It can be one of the most frustrating things in the workplace. You've built a dream team. Between them, they have all the competencies, skills and experience they need to perform. Individually, they're at the top of their games. And when working together, they're incredible most of the time too. Except when it really matters.

Boundaries are pretty uncool at work at the moment, with people in many sectors striving for flat, fluid and 'democratic' structures. Of course it's funky to challenge the aspects of organisational life that seem 'in the way' but there's a real danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, particularly where the aim is to improve employee wellbeing, engagement and psychological safety.

School and MAT leaders are now working in a context that’s not just volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, but also brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible. So this is absolutely the right time to be asking what they need from leadership development programmes.

What is ‘transformational intelligence’ and how can it be developed? Here are seven key practices to develop the capabilities required for transformational change.

The trouble is, whilst consensus-based processes are probably the easiest way to make a decision, they very often result in the worst possible outcome.

You can wait for ages for one great article on the benefit of coaching to come along, and then two arrive at once! The first was a piece on the vital need for leaders to do the 'inner work' required for effective leadership, and the second was a summary of research on the positive impact of coaching that facilitates this.

Dear coaches … instead of saying “I’m curious”, try *being* curious. It’s just a thought, but it might be better for everyone. Sadly, in my experience over the last few months, many of those who have signalled their ‘curiosity’ by saying that’s what they are have tended not to be curious at all. In fact, they’ve seemed to me to be the very opposite.

Leading change well depends on Change Vitality … on how you attend to the quality of your inner capacities as a leader, how that relates to your actions, and then how you bring others with you.

A complex system is one in which even knowing everything there is to know about the system is not sufficient to predict what is likely to happen next, particularly when you start bending it. How can change leaders build the mindsets needed for this work?

Welcome to Praxeum … a transformational leadership development programme for leaders of education. It provides reflective, experiential and energising spaces in which participants are supported to understand and develop their capacity to lead, and provided with opportunities to experiment with system leadership skills. Its aim is to enable confident, competent and ethical leadership in complexity.

Of course values are important and really good ones are really important, but there is an awful lot of unhelpful fluff and faff surrounding them. For example, there’s the idea that organisations have values. They don’t. In fact, they can’t. They can represent values, and this is where it gets interesting (and complicated) …

The idea of an ‘authentic self’ is compelling, but it is a chimera; a fantasy, and the search for it is futile. Coaches should instead help clients to understand that rather than looking for a ‘core’ that isn’t there, they must settle for an awareness of their ever changing kaleidoscope of potential. That should be enough!

The old leadership orthodoxy - that the role of a leader is to set an inspiring vision and make decisions to drive strategy - is dangerously outdated, and risks driving great people out of your organisation. Instead, your role is now to create the conditions that enable people to act on the sense they make at the frontline, and make their own decisions accordingly.

Schools report a ‘surge’ of challenging behaviour and in some cases, the pink battle lines are being drawn. What if what we're seeing isn’t naughtiness but the impact of the pandemic's 'fourth wave'? What if punitive approaches do more harm than good?

What can a bad mannered and undignified playground spat between two highly experienced school leaders on Twitter tell us about the school system, about behaviour, and about my own little fantasies of enabling reconciliation? A short blog on the psychoanalytical concept of 'acting out’ and its usefulness in coaching, consultancy or systemic analysis, as well as self-reflection!

My suggestion to a client that school leadership "is just a job" has provoked a defensive reaction ...

But it is just a job. And my role as a coach or consultant helping you explore why you're so stressed or tired or burned out, or why you find it hard to achieve the strategic distance required for effective leadership, is to say the things that are otherwise left unsaid.

I'm often asked to coach 'resilience'; to help my client cope better with the pressures and stresses of work by changing their behaviours, managing their responses and adopting certain practices. This is fine, but the request always rings an alarm bell.

We can’t just stop work to avoid burnout so we have to find a compromise. For some, even that realisation - that there are choices involved - is an instructive start. But some interesting new research from Nick Petrie has identified five key factors that drive either an optimal experience of work or the sort of toxic experience that leads to burnout.

The extent of Ofsted’s power in England's state school system far over-reaches its legitimate authority as an inspector of quality standards, and now impedes its ability to assure its impartiality and independence. This sort of dysfunction can have no place in the school system.