AN ALTERNATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP
Naomi Ward & Kyra Kellawan are the Heads of Learning and Engagement at MSB: a coaching organisation dedicated to making education more human. Their work has shown them that giving leaders the time and space to regenerate themselves leads to better outcomes, cultures, and relationships in schools.
Being present
Successful leadership in schools today is no small feat. It’s not just about managing policy, curriculum, or team performance. It’s about tending to the emotional, cultural, and human ecology of your school, while navigating pressure, pace, and complexity.
In our experience as educators and coaches, we’ve come to believe that the most transformational shift any school leader can make isn’t establishing a new system or strategy. It’s about presence. And that presence – grounded, relational, reflective – is the starting point of regenerative leadership.
Why regeneration? Why now?
The dominant leadership model in many schools still revolves around performance: outputs, outcomes, evidence. But the global conversation is shifting. Educators like Laura Storm and Giles Hutchins argue that our leadership models must now mirror the wisdom of living systems. In Regenerative Leadership (2019), they write:
“Regenerative leadership is leading in a way that is life-affirming – for ourselves, our teams, our organisations, and the wider systems we’re part of.”
In short: if your leadership is depleting you, it’s likely depleting others too.
Regeneration offers a counter-cultural path. One that begins not with doing more, but with reconnecting to who you are, and how you lead, when you are most resourced.
This is not soft. It’s strategic. This is not new-age. It’s deeply human. We call our way of working resourcing. That means helping leaders map their internal and external sources of strength – body, mind, spirit, emotions, and environment. And along the way, in resourcing ourselves to work in more regenerative ways, we’ve learned a few lessons we think are worth sharing.
Learning #1: Presence is the starting point
Over the past few years, we’ve explored what makes school-based coaching truly transformative. Not just effective. Transformative.
Our conversations with emotional intelligence practitioners, coaching elders, and regenerative educators – including Kenny Peavy, whose work draws from ecological literacy and outdoor education, and Noan Fesnoux, who reminded us in a recent podcast that the most powerful learning doesn’t come from instruction.
It comes from connection. From relational safety. From emotional attunement. From creating spaces where people can actually show up. So we began with a question: what kind of leadership grows people?
The answer wasn’t in a toolkit or a fixed framework. It lives in a philosophy – one that could stretch the mind, stir the heart, ground the body, and shape our identity, as offered to us by our work in dialogue with the founder of Raising Racial Consciousness, coach, and EQ practitioner: Bernice Hewson. Not a script. A way of being.
Learning #2: Do what regenerates you
If there’s one pattern we’ve seen in school leadership again and again, it’s this: the leaders who stay well are the ones who know how to resource themselves.
That doesn’t necessarily mean spa days or massages (although those help too). It means mapping your sources of strength — in body, mind, spirit, relationships, and environment — and making them non-negotiable. This is what Kenny Peavy might call “ecological self-awareness” — the ability to know where your energy comes from, and what takes it away.
As one international school principal recently told us:
“It’s not just about the coaching tools. It’s about who I am when I’m in the room. That’s what people feel. That’s what changes things.”
Leading regeneratively means making room for your full humanity. Not just your expertise. Not just your job description. It also means letting go of seductive but ultimately depleting patterns, like needing to be in control, having the answers, or always being available. These patterns might get things done. But they also create exhaustion. And when your team mirrors that pace, you start to lose the relational magic that makes schools truly work.
Learning #3: Know what you won’t do
Articulating a regenerative leadership philosophy isn’t just about knowing what you stand for. It’s about knowing what you refuse. We’ve come to name these as our acts of refusal. Ours are: conscious choices to say no to surface-level CPD, to leadership development that prioritises optics over depth, and to cultures that reward over-functioning while eroding well-being. Educator and author Laura Storm encourages leaders to “create the conditions for life to thrive.” Sometimes, that means asking hard questions:
- Whose voices are we centering?
- What stories are we perpetuating?
- Are we building cultures of control — or cultures of trust?
These questions don’t have tidy answers. But they offer a place to begin again.
Learning #4: Keep your principles in sight
Eventually, our learning within our own organisation distilled into a set of regenerative principles: not rules, but reminders. Anchors to hold onto when the work gets hard.
They sound like this:
- Be like water.
- What you pay attention to grows.
- Small is good, small is all.
- Hold the boundary, trust the process.
- Never a failure, always a lesson.
- Less prep, more presence.
- See the people, trust the people.
You don’t need to adopt them wholesale. Try choosing one. Write it on a sticky note. Test it in your next 1:1 or staff meeting. Watch what shifts.
These principles come from real conversations, not theory. And they offer an alternative to the rigid, depleting models many educators inherited.
Learning #5: This work is ongoing
Regenerative leadership is not a destination. It’s a practice. It’s how you show up when you’re tired. How you listen when you don’t know what to say. How you create space – even a little – for others to breathe, feel seen, and belong.
And above all, it’s about remembering that you are not a machine. You are a human being, in a deeply human profession. The way you lead matters. And you’re allowed to lead in a way that gives you life.
Naomi Ward is Head of Learning at MSB. As a CTI-trained Coach, Naomi will create the space for you to slow down to stillness, remember what matters most, and take skilful action from there.
Kyra Kellawan is Head of Engagement at MSB. Kyra has over 17 years’ experience in international education as guidance counsellor, fundraiser, and alumni manager.
About MSB
MSB offers regenerative leadership coaching and coach education for international school leaders. In January 2026, MSB will host interbeing, a human-centered gathering in Dubai for school leaders. www.makingstuffbetter.com
FEATURE IMAGE: by by Frederik Merten on Unsplash
Support Images: by Wolfgang Hasselmann , Getty Images For Unsplash+ & Jr Korpa on Unsplash
