L1. Lead by example
Model the behaviours you expect from others. Your actions set the standard.
Resources to support growth in this behaviour
Whether this behaviour has been chosen through Step 1. Diagnose, highlighted through reflection or coaching, or identified as a school or trust priority, you can now follow the steps below to develop and embed it in your daily leadership practice.
Step 2. Learn: Read Everyone Succeeds: 54 Leadership Behaviours to Transform Your School to understand what great leadership looks like in practice. Each behaviour is grounded in research and real examples from schools and businesses.
Step 3. Reflect: Use the Everyone Succeeds Workbook to apply ideas to your own context.
Guided reflection, practical actions, and space for planning turn understanding into improvement.
Step 4. Apply: Work through the Leadership Toolkit for this behaviour. Use the Lead by Example toolkit to reflect on your daily actions and ensure your behaviour sets the standard you want others to follow.
Step 5. Coach and practice: Use the Lead by example Coach and Practise Frameworks to strengthen the behaviour through reflection on visible behaviour and coaching questions about credibility, practising alignment between words and actions so expectations are modelled, not stated.
These can be used individually or with colleagues to embed key behaviours.
Step 6. Plan: Set measurable goals using the 90 Day Leadership Planner.
Turn improvement into action by tracking your focus and progress over time, with completed examples for different career stages.
Step 7. Lead: Apply your learning to real situations through the Scenario Finder.
Over fifty scenarios link directly to the behaviours that help you solve the challenges that matter most in your school.
One book suggestion
Leaders Eat Last – Simon Sinek (2014).
This book reinforces the behaviour by showing how modelling actions and values shape culture more powerfully than instruction. Buy the book.
References from the Everyone Succeeds book
Covey, S.R., (2004). The 7 habits of highly effective people: Powerful lessons in personal change. New York: Fireside.
Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R. and McKee, A. (2002). Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Lencioni, P.M., (2012). The advantage: Why organisational health trumps everything else in business. John Wiley & Sons.