School leadership has a powerful influence on what students learn and experience in school. Across decades of research, strong leadership has been consistently linked to improvements in teaching quality, school culture and pupil outcomes.

Large-scale studies reinforce this conclusion. Waters, Marzano and McNulty (2003) identified a measurable relationship between leadership and student achievement, while Leithwood, Day, Sammons, Harris and Hopkins (2008) concluded that leadership is second only to classroom instruction among school-related factors influencing what students learn.

The evidence is clear: leadership plays a critical role in school improvement.

Yet this evidence raises an important question for practising leaders. If leadership is so influential, why is it often difficult to describe what effective leaders actually do?

The “black box” of leadership

Hallinger and Heck (1996) described leadership as a “black box”: leadership has an impact, but the specific actions that produce that impact are often difficult to see clearly.

Much of the leadership literature, therefore, focuses on broad ideas such as building trust, developing people, setting a vision, or creating culture. These ideas are valuable, but they are often described at a level that makes them difficult to translate into daily practice.

For leaders working in busy schools, improvement depends on something more concrete. Leaders need to be able to see, practise and refine specific actions.

The importance of behavioural precision

Research on professional learning highlights the importance of clarity in what we are trying to improve.

Work by Rob Coe, Stuart Kime and colleagues shows that improvement depends on clearly defined actions that can be practised deliberately.

Without this clarity:

• Leadership development can remain abstract
• Improvement becomes inconsistent
• Practice is hard to replicate

Leaders may understand what they are aiming for, but lack a shared language to describe what effective leadership looks like in action. This is where codification becomes important.

What codification means

Codification is the process of identifying the specific behaviours that experts demonstrate and organising them so others can learn from them.

Many professions improve once effective practice is codified:

• Medicine codifies diagnostic procedures
• Sport codifies technical movements
• Teaching has increasingly codified classroom practice

Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion is a well-known example in education. By identifying and naming specific techniques, it made effective teaching visible and learnable across thousands of classrooms.

Codification makes expertise visible and it turns instinctive practice into something that can be shared and developed.

Codifying leadership behaviours

Leadership has rarely been codified in this way.

Outstanding school leaders often demonstrate powerful behaviours instinctively. They:

• Ask the right questions
• Structure meetings effectively
• Prioritise the right work
• Respond calmly in challenging situations.

However, these behaviours are rarely captured, named and organised systematically. As a result, leadership excellence often remains difficult to replicate across schools.

Codifying leadership behaviours

The Everyone Succeeds framework was created to address this gap. It identifies 54 observable leadership behaviours drawn from research and the practice of effective school leaders.

These behaviours can be:

• seen in practice
• clearly described and named
• deliberately practised and refined
• coached and developed over time
• applied across different contexts

This behavioural precision makes leadership development more practical, learnable and scalable.

Rather than relying on abstract ideas about leadership, the framework provides a shared language that helps leaders discuss, practise and strengthen their work.

From research to practice

The purpose of codifying leadership behaviours is not to add new theory, but to make existing knowledge usable.

The Everyone Succeeds framework translates research into behaviours that leaders can recognise and apply in their daily work. Instead of asking:

“What kind of leader should I be?”

Leaders can ask:

“Which behaviours will make the greatest difference in this situation?”

That shift makes leadership development more reliable, teachable, and consistent across schools.

Explore the 54 leadership behaviours →