Blog
Generally speaking, vanilla is a flavour everyone likes – some people like it a lot – but you know what I mean when I say ‘vanilla’: having no special or extra features; ordinary or standard. Everyone might like it a bit but it doesn’t excite people; fuchsia pink, pistachio ice cream, these get a reaction […]
Often when I see a school vision, what stands out is that it doesn’t tell anyone why it is wanted, a bit like that picture it’s unclear. I think we sometimes think people will just know, or that it’s not important, but it’s crucial! If you don’t tell people why, they will struggle to buy […]
We want everyone in our team to be on board with our vision so that we can spend a lot of time and energy trying to get people on our bus to join us on our journey. However, vision is a choice; if you want me to get on your bus, I need to know […]
A difficult conversation case study I trained a school leadership team of 7 on how to have more successful difficult conversations. When I do this, I teach them the skills in the morning and, in the afternoon, I support them approaching a difficult conversation they have ahead of them. In this school, there was a […]
A difficult conversation case study I first met head teacher Lisa at one of the Successful Difficult Conversations training days I run and she later booked me for the next stage of the course ‘Flexing your Leadership Style’ which I ran with her leadership team. During the course of the day, we talked about issues […]
Three tips for talking to teachers when their pay is higher than performance Pay is always a hot, emotive topic, and in teaching it’s about to get a lot hotter; performance-related pay is going to mean some difficult conversations around pay every year. But in the first two years, 2013/14 and 2014/15, these conversations will […]
So often I see visions which are a sentence and, whilst in many instances less is more, in this case I believe less really is less. You see a vision is exactly that; a vision, a picture, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words (not a sentence). I’m not saying your […]
Please don’t feel like you need to get everyone’s input or agreement for your vision. I know we live in a time when we feel we must get consensus and more often than not I totally agree with this, but I believe that creating a vision is something best done by an individual or a […]
I know that sounds like it’s a beauty product, but it’s true! When we have a problem, something that is gnawing at us, weighing us down, we tend to look tired and older. So often I’ve sat down to coach someone and they have looked like they are carrying the world on their shoulders; the […]
