I know that often the hardest bit of what we do is the human bit and it's important because it affects everything we do, one way or another...

On a day where we have been meeting with secondary headteachers, each of us needs to look carefully at the way we work with our colleagues - conversation by conversation, project by project, meeting by meeting - and work even harder to:

• cultivate relationships and cultures to create openness, honesty, trust and understanding;
• build an open-minded culture where change, innovation and ideas and 'our shared agenda' isn't overshadowed and undermined by personal agendas.
• create intense debate about ideas to ensure we continue to make real progress and minimise the draining effect of conflict, preciousness and compartmentalisation;
• maximise individual talent and organisational strength through networking, sharing ideas and pooling information;
• effectively deal with individual egos which can limit performance and prevent innovation and change.

Chris