School Leadership and Strategy
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Most schools invest in leadership development the same way they invest in a good dinner out — meaningful in the moment, satisfying while it lasts, and largely forgotten by the following week. An annual retreat. A conference in the fall. A speaker at the opening faculty meeting. The intentions are genuine. But isolated events, no matter how well designed, cannot produce the kind of sustained leadership growth that schools genuinely need — especially when those schools are in the middle of strategic change. Leadership Communities are a different model entirely: a year-long, cohort-based program that develops leadership capacity continuously, connects development directly to real strategic work, and builds capability that stays inside the institution long after the engagement ends.

Most school leadership teams don't fail because of a bad strategy. They fail because of what happens — or doesn't happen — in the room where decisions get made. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team gives school leaders a clear framework for diagnosing what's holding their senior team back, from the absence of vulnerability-based trust at the base to inattention to shared results at the top. In this post, we break down each dysfunction through the lens of school leadership, name what each one looks like in practice, and offer concrete steps for building a team that can trust, debate, commit, hold each other accountable, and focus on what matters most.

Discover key leadership behaviors that foster a culture of continuous improvement in schools. Learn how modeling a growth mindset, collaborative decision-making, and data-driven practices can transform student outcomes.