Middle leaders have often been seen as the ‘engine room’ of school improvement, so how good they are as leaders is critical, and that means finding high quality effective CPD and training.
Too many one-off training sessions have seen little improvement over time, but leadership coaching has a proven track record of significant change and lasting impact.
Middle leaders may:
- Feel overwhelmed and over-stretched
- Have difficulty in building the team and with difficult team members
- Not be achieving high levels of staff engagement
- Struggle to have the difficult conversations they know they need to have
- Find it hard to implement leadership training ideas
- Need support through change processes
The real challenge in developing a coaching leadership style (that research shows, alongside collaboration, to be the most effective leadership style) is not developing the skills to coach, but learning to giving less advice and less instruction.
“You can mandate adequacy…. greatness has to be unleashed” – Joel Klein
This has to be the significant advantage of coaching – the ability to unleash greatness. Using a leadership-coaching model, such as the FACTS model, means that you have all the advantages of coaching with all the advantages of systems thinking, accountability and feedback.
The FACTS model:
- Feedback
- Accountability
- Courageous goals
- Tension
- Systems thinking
If you want to unleash greatness, then develop coaching leadership styles in your organisation and prioritise external coaching for your leaders.
Leaders comment that coaching allows them:
- To be challenged in a safe context with someone external to the organisation
- To process their thoughts, reflect and develop deep thinking
- To increase self-awareness and self-confidence
- To grow and develop their leadership over time
- Develop their own coaching leadership style
- Hold others better to account, and provide a high challenge, high support environment
As a qualified and accredited coach, who has 15 years of senior leadership experience, I wish I had received coaching throughout my career, and had implemented it across my organisations.
Don’t delay, unleash greatness in your organisation. If you need help with leadership coaching or training for staff please take a look at our training page or contact the team on 01924 827869 to discuss your needs.
This guest blog is provided by our FusionHR Associate Ian White.
