Product reviews for Leadership Dialogues

Like many school leaders I have read and forgotten far too many books on school leadership. Why would we possibly want another one?

-˜Leadership Dialogues' does something rather different from all the others - and it's designed to use collectively with fellow members of the school's wider leadership. We know that successful leadership needs to be rooted in vision and values, underpinned by courage and a sense of judging when to push and when to step back. We know all about the grand stuff of leadership. But it's all too easy for these principles and values to be squeezed out by real life. An incident at break, a problem with buses, another staffing issue - all of these can knock us unwittingly yet disastrously us off course. Suddenly our optimism of September is mired in the grim day-to-day realities of November. Our idealism and moral fervour unravel.

That's why I enjoyed this book by John West Burnham and Dave Harris so much. It's a practical book about principles, a set of questions and provocations to be deployed by leadership teams in order to hold a regular mirror up to what we are doing and how.

The format is simple, pithy, deeply informative, and full of challenging questions and suggestions that will help constantly to re-root us in what matters most, to think about what our priorities are and why.

From where I sit, almost thirteen years into headship, -˜Leadership Dialogues' feels like a necessary and indispensable text. I can't think how I got this far without it.