My professional development offer for school and MAT leaders is unapologetically disruptive.

Most of the CPD you have on offer fails to acknowledge that leadership has changed dramatically in recent years, and therefore also fails to equip you with the resources you need to lead in complexity.

In an increasingly dynamic, uncertain and unpredictable world, a leader’s role is no longer to pretend (or try) to know everything and make decisions but rather to create the organisational conditions in which good decisions can be made and implemented by people closest to where the action is, and then to facilitate strategy. It’s about understanding where the points of most leverage are in their system, and how best to influence them.

Doing this effectively - being an effective leader - requires an understanding of one’s self, other selves, the leadership role itself, one’s self in the leadership role, how one adapts to influence people, and how that role-adaptation impacts the system. Which in turn requires an understanding of how one’s unique organisational system works.

This requires a wholly different set of skills, aptitudes and mindsets to those that previous generations of leaders could rely on, and therefore wholly different approaches to leadership development. So I help school leaders develop effective agency and take up their authority by:

• attending to their being as well as their doing

• noticing their system and what’s really going on in it

• making meaning and sense from that data and from their own experience

• building a narrative that compels people to join them.

This is real leadership development.

My aim is to bridge the gap between NPQH/EL programmes and reality. My capacity to do this depends on three things.

Firstly, my own experiential, theoretical and practical training in complex organisational leadership, and the network of peers I met along the way.

Secondly, my engagement with the wealth of rich thinking and research-informed practice beyond the heavily guarded boundaries of the school sector.

And thirdly, my passion to make this stuff available to those - like you - who lead the most important type of organisation in the world.

If I’m being completely honest, there’s a fourth driver too. Love. I’ve seen close-up how brutal the school system can be to its leaders and how unprepared many are for that, perhaps in part because they have been propelled to their role by an altruistic sense of vocation. All that I do - my coaching, my consulting and my leadership formation work - aims to strengthen leaders from the inside out, building your sense of purpose and conviction as well as your capacity and connection to a wider community of support, so you can stand your ground with more confidence.

Please take a look at my menu of workshops, courses, groups and programmes below, some of which are my own and some of which are offered by a select few partners.

If anything interests you, or if you’d like to discuss your needs in more detail, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.