You appraise them. You decide what happens to them next. Coaching for executive and senior leadership teams, with someone who isn’t in the room the rest of the time.
Coaching your own team is a conflict of interest wearing a nice jumper. It needs to come from outside.
The Head, the Deputies, whoever the weight actually sits on. Nine hours across the year with someone who knows international school leadership from the inside.
Every senior leader gets a coach chosen for fit with them, not allocated by who was free. Same approach, same ethics, same standard.
Every coach on your engagement comes to group case consultation with Shane across the year. Quality isn’t a promise, it’s a diary entry.
If the same coach sits with your Head, your Deputy and the three people your Deputy appraises, they end up holding every side of every conversation in the building. That isn’t confidential in any way that matters, and people can feel it. They start editing.
Different coaches, one standard, no crossover. It costs a bit more to organise and it’s the only version of this that works.
Shane Leaning coaches and trains education leaders across Asia and beyond. He wrote Change Starts Here with Efraim Lerner and hosts the Education Leaders podcast, listened to in around 145 countries. Before this he led teaching development regionally for a large school group.
The wider team are coaches he’s worked alongside and would put in front of his own leadership team. Every one of them has led in schools. They’re chosen for fit with the leader in front of them, and if the match isn’t right after the first session, you get a different coach and no conversation about it.
You’re paying for it. That changes nothing about what stays in the room.
Shane is a member of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council and works to its Global Code of Ethics. Every coach on an Education Leaders engagement works to the same.
There are three ways in, and most schools use a mix of them.
On top of that there’s one programme fee per engagement, whatever mix you choose. It covers coach matching, the group case consultation, an opening and closing session with the whole group, and termly attendance reporting.
Every rate, the programme fee, a worked example for a twelve-leader team, and how the coach split works. The document you can forward to whoever signs it off. Pop in your details and it opens right away.
Get the rate card (PDF)Seventy per cent of the fee for every leader goes to the coach doing the work. The rest covers matching, the case consultation that holds quality across the team, contracting and the school relationship.
We publish that for two reasons. You should know what you’re buying rather than assuming there’s a mark-up you can’t see. And coaches who do the work should be paid properly for it, which is easier to hold yourself to once you’ve said it out loud.
Can we start with part of the team?
Yes, and most schools should. Four or five leaders in year one, the rest joining once people have seen what it does.
What if a coach isn’t right for someone?
Say so after the first session and we’ll match someone else. No cost, no conversation about why.
Will you tell us what’s coming up in the sessions?
No. You’ll get attendance and nothing else. If a leader wants to bring something from a session to you, that’s theirs to bring.
Do you do this alongside training?
Often. Coaching moves individuals, training days move the team’s shared practice, and the two together tend to hold better than either on its own. See Training & Consultancy.
Can this build our own internal coaching capacity?
That’s usually the better second year. Coaching the team first, then training the team to coach, so you stop buying it in.
They’ve got you, and you’re the person who decides what happens to them next. They’ve got each other, and half of what they’d say is about each other. So it stays in, the decisions get slower, and the conversation nobody’s having gets more expensive every term.
Tell us who’s on the team, what’s prompted this, and what’s already been tried. If it’s not the right thing, we’ll say so.
