How heads of service can maintain curiosity in practice

By now you will have a clearer sense of how you might want to develop your professional curiosity. This will help encourage a curious approach to understanding:

yourself as a head of service
your teams
the broader context in which your service operates

These activities will help you maintain curiosity as a leader by ensuring alignment with:

your core values and strategic goals
building strong, effective relationships across the organisation
advocating for the best interests of children, families, and the service as a whole

By actively engaging in these areas, you’ll strengthen your leadership approach, ensuring your service remains reflective, adaptive, and strategically focused. These activities are separated into suggestions that will benefit you, your team, and your work with wider stakeholders.

Which of the activities below do you think you, your supervisees and service would most benefit from doing? Choose at least one activity from each section to experiment with in your leadership practice.

Thinking about yourself

Personal values workshop

Set aside time to reflect on your personal values such as integrity, transparency and fairness. Write down examples of recent leadership decisions:

that aligned with these values
where you felt conflicted

Note the effect that these decisions may have had on others. Use this to evaluate if your day-to-day leadership aligns with your core principles, and refine your next steps based on what you learn.

Peer feedback sessions

Organise informal sessions to discuss leadership challenges with other senior leaders you trust. Exchange feedback on recent decisions, leadership dilemmas, or personal growth areas. Ask for honest feedback on how you handled certain situations and use their insights to refine your leadership approach.

Thinking about your team

Visibility rounds

Schedule regular visibility rounds where you:

spend time with teams across the service
listen to their experiences
understand their challenges
gather feedback on leadership and service delivery

Systemic practice review

Task your team managers with conducting a systemic review of their team’s service delivery. This will allow you to explore how structural factors such as poverty and discrimination are affecting families. Invite them to a meeting where they can all feedback their findings. Then plan together how they are going to use this insight to shape service improvements and advocate for the rights of those most affected.

Thinking about the wider system

Leadership stability audit

Conduct an internal audit of leadership stability across all levels of the service. Assess areas where leadership might be inconsistent or lacking and create strategies to ensure stable, effective governance and high-quality supervision throughout the organisation.

Political and corporate context briefings

Stay informed of changes in the local and national political landscape. You can do this by engaging in briefings and strategy sessions both within your organisation and with others that have shared interests. Ensure these insights are shared with your leadership team so that they can adapt to changing political contexts.

By engaging in these activities, you can deepen your curiosity and enhance your leadership approach as a head of service. This ensures that your service remains inclusive, aligned with your values, and focused on the best interests of children and families.

Over to you

Now that you’ve reviewed these activities, choose one from each section that you would like to experiment with. You can use the 4C leadership capability framework action plan to detail when and where you’ll try these out and reflect on their effect over time.

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The resources have been developed by Frontline in collaboration with DfE.
Published: 30 January 2025
Last updated: 30 January 2025

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