The Challenge
For many principals, leading in today’s environment feels like carrying a mountain on their shoulders. Issues like disengaged students, teacher burnout, or cultural divisions don’t come with clear answers. Yet too often, these burdens fall disproportionately on school leaders, leaving them feeling isolated.
At Warakirri College, a senior leader reflected that while their team was committed and skilled, they often found themselves “firefighting” problems rather than working strategically. Conversations were fragmented, and adaptive challenges felt too big to hold collectively.
The Leadership Response
The Rising Team for Schools (RT4S) platform was designed precisely for this context. Structured “kits” provide school leadership teams with a guided process to reflect, build trust, and co-create solutions. Unlike compliance-driven frameworks, Rising Team sessions create space for the relational and adaptive dimensions of leadership.
At Warakirri, the team used the kits to work on issues ranging from student engagement strategies to staff wellbeing initiatives. The tools helped surface assumptions and unspoken frustrations, while also aligning the team around shared purpose.
Complexity Leadership in Action
This was complexity leadership in practice:
- Symbiotic leadership as the team moved from hierarchical problem-solving to relational co-creation.
- Collective efficacy as the group developed belief in their shared capacity to act.
- Strategic planning as learning as they treated the kits not as a fixed plan, but a cycle of reflection and adaptation.
One principal summed it up powerfully:
“It was the first time our team felt like we were addressing complexity together, not carrying it alone.”
Results and Insights
The immediate outcome was a stronger sense of shared ownership. Staff described feeling more confident in tackling complex issues, knowing they had collective backing. Early evaluations also suggested that teams using Rising Team had greater clarity in decision-making and improved relational trust.
Implications for Schools
This case demonstrates a key lesson: complex challenges demand collective solutions. By providing a scaffold for shared leadership, Rising Team reduces the isolation of principals and empowers whole teams to lead adaptively.
“Complexity is too heavy to carry alone. Rising Team showed us how to share the load.”
At the Menzies Leadership Foundation, we believe leadership is not about hierarchy — it’s about humanity. It lives in classrooms, corridors, and communities where people choose to lead together through uncertainty.
In the Menzies School Leadership Incubator, we see leadership that learns, adapts, and shares responsibility. When school leaders collaborate across boundaries, capacity multiplies — and education becomes a collective act of care.
Through partnerships with schools, researchers, and system leaders, we’re helping shape a new story of leadership in education: one grounded in trust, curiosity, and courage.
Join us as we continue to explore how complexity leadership can strengthen schools, empower communities, and build leadership for the greater good.
