T1. Know your team
Understand the strengths, motivations, and needs of individuals. Knowing your team enables better leadership.
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 Know Your Team toolkit to deepen your understanding of people’s strengths, motivations, and needs so you can lead them effectively.
Step 5. Coach and practice: Use the Know your team Coach and Practise Frameworks to strengthen the behaviour through reflection on individuals and coaching questions about motivation, rehearsing personal understanding so decisions fit people rather than assumptions.
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
First, Break All the Rules – Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman (1999).
This book deepens the behaviour by showing how knowing strengths and motivations enables better deployment and stronger relationships. Buy the book.
References from the Everyone Succeeds book
Seligman, M.E. and Csikszentmihalyi, M., (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction (Vol. 55, No. 1, p. 5). American Psychological Association.