Growth Coaching International has found everyday conversations in schools hold untapped potential to shape thinking, build leadership capacity, and improve performance when approached with greater intention.
It begins, as it often does in schools, with a simple question.
“Have you got a minute?”
In corridors, staffrooms and between classes, these moments unfold constantly – brief, unscheduled conversations where a colleague pauses, talks, and thinks aloud.
For Mr Chris Munro, Executive Director at Growth Coaching International (GCI) – part of the Instructional Coaching Group – these interactions are not interruptions, but opportunities.
It is this premise – refining how leaders respond in those moments – that underpinned his session at the Capacity Building School Libraries Conference at the National Education Summit in Brisbane, where GCI was a sponsor.
GCI is an Australia-based professional learning organisation that helps educators, school leaders, and organisations improve performance through coaching, mentoring, and leadership development. They provide training, accreditation programs, and consultancy services designed to build stronger communication, collaboration, and coaching cultures in schools and workplaces.
“It’s literally in these incidental, unscheduled moments that aren’t in our calendar. A discerning conversation leader can actually turn those moments into learning conversations,” he says.
“A learning conversation is one where we support the thinking and the progress of our conversation partner – that’s a coaching way of leading.”
That idea – leadership enacted through conversation – sits at the centre of Mr Munro’s work, and of Growth Talk: A Coaching Way of Leading in Schools, the book he co-authored with GCI founder Mr John Campbell.
Mr Munro brings more than three decades of experience across schools and higher education to his work, with a career that has steadily moved toward adult learning and leadership development.
A trained secondary design and technology teacher, Mr Munro began his career in Scotland before moving into teacher education. He later spent five years at the University of Aberdeen as a teaching fellow, before then relocating to Australia.
“I’ve been in Australia for 15 years now. I initially taught at Williamstown High School as a leading teacher in professional learning and then as dean of professional practice at St Kevin’s College in Toorak.”
He joined GCI nearly a decade ago after being recognised for his experience of implementing coaching approaches in schools. Today, his work spans individual coaching and system-wide leadership development.
“We started as a coaching organisation. We still are; we provide coaching services and our consultants maintain a caseload of school leaders, individuals, mostly in education.”
Coaching as personalised PD
For Mr Munro, coaching is not about advice, but about creating space for thinking.
“We work with school leaders on pressing issues. It’s basically a thinking space for them. And that’s the main value of it,” he says.
“I see it as a form of professional development in its own right, a personalised form of professional development – an empowering and professionalising way of conversing.”
That support is often used at key points in leaders’ careers.
“It can range from a few coaching sessions to get over a hump – often it’s a transition point in their leadership. We often provide coaching for people who are new leaders. In some cases, coaching is built into new principal induction programs,” Mr Munro says.
Alongside one-to-one work, schools engage GCI to build internal capability.
“We often have school leaders say, ‘Can you come and work with my staff? How can we build the capacity internally to have conversations that are more like this?’,” he explains.
This type of training is frequently delivered in schools themselves, with the advantage being internal team building that’s tailored to the school’s own context.
“The aim is not to introduce new structures, but to embed new ways of interacting within existing ones,” Mr Munro says.
Leadership through conversation
At the summit in Brisbane, Mr Munro’s session returned to an idea explored in Growth Talk – that leadership is enacted through everyday conversations.
“There’s a really high proportion of conversational opportunities or learning opportunities that aren’t planned and aren’t scheduled,” he says.
“They can happen anywhere. It may be in a team setting. It may be in an incidental one-to-one setting. It may be in a formal meeting you scheduled.”
For Mr Munro, leadership is not separate from these exchanges – it happens through them.
“Leaders at any level enact their leadership through conversation; progress, thinking, change, alignment… all those things you want as a leader are enacted literally one conversation at a time.”
Building capability in everyday moments
A key aspect of this work is building coaching capability across different leadership levels.
“Most of the people we train are leaders – they’re in some position of influence but they’re not always top of the organisational hierarchy. This includes faculty and middle leaders, and staff across the school. Librarians are in positions of leadership and influence too,” Mr Munro says.
The emphasis is not on ‘who’ but on ‘how’ leaders respond in the moment.
“How do we show up and how do we discern what kind of conversation this needs to be right now? Having the presence and attentiveness to be able to do that is quite a skill,” he says.
Rather than stepping out for formal coaching sessions, leaders are encouraged to bring these practices into their day-to-day interactions.
Much of GCI’s recent work has focused on bringing structured coaching techniques into these everyday interactions.
“This is about bringing the skills, the dispositions, the techniques grounded in evidence from formal coaching, to the myriad of conversational contexts through which leaders lead,” Mr Munro says.
The impact, he says, is cumulative.
“Change and progress are enacted one conversation at a time.”
For more information on Growth Coaching International’s courses, visit www.growthcoaching.com.au
