From Fragmented Plans to Focused Action: Building Leadership Teams That Drive Results

"The greatest challenge of leadership is not getting people to follow you. It's getting them to lead with you."

The Problem With Most School Improvement Plans

You've seen it before. Perhaps you've even experienced it in your own building.

A comprehensive School Improvement Plan—meticulously crafted, data-informed, board-approved—sits in a binder gathering dust. Teachers can't articulate the priorities. Leadership team members recall different goals. The plan that was supposed to unite your improvement efforts has instead become another compliance document, disconnected from the daily instructional decisions happening in classrooms.

The reality? Most School Improvement Plans don't work. Not because educators lack commitment or expertise, but because of three fundamental flaws:

• They're too long. Multi-year plans with dozens of action steps overwhelm rather than focus effort.

• They're too complex. Nested goals, overlapping initiatives, and competing priorities dilute impact.

• They're too disconnected. The people responsible for implementation—teachers, instructional coaches, department chairs—don't own the plan because they didn't build it.

In our previous work, we explored developing a personal leadership theory of action—the intentional alignment of your leadership practices and internal resources to drive student outcomes. This post shifts the lens outward, examining how principals and district leaders can build that same clarity and alignment within their Building Leadership Teams to create sustainable momentum across the system.

The Counterintuitive Truth About School Improvement

Here's the thought reversal that changes everything:

• You don't need a more detailed improvement plan. You need a shorter, more focused one.

• You don't need more control over implementation. You need more shared leadership.

The most effective school leaders—those who consistently move student achievement in historically underperforming schools—don't carry the burden of change alone. They understand that sustainable improvement requires distributed expertise, collective problem-solving, and shared accountability. They create conditions for momentum by turning year-long improvement plans into short, focused cycles of action, and they do it together with their leadership teams.

This isn't delegation. It's not about distributing tasks across a calendar or assigning people to committees. It's about fundamentally reimagining how leadership functions in your building—moving from hierarchical decision-making to collaborative ownership of the work that matters most.

When Leadership Teams Find Their Stride

In every turnaround and change effort we've supported at Compass Edvantage, there comes a pivotal moment when a leadership team fundamentally shifts how it operates. You can feel it in the room. The energy changes. The questions deepen. The resistance to data transforms into curiosity about next steps.

This shift happens when teams stop "meeting about the plan" and start building the plan—using short cycles, focused priorities, and transparent accountability structures. When this transition occurs, improvement doesn't just gain traction. It accelerates.

We recently worked with a high school principal whose leadership team had been meeting monthly for two years. On paper, everything looked right: standing agenda, rotating roles, documented minutes. But the team wasn't functioning as a leadership body. Members arrived unprepared, discussions circled without landing on decisions, and teachers in the building couldn't name a single priority the team was driving.

The breakthrough came when we helped them design their first 100-day cycle. Instead of reviewing reports about initiatives happening in isolation, the team co-created a single, measurable goal focused on student use of academic vocabulary in classrooms. They built the professional learning plan together. They established metrics as a team. They divided leadership responsibilities based on expertise and capacity, not job titles.

Within six weeks, they had seen a significant improvement in their implementation data. Most importantly, the leadership team members began seeing themselves differently—not as messengers for the principal's vision, but as co-architects of instructional improvement.

That's the power of structured, short-cycle collaborative leadership.

Why Short Cycles and Shared Ownership Work

When your Building Leadership Team co-creates and implements a 100-day plan, you unlock four critical drivers of improvement:

• Clarity: The team rallies around one student learning focus—not a laundry list of priorities, but a singular outcome they choose and own together. This focus becomes the lens through which every decision gets filtered.

• Momentum: Quick wins build belief and energy. Teachers see progress within weeks, not years. Leadership teams experience their collective efficacy in real-time, which reinforces continued effort and risk-taking.

• Collective Efficacy: When teams see the direct impact of their leadership actions on instruction and student learning, something profound shifts. They move from feeling like implementers of someone else's plan to architects of meaningful change.

• Adaptability: Each cycle includes structured space for reflection and adjustment. You're not locked into a plan that isn't working. You have permission to learn, pivot, and improve—modeling the same adaptive expertise you want to see in teachers.

Building a High-Functioning Leadership Team: Four Essential Practices

1. Clarify Purpose and Function

Your Building Leadership Team—whether you call it a Guiding Coalition, Instructional Leadership Team, or Administrative Council—serves as the engine of implementation. But simply convening a group of people doesn't create a leadership team.

The distinction matters. Many schools have leadership teams that function primarily as communication hubs: the principal shares information, team members relay updates to their departments, questions get answered, and everyone returns to their separate work. Information flows, but ownership doesn't.

True distributed leadership isn't about distributing tasks. It's about distributing ownership of the outcomes.

This requires intentional design of how your team operates:

• Co-create agendas focused on problem-solving, not updates. Reserve 70% of your meeting time for collaborative work on shared challenges. Use protocols that structure inquiry, analysis, and decision-making. Information sharing should happen asynchronously whenever possible.

• Use real-time school data to inform decisions. Bring current student work, assessment results, walkthrough trends, and teacher feedback into the room. Make decisions based on evidence you examine together, not assumptions or anecdotes.

• Rotate facilitation to build capacity across the team. Your instructional coach can lead the analysis of formative assessment practices. Your special education coordinator can facilitate conversations about differentiation. Your teacher leader can guide reflection on student engagement data. This isn't just efficient—it's capacity-building.

• Establish and revisit norms that promote inquiry and equity of voice. The best leadership teams surface disagreement productively, question assumptions respectfully, and ensure that positional authority doesn't dominate airtime. Make your norms explicit, visible, and revisable.

2. Build Your Shared Theory of Action

Effective leadership teams operate from a clearly articulated Theory of Action—not just individual theories, but a collective framework that connects what you'll do to what you expect will happen.

Here's the structure we use in our work with districts:

WHAT (The Goal): What is the highest-leverage student learning outcome we need to address in the next 100 days?

This isn't your entire improvement plan. It's the one thing that, if improved, would most significantly impact student learning in your context right now. Be specific.

First HOW (The Improvement Focus): What school improvement factor—particularly within core instruction—will most directly impact that outcome?

This is where you make the connection between your student learning goal and the instructional practice that drives it. Examples include:

• Student engagement in evidence-based academic discourse

• Systematic use of formative assessment and timely feedback cycles

• Clarity and cognitive demand of grade-level tasks

• Explicit vocabulary instruction embedded across content areas

• Differentiation strategies responsive to student readiness data

Second HOW (The Action Plan): What will this leadership team do to improve that instructional factor?

This is where planning transforms into practice. Your 100-day action plan should specify:

• Baseline data and progress metrics: How will you know if the work is making a difference? What evidence will you collect, when, and how will you examine it together?

• Professional learning experiences: What PD sessions, faculty meeting protocols, or learning labs will you facilitate? Who will lead them? How will they build teacher expertise progressively?

• PLC support structures: What protocols, resources, or guiding questions will you provide to ensure collaborative teams are analyzing the right student work in service of your goal?

• Monitoring and feedback systems: How will you conduct walkthroughs? What will you look for? How will you provide feedback to teachers that reinforces the improvement focus?

• Celebration and communication strategies: How will you make early progress visible? How will you recognize teacher risk-taking and student growth? How will you communicate momentum to the broader school community?

This isn't theoretical. This is the operational plan your leadership team enacts together over 100 days. It's specific enough to guide weekly actions but flexible enough to adjust based on what you learn.

3. Master the Art of Facilitative Leadership

Here's what most principal preparation programs don't teach you: facilitating a high-functioning leadership team is one of the most complex and essential leadership skills you'll develop.

It requires knowing when to step in and when to step back. When to hold the focus and when to follow the team's thinking. When to offer your expertise and when to withhold it so others' voices can emerge.

This is adaptive leadership in practice—reading the room, diagnosing what the team needs in real-time, and adjusting your moves accordingly. It demands:

• Trust in your team's capacity. If you've assembled the right people, they have expertise you need. Create structures that access it.

• Modeling vulnerability. Share your own uncertainties. Admit when you don't have the answer. Demonstrate that leadership is learning in public.

• Strategic restraint. Resist the urge to solve every problem. Sometimes your most powerful move is asking a better question or letting silence create space for thinking.

• Explicit attention to equity. Notice whose voices dominate and whose perspectives are absent. Name patterns when you see them. Adjust structures to ensure all members can contribute fully.

This work doesn't come naturally to most leaders. It challenges deeply embedded beliefs about what leadership should look like. But when done well, it transforms not just your leadership team—it transforms the entire building.

This is core to our work with districts. We help leaders develop the facilitation skills, protocols, and adaptive mindsets required to build high-functioning leadership teams. If you're feeling stuck or unsure about how to move your team from compliance to ownership, we can help. Reach out. Let's talk.

4. Commit to Cycles of Inquiry and Action

The 100-day cycle isn't arbitrary. It's long enough to implement meaningful change and short enough to maintain urgency and focus.  If it fits better in your calendar, use a “quarterly” cadence or “trimester.”

Structure each cycle around this rhythm:

• Plan (Weeks 1-2): Co-create your Theory of Action. Establish baseline data. Build your action plan with clear roles and timelines.

• Act (Weeks 3-12): Implement your professional learning experiences, monitoring systems, and support structures. Collect evidence of implementation and impact.

• Study (Weeks 13-14): Analyze your data together. What's working? What's not? What's surprising? What have we learned about our students, our teachers, and ourselves as leaders?

• Adjust (Week 14): Based on your learning, what will you keep, strengthen, stop, or start in the next cycle? Document your insights and begin planning cycle two.

This rhythm creates a cadence of improvement that becomes embedded in your school's culture. Teachers come to expect it. Leadership team members anticipate it. The work gains its own momentum.

From Meetings to Movement

The difference between a leadership team that meets and a leadership team that leads is visible in how teachers describe their work.

In buildings with high-functioning teams, teachers can articulate the improvement focus. They see coherence between professional learning, collaborative planning time, feedback they receive, and resources provided. They experience their leadership team as a source of clarity and support, not confusion and compliance.

This doesn't happen by accident. It happens when principals and district leaders commit to building the structures, skills, and shared ownership that allow leadership teams to function at their full potential.

Your Next Move

Reflect on these questions about your current leadership team:

• How is your team currently involved in breaking down your improvement plan? Are members primarily receiving information, or are they co-creating the work?

• What would it take to move from compliance to ownership? What structures, skills, or shifts in practice would need to change?

• What's your next 100-day focus? If you could rally your leadership team around one student learning outcome right now, what would it be?

The answers to these questions reveal your starting point. The good news? You don't need to have it all figured out before you begin. You just need to take the first step with your team—together.

Because the greatest challenge of leadership isn't getting people to follow you. It's getting them to lead with you.