Great leadership, like great teaching, is built through practice. Reading, reflection, and feedback all matter, but lasting improvement only comes when leaders practice what they want to get right, again and again, until the right actions become automatic. As Doug Lemov reminds us, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent” (2012).

In schools, leaders are often expected to learn complex interpersonal and strategic skills simply by doing the job. Yet the highest-performing organisations in the world understand that performance is built in training, not in the moment of execution. Doctors, pilots, athletes, and musicians all practise deliberately. School leaders can do the same.

Leadership behaviours do not improve through intention alone. They improve through deliberate, structured practice. This section of the website provides a framework for turning insight into action, helping leaders rehearse and refine the habits that define effective leadership.

The focus here is incremental coaching: short, purposeful practice episodes that strengthen specific behaviours until they become natural. Each activity is designed to transform ideas from the main chapters, and from the toolkits, into visible, lasting change in daily leadership.

While the coaching yourself section of the site explores how to coach yourself through reflection and self-questioning, this section is about coaching in action. It is about practising, receiving feedback, and embedding habits. Used together, the two approaches create a complete cycle of improvement: practise, reflect, and refine.

The Case for Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice means breaking down complex behaviours into small, specific actions and rehearsing them with focus and feedback. It’s about building fluency, not theory; training your instincts so that composure, clarity, and consistency become part of how you lead every day.

Incremental coaching, drawn from Lemov’s Practice Perfect and Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto (2010), builds improvement one step at a time. Instead of broad targets, leaders work on one precise skill, practise it in a safe space, receive feedback, and refine it before moving on. The aim is steady, compound growth rather than occasional leaps of inspiration.

How to Use This Section

Each behaviour in this section includes three elements:

• Action Steps – the key moves that bring the behaviour to life.
• Key Questions – prompts for coaching and reflection.
• Practice – short, focused activities that allow leaders to rehearse and refine the behaviour in context.

These practice activities are designed to be real, actionable, and observable. They can be used in coaching sessions, leadership meetings, or short drop-in rehearsals. The goal is to help leaders close the gap between knowing and doing, making leadership behaviours visible and repeatable across the school.

Why It Matters

When leaders practise deliberately, they create a culture of continual improvement. They model humility, show that feedback is valued, and build a team that learns together. As Lemov puts it, “The best never stop practising.”

This section provides the structure to make that mindset practical, to move beyond reflection into rehearsal, and from theory into mastery. Over time, these small, consistent moments of practice become the habits that define the culture and performance of your school.

References

Lemov, D., Woolway, E. and Yezzi, K. (2012) Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gawande, A. (2010) The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. London: Profile Books.