Aspiring Leaders; can you afford to ignore this opportunity?

Great leadership is an essential ingredient to making an organisation, whether it’s outstanding nurseries or a successful schools. The management company ‘Bain’ completed a study in 2015 on distributed leadership in the US Charter Schools. They wanted to find the common ingredients of exceptional schools where children did well against all the odds. The clearest answer was great leadership. However, great leadership is easier said than done as leadership is complex and if it was easy we would have lots of great leaders. The power of great leadership struck me so forcible that I ended up writing three books on the subject, mostly to help me articulate what leadership looked like in action.

Leadership has many facets but the over-riding responsibility that comes with leadership is how many leaders you develop. We often fixate on the idea that leaders are great charismatic people, driving huge visions and making radical changes. While this is the case for the minority, in realty great leaders can be developed and grown with the right support, knowledge and understanding, with 80 per cent of our efforts focusing on developing staff capacity. Generally this is done through by: