; they are vital infrastructure that reduces the compounding costs of an unseen and disregarded workforce.
The World Cup, Scotland, and Soft Power
Soft power is built on attraction rather than force, relying on the amplification of community strengths through light and democratic organisation.
Don’t trust your vision. Trust your habits.
Habits are a more honest indicator of strategy than any written document; ensure your daily routines actually match your stated ambitions.
Lessons from kangaroo ragú: hospitality is a Super Teacher
Service is technical, but hospitality is a deeply human feeling of being on someone's side, which builds the trust essential for a school's brand.
What are you letting disappear in plain sight?
Leadership involves cleaning away the soot of daily operation to reveal and protect the beautiful, enduring elements of a community's heritage.
The speech that could have been given anywhere
End-of-year speeches become memorable only when they prove why specific successes were uniquely possible because of the community's own character.
Stop repeating yourself - start building signal
Avoid the trap of robotic repetition; focus on one clear signal and wrap it in distinct, purposeful stories to build a consistent culture.
🚨 Success is easy to waste.
Reflection is a critical sense-making practice that allows leaders to pause, extract lessons from success, and decide what truly warrants repetition.
Are you listening to the people closest to the problem?
True listening is a deliberate discipline, not a courtesy; leaders must seek out the candid insights of those closest to the daily problems.
The tiny routines that stop big failures
Significant organisational failure is best prevented not by complex systems, but by the disciplined repetition of small, observable human routines.
Are you making the most of your soft power?
A school's soft power is the measurable influence generated when daily actions consistently align with genuine, clearly stated community values.
Your culture isn’t what you say it is
School culture is defined by operational rituals, not glossy mission statements; consistent actions serve as the true proof of stated values.
The secret work that makes everything else feel easy
Exceptional organisations succeed by choosing a few invisible, precise rules that build trust and provide a solid foundation for all other activities.
The most important thing you can’t yet see
Like a lighthouse on an imperceptible reef, effective leadership provides a steady reference point that helps communities navigate their own future.
What are you tolerating right now?
Leaders must distinguish between harmful stagnation and constructive friction, ensuring they do not inadvertently wash away a culture's valuable history.
The smallest leadership move with the biggest ripple effect
In times of complexity and negativity, a deliberate choice of relentless positivity and a simple smile can restore clarity and effective team action.
Stop assuming someone else has it covered
Effective leadership requires taking absolute responsibility for every detail that influences outcomes, instead of relying on others to manage them.
When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.
True ambition in schools demands a communal, iterative effort that prioritises meaningful progress over the safe pursuit of unattainable perfection.
The beauty of a mistake, now legendary.
Instead of reacting to failures with panic, leaders should pause to notice the new possibilities and stories that emerge from unexpected moments.
This one thing is ruining your communication (and it’s not AI).
Educational jargon creates distance and obscures meaning; schools should prioritise clarity to foster trust and genuine community engagement.
The Five Day Rule to lighten your load
Deferral is a decision; using a five-day rule to either execute or delete commitments helps leaders stop pretending that the future will add capacity.
What jazz legend Thelonius Monk can teach us about improvisation
Improvisation in leadership is about being well-prepared enough to listen to the room and find the right path in service of others.
Fred Smith's vision myth: debunked for schools.
Educational vision requires a thoughtful interplay between personal clarity and collaborative community insight, avoiding purely isolated decisions.
Whose voice is really speaking at the start of your school year?
School leaders should avoid generic AI-generated metaphors in their speeches and instead define their own unique voice to deepen genuine meaning.
The boiling frog doesn’t leap.
To avoid being overwhelmed by incremental change, schools must adopt resilient strategies that proactively address long-term challenges.
You don’t need more data. You need this.
Data only informs rational decisions if it is high quality; leaders must prioritise the time to listen and notice over superficial metrics.
The problem with feedback? You might be starting in the wrong place.
Feedback often fails because it lacks a shared vision; schools must define what excellence looks like before attempting to measure performance.
The problem with words.
Communication should be treated as a strategic asset, built on deep work and clear narrative rather than generic, outsourced language.
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
Deadlines often create ripples of unfinished work when underlying priorities are blurred; moving past the fog requires clarity and purpose.
The photo that reminds me of everything that matters in school.
Brand strategy is about designing a culture that fosters everyday, pivotal human moments rather than just reporting on performative events.
The secret to happiness and wellbeing.
True happiness is found at the intersection of meaningful work, personal growth, and helping others, rather than in policies or shallow perks.
Complexity kills autonomy.
Complexity breeds helplessness; stripping away unnecessary policies and clarifying responsibilities empowers teams to do their best work.
The secret of leading from a high school band.
Leadership is not dictation; it is creating conditions where others can contribute their unique talents to build something extraordinary together.
So they don’t like your idea: just bring them closer.
To overcome apathy, communicate ideas effectively and maintain curiosity, knowing that busy people often miss potential innovations.
10 Essential Leadership Steps to Get Out of a Crisis
Leaders must employ a structured approach to crisis management, focusing on clear strategy, expert use, empathy, and providing honest hope.
They don’t like your idea: so bring them closer.
Watering the rocks—harnessing the feedback and stabilising influence of critics—is essential for avoiding fuzzy compromises and achieving success.
The biggest mistake I ever made.
Major failures are often the result of accumulated small errors; pick up the phone daily to address issues before they become disasters.
Pretty much everything about leadership training is wrong.
Generic, event-based leadership training fails because it lacks relational depth and does not address the systemic barriers within schools.
How to stop worrying about the things outside your control
If we want to change the system, we can start by changing something in our small corner of the world, with the people who are with us in that small corner.
Keep building an all-weather organisation
All-weather organisations deliver the goods, even when the conditions are tough.
The perfect balance between autonomy and accountability.
Most senior leaders want their teams activated. They want them productive and generating ideas that move the needle of the school’s strategy.
Are you the saboteur in your projects? The CIA think so.
The tragedy is that most people are completely unaware of the sabotage they introduce to their projects.
When confident is too confident… and when it’s not.
No matter how thought-through you think your ideas might be, in general, humans are over-confident, emotional and irrational.
Writing is thinking. Thank you for being part of our thinking.
Nothing is too sacred when it comes to being the best community you can be, for today. But whatever you do, write it down together, regularly.
How to be boring and succeed, according to Aretha Franklin.
You see, the key to great leadership and team success is to communicate repeatedly about the same, single idea.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
It’s for this reason that, if you want to understand what the purpose of an organisation is, all you have to do is look at its behaviour.
Efficient Process vs Happy Accidents
Community conversations might not change your decision - but they will change the way you go about realising it, for the better.
Flying lessons focus on one thing: how not to stop flying.
When you start to worry that you’re sinking closer to the farm, it’s time to learn.
Improvisation beats planning, hands down.
Improvisation is hard work. It takes hours - years - of invisible-to-the-crowd practice, and sometimes it doesn’t quite work out as planned.
Assume all new ideas are bad. Then work on them.
If you hold onto your ideas too tightly for too long then you end up blind to new ideas and opportunities around you.
Sometimes we don’t need the Board’s opinion.
Too often, we see Boards operate in a vacuum of quality information, or on the basis of extremely high quality but narrow anecdotal evidence.
Find the perfect goal and get out of their way.
You can’t tell people what to do if you want the best from them.
You only need one policy: don’t make more work than you have to.
We feel that pressure to create lots of content, too, when we write core values or mission statements.
Don’t let fear write the script.
Some of the schools we’re spending time with this past few months have struggled. They’re in a balancing act that nearly every school plays out nearly ever
Last orders… and a secret to happiness.
I’m going to ask you to stop ‘giving it your all’. Give it 70% instead.
Would you use a teaspoon to dig a hole?
A mentor asked me this question over coffee a couple of weeks ago. Would you use a teaspoon to dig a hole?, they asked. Of course not!, I replied.
You’re a millionaire investor without even realising it.
Imagine your local school offers you a stake in it for an incredibly low price. All you need to do is spend less than the price of a textbook and you get a
Where do you want to be?
Establish where you want to be, not what you want. Professor Norman Drummond is a stalwart of quality leadership in the Scottish business world. He believe
A lack of focus leads to terrible decision-making.
A lack of focus is a symptom of and contributor to poor decision-making. When you don’t have focus you might find yourself avoiding taking quick decisions.
How to find laser sharp focus
Has anyone in your leadership team taken up their post in the last two years? Up to half of them will be deemed to have failed within the first two years o