Case vignettes

The senior leadership team of a mid-size trust commissioned me for a day a month to support their aim of developing a more people-focused culture, focusing initially on a trust-wide wellbeing strategy. We had to adapt to the first lockdowns in 2020 so I switched focus to researching and developing staff and student wellbeing surveys, forming and facilitating an online working party of school leaders to take ownership when this was possible. The surveys are now fully embedded in the trust's annual programme and the working party is building contextual responses to wellbeing needs in each individual school as part of a coordinated trust-wide strategy. I've subsequently supported the trust senior team to develop a new process for recruiting school leaders more aligned with trust strategy and vision, and the design of a new coaching-based performance management and feedback process based on best practice in other sectors.

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Since early 2022, I have been consulting to the executive leaders of a fast-growing schools trust to help them address key strategic challenges. They had identified a tension in the relationships between the trust and its school leaders, and were concerned this had the potential to disrupt planned change. We co-created a consultancy programme based on a two day a month contract over two years, initially exploring school leaders' experience of holding authority and maintaining role boundaries in the trust system at various levels. Once trust is established, I will facilitate a regular forum to support leaders' reflective capacity and provide a way for them to influence the trust's scenario planning.

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In 2018, I was commissioned by the head of a large rural secondary school to explore why students seemed to be disengaging. The school had previously commissioned a 'school improvement specialist' to address 'low-level disruption' by developing a behaviour policy and tracking system. Centred on a list of six behavioural expectations and a demanding process of enforcement and tracking, this was unpopular with staff as well as students. Through a series of observations, focus groups, interviews and discussions, it became clear that whilst staff cared deeply about the students at the school, they felt increasingly distant from them, and unable to 'see' them. One described students as "'magnolia' kids, largely invisible and under the radar". On the other hand, the students certainly did not think of themselves as hiding! In fact, they were desperate for more recognition and more opportunities at the school for engagement. The issue wasn't so much that students were disengaging but that the behaviour policy had made it difficult for staff to see their engagement and, worse, had created a distance between them and students. The consultancy culminated in a workshop at which I suggested flipping the problem on its head; framing the issue as being about how to create more engagement rather than how to tackle disengagement.

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In late 2020, I bid for and won grant-funding on behalf of a national charity to carry out a novel qualitative survey of how students, parents and teachers were experiencing the lockdowns, and what that could tell us about how the school system needs to change. The exploration was carried out using the ‘Listening Post’ methodology, a form of bounded social enquiry which provides a ‘snapshot’ of society at a particular time. I held a series of online group discussions with parents, teachers and school children and then reviewed the transcripts to identify the key themes that emerged from across the groups as a whole. The aim was for the authentic voices of the system and those in it to be heard, in place of those who all too often speak on their behalf. The report was published by the funding organisation and launched by one of its backers here.

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My client - an experienced Head at a large inner-city academy - had found that he’d become ‘stuck’ in his career. Despite knowing what he needed to do, and despite going out and acquiring the qualifications and skills he was told he needed to make the next step, he just couldn’t make the change. And, for the first time in his life, he didn’t know why. He was at a loss, and it had begun to eat away at him.

After considering the nature of the challenges he felt he faced and the evidence he felt he had for his ‘stuckness’, we began using Kegan & Lahey’s ‘Immunity to Change’ framework for exploring the unconscious assumptions that were working away under the surface to drive his behaviour, limit his capacity to act and betray his best intentions. We also explored some of the literature around the psychology of mid-life, particularly relating to Jung’s concept of individuation, and what James Hollis elegantly calls ‘the turn within’.

At about the halfway point, my client noticed that just the act of dredging some of his silt up to the surface had the effect of freeing the flow a little, and - without knowing quite why - his options became a bit clearer for him.

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Reflective practice groups feature sensitively facilitated sessions to enable staff to bring concerns, experiences and thoughts that might not otherwise get aired, and which may be blocking or inhibiting effective practice. During one such session in early 2022, the group was unusually quiet and subdued. After some time, one of the participants shared that a child had recently passed away but that the staff had not had an opportunity to discuss it, adding that "the leadership team seemed too busy to notice". A member of the SLT responded defensively and the discussion soon became quite aggressive. My colleague and I invited participants to turn their attention to what the death meant to them and what they felt they wanted to say. A parallel was drawn to the fact that the school had recently transferred to a new Trust, bringing a new name, a new Head and a new direction, and that staff - particularly those who had been there for a long time - felt they had not really been part of that process either. To an extent, they were mourning the loss of the old school but had not had an opportunity to think about what it had meant to them. As a result, they felt disengaged and split off from the 'new' school. The SLT acknowledged this need and supported a symbolic process of reflecting on those aspects of prior strategy and practice that were of value to the new direction. Staff engagement and relations improved.

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The COO of a rapidly growing school trust commissioned me to provide a programme of six coaching sessions with a specific aim to help her re-discover her sense of purpose. Having begun her career as an HR director, my client had moved into working with schools after being inspired by young people's hopes and dreams during a careers visit. After a few years as a business manager, the small rural secondary school at which she worked became a trust and merged first with two primary schools and then another local trust. Within 18 months, she found herself in a COO role with a far more 'corporate' remit than she had intended and a greater distance between her and the children who had inspired her career change. The lockdowns amplified this sense of distance, and then a prolonged period of ill-health disrupted her full return. Working online, we used imagery and animation to help her think about her position relative to others in her work and life systems, and to consider the resources, aspirations and desires she had available to her. We explored how she perceived of the organisation and her support network through system maps, and used constellations to learn how changing position might affect her emotional experience. We also spent time thinking deeply about the influence of her origin story, the impact of her illness and what her life-stage meant for her 'right place' at work. Her full return to work coincided with the end of our programme, and we created a 'self-contract' to guide the new terms of her engagement and priorities.

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In September 2020, I was commissioned to provide six two-hour half-termly online coaching sessions to the leadership team of a large primary in the north of England. The school had been hit very hard by the pandemic and the new Head - the schools fifth in six years - wanted help to build trust and clarify her long-term commitment ahead of a period of maternity leave. Having earned their trust by facilitating several difficult conversations and identifying some systemic barriers to effective leadership in the first two sessions, I used the next three sessions to run work discussion groups. Taking it in turns, each member of the team was invited to bring a 'critical incident' that had been troubling them. While the others watched with their screens off, I coached the individual to tease out the detail of the incident and explore how it was affecting them. After this, the 'issue holder' turned their screen off while I invited the others to reflect on how they’d felt whilst listening and how it had impacted them. The 'issue holder' was then invited back into the group to reflect on their colleagues' comments before I facilitated a discussion about what they had learned about one another as well as how the team might better support one another.

See TEAM COACHING

About an hour into my first team coaching session with a MAT executive team, it became very clear that several people really didn’t want to be there. They reminded me of the two Y9 lads who had taught me 20 or so years previously that even the most elegant lesson plan has to give way when something else needs to be addressed.

So we switched focus and we talked about what was going on in the room, about the feelings and experiences behind both the disengagement and others’ frustrated responses to it, and about the impact of this split on the team’s potential performance. Once it became clear how this dynamic was not just disrupting my wonderful workshop but also their strategy, it was clear to them all that something needed to be done.

I designed a 6 session programme that aimed to raise each person’s awareness of what drove everyone else’s behaviour … their concerns, their strengths, their desires, their hopes, their Achilles Heels, how they conceived of their purpose and impact, their worries, their motivations, their values and their experience of being in their role at the Trust.

Each member of the team completed a psychometric questionnaire to identify their motivational value system, which identified whether they are driven by performance-, process- or people-focused work. Sharing this data enabled the team to understand how their peers differed from them, and made sense of some of what had previously seemed peculiar or even eccentric. We also did some ‘organisation-in-the-mind’ work, and held a series of ‘work discussion groups’ where the team learned about their peers challenges and how best to support them.

They decided not to subscribe to the Core Strengths platform, but had come together at the end of the programme in a way that none had expected. Even one of the ‘naughty boys’ told the group at the end that he now - for the first time in his career - felt like he was fully part of a team.

See CORE STRENGTHS 4S

In 2021, I was commissioned by the COO of one of England's largest MATs to provide a focused programme of executive coaching. My client was very successful in the technical aspects of his role but struggled with the relational aspects of leading teams. My brief was specifically to help him better understand this side of his behaviour and reflect on both its impact and how to change it. Working both online and face-to-face and using the Analytic-Network five frame coaching system, we explored the origin of his drives and ethics and how these interplayed with others in his team and across the broader system. We also considered how they influenced his capacity to lead effectively and to establish the sort of networks and culture needed to achieve the trust's strategic objectives. A Prophet role analysis provided a further level of insight into my client's motivations and decision-making styles, enabling us to identify how alignment with others was a vital component of his leadership. Following the commission, my client fed-back positively on how the programme had provided a new frame through which to view his relationships at work, and the CEO reported that his own interactions with his COO had improved.

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A mid-sized trust and teaching school alliance commissioned me in early 2022 to develop and deliver a bespoke training programme in organisation development and systemic leadership for trust leaders. Between January and July, I developed and trialled modules in 1:1 sessions with the Deputy CEO, identifying which aspects would be most useful for leaders in the trust's context. During 2023 I will design, develop and deliver a series of short development workshops providing a grounding in organisation development. The aim will be to build relational and systemic leadership capability in the trust's leadership teams, to develop resilience and future-focus in the leadership culture, and to emphasise the human-elements of a leader's work. A long-term outcome may be the co-development with the trust of a joint-venture commercial programme for the wider MAT market.

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In June 2022, a large secondary school commissioned me to prepare and deliver a professional development session for its senior leadership team. The school had been through a long period of significant disruption and the SLT - some of whom had been appointed while the school was in lockdown - was finding it difficult to work together. The brief was to 'galvanise the SLT around their emerging strategy and provide a confidence boost'. The session was to be the first time the new SLT had met face-to-face so there was an opportunity to build some new habits. The session began with a facilitated check-in followed by a short period of reflection, using photos as a way to encourage emotional expression. We then explored the characteristics of a high performing team using the 'Creating the Team Edge' and 'Prophet' models, before engaging in a constellation-forming activity and ‘liberating structure’ exercise to consider what individual and team behaviours might inhibit the achievement of strategy.

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I am an Associate with the University College London's Institute of Education, supporting the Centre for Educational Leadership to develop innovative leadership development programmes. My brief is to disrupt the prevailing model for executive school leadership training, bringing in ideas, theories and practices from other sectors; particularly those informed by organisation development, systems thinking and systems-psychodynamics. In early 2022, I drafted a series of case studies for use in the National Professional Qualification for Executive Leaders (NPQEL) programme and re-wrote the introductory curricula for several NPQEL modules. In late 2022 I began facilitating several learning groups of prospective executive leaders to enable reflective practice.

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