Your senior team runs the school well but never gets to the long term
The senior team manages the daily running of the school effectively, but long-term improvement work never reaches the top of anyone’s list.
Day to day, the school runs well. Problems are resolved, cover is arranged, incidents are handled, and the senior team is visibly busy and competent. What does not happen is the designing and long-range thinking that only this team is placed to do.
Presenting symptoms
- Senior team meetings run out of time before reaching the improvement items.
- Senior leaders are the first point of contact for problems that could be settled below them.
- Asked what they are working on for next year, senior leaders describe this term.
Possible causes
- Operational work may be reaching senior leaders because nobody below them has been given authority to settle it.
- The senior team meeting may be designed for coordination rather than for thinking.
- Roles may have accumulated duties over several years without anything ever being handed on.
- Long-term work may have no named owner, so it belongs to everyone and therefore to nobody.
Into decisions other people could make.
Your most useful next step: Take the three issues that reached you most often last term and name, for each, who settles it from now on and exactly what they may decide without checking.
Lead behaviours
Into a meeting that never reaches the improvement items.
Your most useful next step: Separate the two kinds of business. Give operational coordination its own short slot with a hard finish, and reserve the leadership meeting for strategic decisions and improvement work that only this team can do.
Lead behaviours
Into roles that have collected duties over the years.
Your most useful next step: Write down what each senior leader is actually accountable for, set it against this year’s priorities, and move at least one duty that no longer belongs to that post.
Lead behaviours
It is hard to say without looking properly.
Your most useful next step: Record how the senior team’s hours actually divided last week, marking each one as running the school or improving it, and bring the two totals to the next meeting.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
Most of what reaches a senior leader arrives there by habit rather than by necessity. Handing work on with the authority to settle it attached is what creates time; handing on the task while keeping the decision creates more meetings, not fewer.
The senior team meeting is the largest single block of this team’s shared time. A meeting designed for coordination produces a team that coordinates well and thinks rarely.
Operational load arriving at senior level is usually the symptom of a missing system. Each recurring problem solved once, as a process, stops arriving repeatedly as a decision.
The work only this team can do carries the longest horizon and the weakest deadline. Nothing will ever make it urgent, so it has to be made deliberate.
A school that runs smoothly and improves slowly rarely feels as though it has a problem. Naming what the school should be able to do in two years is what turns released time into improvement rather than into more capacity for the day.
Secondary behaviours
Use this where the team’s impression of how it spends its time has not been checked against a record of how it actually did.
Use this as the test when reviewing roles. Without agreed priorities for the year there is no basis on which to say that a duty no longer belongs to a post.
Use this before handing work on. Whether a colleague is ready to settle something is a judgement about that person, not about the task.
Use this where roles have collected duties over several years. The question is not whether each leader is working hard, but whether the post still matches what the school now needs from it.
A useful first action
Take last week’s senior team calendar and mark every hour as either running the school or improving it. Bring the two totals to the next meeting.
Suggested approach
- Establish how the senior team’s time actually divided last week, from the record rather than from memory.
- Identify the recurring problems that reach senior leaders, and decide for each who settles it and what they may decide alone.
- Separate operational coordination from leadership thinking, giving each its own slot and its own finish time.
- Test each senior role against this year’s priorities, and move at least one duty that no longer belongs to it.
- Name what the school should be able to do in two years, and give each of those priorities a senior owner and a checkpoint date.