Twenty years inside a school like yours.

One leader, a fixed cadence, and a working agenda that belongs to them rather than to me. Most engagements start with whatever keeps landing back on their desk and end somewhere structural: the way decisions get made, the way work gets handed off, the way the senior team behaves when the head is off campus.

The standard shape is the OBD first, then six 1:1 sessions. CliftonStrengths® can run alongside it in any of three forms:

• The assessment itself, for the leader.
• A 1:1 strengths session on what the results mean for how they actually run their week.
• The whole administrative team together, so the cabinet has one vocabulary for why they keep colliding in the same three places.

Always one to one. It can be bought two ways: the school engages me for a leader, or the leader engages me themselves. The work, the cadence and the confidentiality are identical either way, and so is the price. What the board or the head hears is that the engagement is happening, not what was said in it.

The standard executive coaching engagement

A year-long cohort, in person or hybrid, of five to ten participants. Built for two groups: the people you can see stepping into a team lead or dean role next, and the people who were promoted into one recently and are finding out what the job actually is.

Scheduling is flexible by design, because the people who most need this are the hardest to release during the day. Evenings, professional development days, or whatever gaps the calendar actually has.

The value is partly the content and mostly the room. It is the only place most new leaders can describe a real problem out loud to people who understand the job.

Two ways schools use this, and they work well in sequence.

• New faculty orientation. A session for the incoming cohort, after they are hired, built on their CliftonStrengths® results. It gives a group of strangers a shared vocabulary in their first week, which is otherwise the slowest thing to arrive.
• Faculty-wide Top 5. Everyone takes the assessment, then a full day together. Interactive, properly paced, and genuinely enjoyable, which matters more on an in-service day than anyone admits.

Codes are bought on the school’s behalf and each person’s results are theirs to keep. Not used for hiring or selection, which is both Gallup’s position and mine.

Matt Goode is a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach.

Two ways in, depending on what the school is comfortable with.

• Instrument-based. The OBD. CliftonStrengths® and the EQ-i 2.0, both reports issued in full and unaltered, plus a written read in my own words of what the two together suggest about how this person operates under pressure, and a 1:1 debrief. Codes are bought on the participant’s behalf and the results are theirs to keep.
• Conversation-based. No instrument at all. Structured, confidential conversations with the leader and a set of colleagues who see them work, then a written profile: where intention and impact match, where they do not, and what to do about it. For evaluation cycles and board contexts where a personality instrument is the wrong object to put on the table.

Most school conflict that looks like a personality problem is a decision-rights problem wearing a costume. Nobody said whether this was the head’s call, the cabinet’s call, a consultation, or a genuine consensus, so everyone assumed the version that suited them and somebody left the meeting feeling overruled.

A working session, then a written map: which decisions belong where, between board and head, head and cabinet, cabinet and department. Decided before the meeting rather than during it.

Schools accumulate responsibilities the way attics accumulate boxes. Someone agreed to run the thing in 2019 and nobody has opened the question since.

Two pieces, usually bought together. A seminar on how to hand work over so it stays handed over, aimed at chairs and directors. And a role-clarity review that puts every recurring responsibility in the division against a name, an authority level and a deadline, which is usually the first time anyone has seen the whole list.

A keynote at an all-staff meeting or a faculty meeting, an August in-service day, a cabinet retreat, a conference session, or a new and emerging leaders institute.

One-off speaking engagements are available and are often the first thing a school books. Designed for the group in the room and the thing the school is actually trying to move, not delivered off a shelf.

Participants leave with something they can use on the Monday. That is the whole test.

The one item on this page that is not about leadership, and the one nobody else is offering.

Advisory already has the time. Roughly a hundred and twenty hours with the same adult across four years. What it usually lacks is a vocabulary, and a recognition that advising is not the same skill as teaching. Your advisors were hired as content and pedagogy experts. Sitting with a fifteen-year-old who will not say what is wrong is a different job, and almost nobody was trained for it.

Built on the OWN framework and made for the fifteen-minute conversation an advisor actually has on a Tuesday rather than the workshop nobody has time for. Your advisors deliver it. Training, prompts organized by grade and behavior, a parent evening, and language students can use in essays and interviews that is genuinely their own.