Leadership development should not sit apart from the real work.
The best leadership grows around the work that matters most: strategy, culture, learning, identity, space, community and change. NoTosh helps leaders practise the conversations, choices, routines and behaviours that move ambitious ideas from intention to impact.
Where leadership gets stuck
Leadership work can become too generic.
A retreat creates warm agreement, but little change. A course builds energy, but not follow-through. A Board talks strategy, but not the trade-offs. Middle leaders are asked to implement priorities they had little part in shaping.
Everyone is busy. Not everyone is moving the same work.
What NoTosh does
We build leadership around live priorities.
We design retreats, cohorts, sprints and advisory processes that help leaders think strategically, work collaboratively and make progress on real initiatives while they learn.
Ewan McIntosh, NoTosh Founder
Great organisations do not rely on a few heroic leaders at the top.
They need leadership distributed through the system: Boards who ask better questions, senior teams who make clearer choices, and middle leaders who can turn direction into daily practice.
We Support Leadership at Three Levels
1. Governance and Board Leadership
For Boards, governors and executive leaders, we create the conditions for better strategic conversation.
This work is useful when you need to:
- define what excellence means now
- align Board and leadership around future direction
- prepare for leadership transition
- refresh Mission, Vision or Values
- make strategic choices before a full planning process
- build stronger governance habits
- surface tensions before they become decisions by drift
- create shared language between Board and executive leadership
Our retreats and advisory work are designed before the room: interviews, provocations, pre-thinking, facilitation and synthesis. This not another away day. Preparation like this gives a sharper basis for the decisions ahead.
2. Strategic Leadership
Senior leaders take responsibility for delivering the work between aspiration and implementation.
We help leadership teams build the routines, language and decision-making habits that make strategy usable.
This can include:
- senior leadership team development
- strategy implementation support
- OKRs and priority-setting
- implementation sprints
- decision-making routines
- communication and alignment
- coaching for strategic projects
- support for hard conversations
- change leadership around spaces, brand or curriculum
The work is always practical and applied, because it is built around the ideas your team is already trying to move.
We help leaders focus the work, involve the right people, make choices visible and learn as they go.
3. Middle Leadership Development
Middle leaders are often where strategy succeeds or stalls.
They are close enough to practice to see what is really happening every day, but far enough from senior leadership to need skills of influence, trust and practical team tools.
NoTosh has worked with over 700 aspiring and current leaders through our Leading from the Middle program, with participants from hundreds of schools in more than 50 countries. The programme helps leaders think strategically, influence senior leaders, lead teams, build relationships and turn good ideas into action.
We can support middle leaders through:
- bespoke school or group cohorts
- implementation sprints around live initiatives in your school
- leadership drop-ins and coaching
- strategic alignment with your school or organisation priorities
- practical tools for influence, collaboration and momentum
Learning about leadership is pointless unless you have a chance to put new ideas into practice. So we believe Middle Leaders must learn about leadership while working on real, live projects in school, and design our programs on that principle.