Welcome to district leadership: 7 things you need to know

The reason that the move from school to district leadership feels like such a big step to many leaders is because the skills that made you a successful— and promotable—principal are in some way counterproductive for district leaders.
ByDana Godek and Michael Moore

July is an exciting time in school districts. The students are out of school. The budget is adopted. And there are people in new leadership roles. Are you newly promoted? Are you moving from school leadership to district leadership? Congratulations!

All new roles present challenges, but in our experience the transition from the principalship to a district role feels like a very big step to many people.

In this article, we’ll look at why that’s the case. First, we’ll define district leader success criteria. Then we’ll discuss why, as the cliche says, ‘What got you here, won’t get you there.” Finally, we’ll look at the leadership shifts—in perspective, behavior and priorities—that provide a path into effective district leadership.

6 keys to district leadership

The core challenge for new district leaders is about identity. You got promoted because of your success leading adults who reported to you. While you certainly had a boss or two, you spent nearly all your time as The Boss (apologies Bruce!) at your school.

As a district leader, you’ll spend most of your time surrounded by colleagues and by more senior leaders. One newly promoted leader told us, “I used to make 30 quick decisions in a day as a principal and now every decision I need to make requires a meeting or a committee.”

As you build a new identity as a district leader, consider how will you be judged given the daily attention you’ll be getting from everyone around you. We believe these six success criteria can serve as a scorecard:

  1. Achievement of district goals. All district leaders are expected to understand, promote and execute the district’s goals.
  2. Improved student outcomes. As a school principal you had a direct impact on student outcomes. Now your impact will be less direct, but unless you’re in a purely operational role you’re still expected to improve student performance.
  3. Effective team functioning. Because of the transparency and cross-functional nature of district work, you’ll be judged by your ability to keep your team on-time and on-task.
  4. Successful cross functional work. While it’s important to know your “lane,” it’s also important to be seen as a team player by colleagues and be seen by senior leaders as someone who can manage projects.
  5. Sustainable initiatives. You’ll likely be expected to design and implement new projects, anticipate trends in your area of responsibility and determine what’s worth spending time and energy on. If you are implementing larger district initiatives, you will want to use strong change management practices to ensure both fidelity and sustainability.
  6. Stakeholder satisfaction. Getting to know your end-users and customers quickly will be critical, even if it’s your hometown (sorry again Bruce). You need to understand who they are and what they need and confirm those findings with the senior team in relation to the broader district goals.

Why is district leadership different?

Earlier, we used the cliché: “what got you here, won’t get you there.” The reason that the move from school to district leadership feels like such a big step to many leaders is because the skills that made you a successful— and promotable—principal are in some way counterproductive for district leaders.

:Superintendent turnover : Frenzy of moves as school year ends

As a principal you were able to build strong relationships with staff and students because you saw them everyday and got to know them. As a district leader, you’ll spend less time with more people making it hard to use relationships as your ‘go to’ appeal.

As a principal you could make dozens of quick decisions in a day and delegate tasks to direct reports. As a district leader, many decisions require discussion across teams or departments, stretching out the decision-making process.

As a principal you focused on things that were happening that day or as far out as the next break. You were excellent at “firefighting.” As a district leader, you are asked to think about next year and the next several years, reducing the level of urgency.

As a principal you were a generalist. You could build a master schedule, deal with an angry parent and give effective feedback to a new teacher. Except for the superintendent, district leaders are functional leaders, experts in important but narrow roles. You might be tempted to debate things that you experienced as a principal that didn’t seem quite right coming from a central office. Use these perspectives and trust your intuition with your team, but resist ‘fixing’ other departments until you know the lay of the land.

As a principal you established the political context. Others knew what was important to you, how you would react to different situations and how you managed others. As a district leader, you have been dropped into a complex political context where you don’t set the tone.

Making the shift

There is a path to becoming a successful district leader that will take at least a year to master but can be accelerated through intentional shifts in perspective and behavior. Those shifts are:

  1. Observe and learn the political context. You have leadership skills and capabilities but not all the context to use them effectively. Ty Wiggins, author of The New CEO offers this advice: “If it’s on fire, fix it. If it’s smoldering leave it alone until you have more context.”
  2. Be strategic. Lengthen your time horizon to focus on the district’s goals. Trust the managers on your team to develop the tactics for getting work done.
  3. Build your team. Distribute leadership across the team and make sure they can articulate and measure their goals. Provide training and coaching. Interact intentionally with them individually and collectively.
  4. Support your colleagues. Be curious about how they work and make decisions. Have their back in meetings. Offer opportunities to work together on small wins.
  5. Focus on your function but don’t become an island. We agree with Patrick Lencioni’s focus on “Team #1”—your boss and their team—but it’s also important to master your team’s specific workflow and production.
  6. Don’t talk about the work, do the work. Let a good ol’ dry erase board in your office talk about the work for you. Your meeting calendar will prioritize your work quickly. Don’t let it. Prioritize the work and then your calendar. The number of meetings can quickly overwhelm you. When invited, ask why your attendance is needed and how you can best prepare and participate.
  7. Communicate and advocate. Celebrate success. Be humble about challenges. Make it easy for others across the organization to see what you are working on and how they’re connected to it. Be sure to state your team brand and department mission in most conversations so people get to know what you’re about and where you’re taking your team.

Congratulations on moving into a bigger role. You are likely on the way to even bigger and better things!

Your results ‘hinge’ on your senior leadership team

The meeting was already 30 minutes over time. People were looking at their phones. An assistant knocked on the door and asked someone to step out. “Are we done?” the superintendent asked as he stood up. Cabinet members gathered their things and walked out, talking quietly in small groups.

The frustrated superintendent looked at us: “I don’t need any more bright ideas from people who just want to show everyone how smart they are. The board wants to know why we’re not meeting our goals. I need people who can work together to get things done. Where are the people who will execute?”

There are few things directly under a superintendent’s control, but the senior leadership team is certainly one of them. Becoming more intentional about the team’s purpose, membership and meetings will make your life easier, bring energy to the work of your leaders and improve your results.

Purpose

By design, the superintendent serves as the hinge between the board and the district’s leadership. The board oversees the process through governance and monitoring. The senior leadership team oversees performance by managing people and resources. The superintendent is the only role holding and connecting both of those functions.

Senior leadership team performance is a concern in most organizations. More than half of senior executives report underperformance by their top team. McKinsey describes the challenge as “individual and institutional biases and clunky group dynamics.” By focusing on “dynamics, not mechanics”—that is process, not just content —senior leaders can work as a team, take advantage of different skills and perspectives and bring coherence to their work.

Patrick Lencioni calls this “Team #1.” Even if you’re familiar with the concept, we encourage you to take a moment to watch this linked video and reflect on the degree to which each of your senior leaders truly behave like your team is their Team #1.

In defining the purpose or mission of your senior leadership team, span of control is often a concern. Traditionally, an ideal span of control has been seen as six or seven direct reports, but recent research has made a case for a broader scope.

This increased span has been attributed to the need for the CEO to have easier access to more information, speed up decision-making, improve operational efficiency and foster better coordination. Paradoxically, a broader span of control improves accountability because no one sits between the CEO/superintendent and the senior leader who is responsible for results.

We’ve created a graphic to describe how any team should make the most of its time. The most senior teams in an organization should focus on the top-right functions – collaboration and creativity – with teams lower on the hierarchy addressing the less complex functions.

So, what should your senior leadership team collaborate on and create? The concept of time horizon comes into play here. You and your senior leaders are the only roles expected to look beyond the next 60 to 90 days. You want team members, individually and collectively, to be continuously ‘forward looking’: discussing the forces and resources in play, considering a wide range of scenarios and, pushing for rigor and creativity, but also mitigating risk. This includes making sure the senior leadership team has the superintendent’s back. Highly successful senior leaders use the time horizon to anticipate the field around the leader, both inside and out.

Senior leaders should be expected to be ‘in the arena’ with the superintendent when it comes to board member engagement, board preparation and presentations and governance-level conflict resolution. Second, similarly, as more community and stakeholder engagement becomes the norm, senior leaders should take on significant external-facing responsibilities. Expectation-setting, training and even role-playing may be needed before all members are comfortable stepping into these roles. The superintendent cannot do all the needed external-facing and political work alone.

The bottom line: The purposes of your senior leadership teams are creating long-term strategies for the district’s success, creating and collaborating on those strategies, executing and coordinating those projects and activities that lead to results, and extending the superintendent’s communication and engagement efforts with the board and community. No other teams or roles share these purposes.

Membership

You want to coach a star team, not just star players.

Corporate poet (yes, there is such a thing! ) David Whyte notes that: “Too often, we reward people who solve problems while ignoring those who prevent them. Instead of glorifying those who run around putting out fires, we need to create an organizational culture that empowers everyone to act responsibly at the first sign of smoke.” Culture, of course, starts at the top.

A strong senior leadership team has a mix of “T” and “I” shaped leaders. “I” shaped leaders have functional expertise. The CFO you trust completely with the district’s fiduciary responsibilities, for example. “T” shaped leaders successfully lead their function, while also having an organization-wide perspective: the bar across the T. If most team members are “I,” collaboration will be a challenge because everyone will “stay in their lane.” If most team members are “T,” moving from strategy to action may be a challenge.

While the “T and I” language is well known in the private sector, we suggest including a third shape (an “I” with a bar, top and bottom): those with social capital in the community, who will add values and historical perspective into the mix.

We sometimes see two membership mistakes. One is keeping a senior leader on the team who poorly represents you or the team. If you decide to commit to a “Team #1” approach it’s essential that each member’s loyalty is to the senior leadership team, not to their own team, a peer group or naysayers. As Ty Wiggins says: “Culture is the worst behavior you’ll tolerate.” And everyone watches the behavior of senior leaders.

The other mistake is to leave a mission-critical player off the senior leadership team because their title isn’t right, such as an executive director of accountability. If they’re that important to your success you should probably elevate their title, but even if you don’t, put them on the team.

Meetings

The senior leadership team is not a regular team or meeting. It is your team and meeting, and needs to meet your needs. That starts with being clear up-front about the level of decision-making. Wiggins suggests asking each team member, “Do you agree that people can disagree and still commit?” Of course, the right answer is, “Yes!” Those are the only kind of “yes men” you want on your team.

It’s important to explicitly foster a culture of vigorous debate. Be explicit about the ground rules and protocols you will use for such debate. This releases the power of the team to get the best from one another. It’s also easier when members know that the team discusses and debates, but ultimately that it’s you who will decide.

The toughest challenge in creating that culture is all leaders’ tendency to add value reflexively. Whenever possible, make your decision in the moment and unpack your reasoning. That’s a teachable moment for members and the team.

In addition to debate and decision-making, another key function of the senior leadership team is making and keeping commitments to the team. We’re fans of The 4 Disciplines of Execution but any method that records specific commitments made by members and then monitors progress will boost productivity and members’ engagement.

As professional facilitators, we plan on about two hours of preparation for each hour of meeting time and we encourage you to use a senior (but not executive) leader to play this role, ideally facilitating the meeting itself so that you can participate fully in your CEO role without managing the process. That preparation should include information-gathering, framing action items clearly, anticipating the need to bring other people into the meeting and tracking commitments from one meeting to another.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

Last month, we wrote an article about how to become successful district leaders. Our Six Success Criteria provide a scorecard for how your efforts to improve the senior leadership team are working. The stronger your team, the more satisfied (and rested) you’ll be as a superintendent.

Dont’ Drift Off the Cliff, Soar to the Sky, 90 Schools, Across 5 States

Like traditional public schools, charter public schools are facing pivotal decisions, particularly given the imminent deadline of September 30, 2024, to utilize pandemic relief funds from the ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) Fund. EduSolve is proud to work with Charter Schools USA in making informed, equitable decisions amid the challenges posed by post-pandemic learning shifts and  funding drop-off. In doing so, they have optimized $24M in funding. We partnered to install tangible system solutions and sustainability measures that measure ROI to preserve LOI.