The Leadership Playbook

Leadership is about providing direction and influencing people. But the practices and behaviours involved are often implicit, personal, and hard to see — making it difficult to align efforts, build capability, or improve together.
The Playbook offers a disciplined yet flexible way for teams to make leadership practice explicit, learnable, and aligned. It supports learning through doing — helping teams develop a shared approach to leadership that’s grounded in their real context and informed by evidence. It starts with identifying what’s already working in your organisation.

Leadership Perspectives that Ground the Leadership Playbook

The Leadership Playbook is built on multiple perspectives about how leadership develops and improves in schools. Here, we highlight three key ideas.

1. Job-Embedded Leadership Learning

Leadership is best learned through the work itself—not separate from it.

Most school leaders learn leadership informally on the job. If leadership is learned on the job, let’s make it intentional. The Playbook supports deliberate, structured learning by making leadership practice visible, shared, testable, and aligned to context. Naming and documenting practice helps teams build a shared picture of what leadership looks like—and how to improve it together. In other words, it can help a school leadership team function as a community of practice, not just a management team.

2. Leadership for Improvement

Leadership that strengthens and sustains school improvement.

A key aspect of a principal’s leadership practice is setting direction—the leadership playbook can help a school leader do this. I often ask leaders what they need their leaders need to be able to know and do to support the next phase of improvement in a school. For example, alongside the rollout of a new teaching and learning framework, a leadership team may decide to focus on instructional leadership practices such as learning walks or classroom observations to better support teachers. The Playbook encourages teams to trial, reflect, and refine practices in real-time, helping leadership evolve alongside the work. Importantly, alignment alone isn’t the goal—the goal is coherence around impactful, research-supported practices that are contextually appropriate and likely to improve outcomes. The Calibrate step explicitly supports teams in anchoring leadership practices in credible, relevant evidence.

3. Distributed Leadership with Clarity

Distributed leadership is most effective when underpinned by shared expectations, routines, and trust.

The Playbook helps build a shared culture, clear expectations, and purposeful coordination—essential ingredients for making distributed leadership effective in schools. Sometimes, middle leaders lead the way. For example, a cohort of middle leaders wanting to increase teacher teams’ ability to provide regular, rapid feedback and adapt effectively might use the Playbook to introduce rapid retrospectives into team meetings at least once per term.

The Leadership Playbook is a collaborative organisational tool and process designed to help leadership teams surface, shape, and trial shared leadership practices anchored in the evidence base and informed by place-based and contextual insights. The end product is a unique leadership playbook for your school.  
It includes:

• A simple three-step process: Make it Visible → Calibrate → Act & Review.

• Practical protocols for making leadership visible.

• A customisable Leadership Playbook template to capture and co-design shared leadership practice.

• Protocols for feedback and team reflection.

• Optional poster versions for visibility and iteration.

• A facilitated version with implementation guidance, coaching tips, and links to research.

The Playbook uses a three-step process:

Step 1 – Make it Visible is the process of surfacing and identifying how leadership currently happens—making it concrete, specific, and observable. By starting with what’s already in use, you can kick-start shared leadership learning and reflection and move toward greater coherence.

It has three parts: 

• Select a focus

• Surface existing practice

• Share using rapid protocols 

Step 2 – Calibrate is the process of using the Playbook template to co-develop a shared version of a leadership practice—clarifying what it is, when to use it, why it matters (including links to evidence), and how to enact it in your context. This step helps refine and align leadership practices, anchoring them in both research evidence and your school’s unique context. 

It has two key parts: 

• Co-create

• Collate and commit 
  Use the Playbook template to co-develop a shared version of practice — including what it is, when to use it, how it connects to the evidence, and how to enact it.

Step 3 – Act & Review is the process of trialling the shared leadership practice, then reflecting together on what worked, what didn’t, and what to adapt. In other words, implement the practice, monitor its use along the way, and review its effectiveness and impact within your context. 

It has three key parts: 

• Rapid Check-In 

• Full Review 

• Leadership Playbook Tracker

Designed for leadership teams in schools, organisations, or networks who want to:

• Align leadership practice and behaviours.

• Build shared approaches and strengthen collective leadership capability.

• Learn from one another in real-time.

• Support evidence getting into practice.

• A clearer, shared understanding of “what good looks like”.

• Stronger alignment and coherence in leadership practice.

• Documented, revisable leadership practices that grow over time.

• More confident, capable, and connected leadership teams.

• Leadership approaches grounded in evidence and real-world application.