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Leadership: The Foundation for Successful Coaching

The difference between coaches who have a positive impact and those who do not comes down to leadership. Leadership is more complex than we might think, especially for coaches who engage in equal-status, peer-to-peer conversations with others. At the Instructional Coaching Group, we provide resources and teacher coaching models focused on empowering coaches and teachers.

What is Leadership?

Jim Knight divides leadership into two parts: leading ourselves and leading others. To lead ourselves, we need to know our purpose and principles, how to use our time effectively, how to take care of ourselves, and how to develop habits that enable us to do these things. To lead others, we need to make good decisions, interact with others in ways that expand our capacities, foster deep knowledge and deep implementation, and create alignment with others.

Often, we think of leaders as almost superhuman. These heroes—Dr. Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and so on—seem like saints who have accomplished so much that we could never approach achieving similar results. And yet, their fights—for freedom, health, equality, respect, goodness—are fights all of us can join.

To lead with the Partnership Principles in mind is to hold up hope that the world can and will be better.

When a coach’s kindness and empathy help a teacher find self-efficacy, when a teacher’s high expectations compel a student to believe she can be more than she realizes when a coach’s commitment to self-improvement helps him better coach teachers so that students improve—in all these cases, coaches and teachers are engaged in the same struggle as our saintly heroes: the fight to make the world a better place.

Making Good Leadership a Habit

Turning ideas into action is a messy and complex affair that often leads to failure for many teacher coaching models. Too often, there is a tremendous gap between what we know and what we do. As Maya Angelou (2018) once beautifully wrote, you should “do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” The trouble is that, too often, we don’t do better even though we know we should.

If we really want to turn ideas into actions, we need a structure that will ensure that we do what we know we need to do, and that structure is what we call a habit. In The Power of Habit (2012), Charles Duhigg writes that “a habit is a formula our brain automatically follows . . . a choice that we deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about, but continue doing, often every day” (pp. 284–285). If we keep dropping the ball when it comes to change, the problem is not that we lack grit, but that we lack a structure—a habit.

How to Build Habits

Although the researchers use different words to describe how habits work, the descriptions themselves are fairly consistent. A habit begins with a cue—some prompt that triggers an action, like a green light in traffic. Next, there is a routine—a response to the cue or prompt. Finally, there is a reward for the action.

If a coach wants to develop a habit, a good place to start is to identify the cue.

For example, a coach who wants to implement time management strategies might consider the bell at the end of the school day as a cue to sit down and plan the next day. After identifying the cue, the coach needs to develop a routine—a simple action or set of actions to do the same way each day.

Research (Wood, 2019) suggests that we increase our chances of successfully adopting habits by thinking about how our context enhances or inhibits our ability to form a habit. For example, if you want to engage in time management but find that many teachers want to have a coaching conversation, it’s probably best to set aside a different time to implement that habit.

Leadership in Instructional Coaching

Leadership is more complex than we might think, especially for instructional coaches who engage in equal-status, peer-to-peer conversations with others. Leadership among peers in complex organizations involves much more than a persuasively delivered call to action.

At the Instructional Coaching Group, we provide workshops and support for coaches looking to grow their leadership. It’s one of the 7 foundational principles we use in building teacher coaching models that produce genuine change and better support for students.

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