The Leadership Playbook is a research-based professional learning series that supports school and district leaders in developing shared leadership practices that strengthen culture, collaboration, and systemwide coherence. Through six interactive sessions grounded in the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders, participants build practical skills to lead teams, grow talent, coach others, and facilitate meaningful adult learning.
How We Help
WestEd’s Leadership Playbook helps leaders strengthen the interpersonal skills required to move people, work, and vision forward. The service focuses on how leaders build self-awareness, build and sustain strong professional relationships, develop the people they lead, and create the conditions for productive collaboration.
Across six structured sessions, leaders practice skills such as emotional intelligence, relationship management, team development, coaching conversations, and effective facilitation. Participants learn how to engage others around shared priorities with clarity and purpose and lead meetings that result in alignment and action. By strengthening these human-centered leadership practices, the Leadership Playbook supports leaders in building commitment, growing talent, and sustaining momentum for improvement across their schools and systems.
Service Delivery
- Online or onsite
Who Will Benefit
The series is designed for instructional and non-instructional site leaders, teacher leaders, and district leaders. Whether you support teaching and learning, operations, or student services, the Leadership Playbook is for anyone working to strengthen leadership across schools and systems.
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“I’ve read countless leadership books, articles, and blogs, but the Playbook feels different. The sessions are personal and meaningful because they focus on real, intentional leadership. Each session begins with reflective activities that invite us to look inward as well as outward, and that reflection has directly influenced how I’ve built and supported my own leadership team.”
— Anakonia Matsumoto, EdD, Principal, Hawthorne Math and Science Academy
I think with many of the exercises that we went through, there was an individual piece before there was a systems piece. There was a lot of learning about your own leadership style—how you make decisions and how you engage with people. You had to understand how you fit before you could put yourself into a system. This work through The Leadership Playbook gave leaders the opportunity and time to do that.
—Dr. Kathy Hinz,
Superintendent, Crystal Lake Elementary District 47
Featured Experts
Lauryn Fullerton
Ayele Dodoo
Connecting Research With Practice
The Leadership Playbook is grounded in research-based leadership and adult learning frameworks that support coherent, systemwide improvement. Its design is anchored in the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL), ensuring alignment with evidence-based leadership practices across roles
Session content draws on research related to emotional intelligence, systems thinking, relationship management, team development, coaching, and facilitation.
Delivery emphasizes reflection, practice, and application through structured protocols that translate research into daily leadership routines.
More Related to This Service
Blogs & Podcasts
Research insights and stories designed to inform, engage, and inspire.
