Why the Plan is not Enough
Leadership Enactment Is the Missing Link Between Planning and Results
Schools spend an extraordinary amount of time developing improvement plans. Teams analyze data, identify root causes, review research, establish priorities, develop strategies, and create detailed action steps. They carefully document what needs to happen, who is responsible, and how progress will be measured.
And sometimes, they create genuinely excellent plans.
Yet months later, classroom practices remain largely unchanged. The same challenges persist. The plan is revisited during leadership meetings or accountability reviews, but the improvement everyone envisioned never quite materializes.
Why?
Often, it isn't because the school identified the wrong priorities. It isn't even because the improvement plan was poorly designed.
It's because we confuse having a plan for improvement with actually leading improvement.
A Great Plan Is Still Just a Plan
In our previous blog, Simplifying the WHAT of School Improvement to Focus on the HOW, we argued that schools often spend too much time determining WHAT needs to improve and too little time designing HOW improvement will happen.
Research provides considerable guidance about the conditions and practices associated with effective schools. While identifying the right priorities is essential, the greater challenge is often determining how to develop those conditions within a particular school.
That requires context.
A strategy that succeeds in one school may fail in another—not because the strategy is ineffective, but because the schools have different histories, cultures, relationships, capacities, and organizational structures.
Context should therefore be central to improvement planning from the beginning. Leaders must consider not only which practices are likely to improve outcomes, but how those practices can realistically be introduced, supported, and sustained in their schools.
But even when schools do this exceptionally well, something important remains.
The plan still has to be enacted.
The Missing Link: Leadership Enactment
Consider a relatively straightforward improvement strategy.
A school decides to begin collecting classroom walkthrough data to better understand whether a new instructional practice is being implemented. The improvement plan might include an action step such as:
"Conduct regular classroom walkthroughs and analyze implementation data to inform ongoing professional learning."
It's a perfectly reasonable action step, but who develops the walkthrough instrument? Who determines what evidence should be collected? Who schedules the walkthroughs? Who ensures that the observations actually occur? Who compiles the data, facilitates the analysis, and helps teachers make sense of the findings?
These activities might be delegated to different members of the leadership team. But someone must organize, coordinate, and monitor the work.
And that's only the procedural side.
The leader must also consider whether teachers understand the purpose of the walkthroughs. Do they view the process as an opportunity for professional learning or another form of evaluation? Do they trust how the data will be used? Are the observations producing meaningful information, or simply generating another report?
Those questions require an entirely different set of leadership actions.
This is what we mean by Leadership Enactment.
Leadership Enactment is the intentional application of leadership practices, decisions, and routines that translate improvement plans into sustained organizational action.
It is the bridge between what a school intends to accomplish and what actually happens in classrooms.
Leadership Enactment Requires More Than Good Leadership Practices
Decades of educational leadership research have helped identify practices associated with effective school leadership.
These include establishing a shared vision, developing people, strengthening relationships, distributing leadership, creating supportive organizational conditions, and monitoring instructional improvement.
We see these practices reflected in five essential leadership moves:
Create shared purpose: Help people understand why the improvement matters and how their work contributes to it.
Build relationships and commitment: Develop trust, engage stakeholders, and cultivate authentic ownership.
Distribute and develop leadership: Build the knowledge, skills, and responsibility of others to lead improvement.
Protect focus and create conditions: Align time, resources, structures, and priorities to support the work.
Monitor, learn, and adapt: Use evidence, feedback, and short cycles of improvement to determine what is working and what needs to change.
These practices provide an essential foundation.
But knowing what effective leaders do in general is different from understanding the specific actions a leader must take to make a particular improvement strategy successful in a particular school.
That's where Leadership Enactment becomes especially important.
The Procedural and Adaptive Work of Improvement
Imagine that a school has identified student ownership of learning as an improvement priority. One strategy involves implementing student data folders to help students monitor their progress, establish goals, and reflect on their learning. The improvement plan includes professional development, a timeline for implementation, and a process for monitoring progress.
What happens next?
A leader might need to begin with the building leadership team, developing their understanding of the strategy and the research behind it. That team may need opportunities to examine examples, anticipate implementation challenges, and determine how to introduce the practice to the larger faculty.
The leader may also recognize that several influential teachers are skeptical of the initiative. Rather than introducing the strategy at a faculty meeting and hoping for the best, the leader might first engage those teachers in individual conversations.
Not simply to convince them, but to understand their concerns, address legitimate questions, and potentially enlist their expertise in strengthening the approach.
Meanwhile, someone must develop or adapt the data folder templates, organize professional learning, establish implementation expectations, and create opportunities for teachers to collaborate.
These are not necessarily complicated tasks. But they rarely happen automatically.
Some require procedural leadership: organizing work, assigning responsibilities, establishing routines, and ensuring that essential tasks are completed.
Others require adaptive leadership: understanding people, navigating relationships, building commitment, responding to resistance, and adjusting strategies as new information emerges.
Both are necessary.
And neither can be fully captured by simply writing "implement student data folders" in an improvement plan.
Sometimes Leadership Enactment Means Saying No
One of the most under-appreciated leadership actions is protecting the school's focus.
Schools are constantly presented with new opportunities. A promising instructional resource becomes available. Someone attends a conference and returns with an exciting idea. A district initiative introduces additional expectations. A well-intentioned staff member proposes a new program.
Many of these ideas are genuinely good.
But every new initiative competes for limited time, attention, and organizational capacity.
Effective Leadership Enactment sometimes requires a principal to say:
"That's a good idea, but it isn't where we're focusing our energy right now."
This isn't resistance to innovation. It's a recognition that meaningful improvement requires sustained attention.
If leaders continually introduce new priorities, they undermine the very conditions necessary for existing priorities to succeed.
Protecting focus is not merely something leaders believe in. It is something they must repeatedly enact through their decisions.
The Leadership Actions That Never Appear in the Plan
Some of the most consequential leadership actions are almost invisible in formal improvement plans.
A principal recognizes that a teacher leader is beginning to lose confidence in a new instructional approach and schedules a conversation.
A leadership team meeting is redesigned so that participants spend less time reporting activities and more time examining evidence of implementation.
A principal notices that staff members are treating an initiative as another compliance requirement and deliberately reframes the work around the students it is intended to serve.
A competing initiative is postponed.
A small early success is recognized and shared to build confidence.
A struggling team receives additional coaching rather than another reminder about implementation expectations.
These actions may seem small, but collectively they determine whether improvement becomes part of the school's daily work.
And they illustrate something important about Leadership Enactment:
The actions that matter most are not always the ones explicitly written into the improvement plan.
Effective leaders must continually interpret what the situation requires and respond in ways that advance the school's improvement priorities.
Good Leaders Plan for Improvement. Great Leaders Enact It.
We often judge school improvement leadership by the quality of the plan. Does it identify research-based strategies? Are the goals measurable? Are responsibilities assigned? Is there a timeline? Does it include monitoring procedures?
Those are worthwhile questions.
But perhaps we should be asking a different set of questions.
What are leaders doing every day to make the plan successful? How are they using their time? What conversations are they having? What are they choosing not to do? How are they building the capacity of others? How are they responding when implementation doesn't unfold as expected?
Good leaders develop strong improvement plans. Great leaders recognize that the real work begins when the planning ends.
They understand that improvement is not produced by the document itself. It emerges through countless leadership decisions, conversations, routines, and adjustments that turn intentions into organizational practice.
This is Leadership Enactment.
And it may be one of the most important missing pieces in how we approach school improvement.
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