The research in 60 seconds
Researchers studied group coaching within national school leadership programmes at one Norwegian and one Swedish university. The qualitative study involved 12 Norwegian and 21 Swedish school leaders, using observations alongside questionnaires or follow-up interviews. Leaders brought challenges involving individual staff, leadership teams and themselves as leaders. Across both programmes, they said coaching helped them clarify problems, separate different parts of a challenge and consider new responses. The Norwegian programme also used 360-degree preparation and explicit action planning; researchers suggest these differences may have influenced both the issues leaders raised and what happened afterwards.
So what?
The interesting point is not simply that leaders found talking with other leaders helpful. The coaching was deliberately structured: one person presented a real challenge, colleagues asked clarifying questions, the group explored different interpretations, the leader listened, and only then considered what to do next.
That matters because leadership problems often arrive already framed: this teacher is resistant, my assistant principals are not taking responsibility, I need to manage my time better. The coaching sometimes helped leaders see a wider problem — including their own behaviour, expectations, boundaries or organisational conditions. In several Swedish cases, for example, difficulties initially attributed to an individual teacher came to be understood as something that also needed attention at group or organisational level.
The comparison between programmes is suggestive rather than conclusive. Norwegian participants completed 360-degree interviews before coaching and finished with a more explicit action-planning process. They were also more likely than the Swedish participants to bring challenges concerning themselves as leaders. The researchers propose that the preparation may have encouraged greater self-reflection, while action planning may have helped translate reflection into practice. But this was not an experiment, the groups were small, and the programmes differed in other ways too. We cannot say the preparation or action planning caused those differences.
For schools, the practical question may therefore be less “Should we introduce coaching?” and more “How do we make leadership conversations more likely to change what someone notices and does?” This study points towards a useful sequence: arrive with evidence, interrogate the framing of the problem, hear perspectives you would not generate alone, and leave with something concrete to test.
For school leaders
1. Ask leaders to prepare evidence, not just a problem.
Before a coaching or leadership-development conversation, ask the person bringing the issue to gather something that might challenge their own account: feedback from colleagues, stakeholder perspectives, a short self-assessment or examples of what has actually happened. The Norwegian programme suggests that this kind of preparation may make it easier for leaders to examine their own role in the problem rather than locate it entirely elsewhere.
2. Treat the first version of a leadership problem as provisional.
If a leader says, “This teacher is the problem,” or “My team will not take responsibility,” resist moving immediately to solutions. Ask whether the issue sits with an individual, a relationship, a team, the wider organisation, the leader’s own behaviour, or several of these at once. In the study, some challenges became more useful to work on only after they were reframed.
3. Build a return loop into professional learning.
Do not finish with “That was useful.” Finish with a specific action to try, then come back to it. The research does not establish that action planning produces better outcomes, but the contrast between the two programmes gives a good reason to distinguish reflection from implementation rather than assume one automatically leads to the other.
