Imagine a company that replaced its chief executive every few years. Each new leader arrives with new priorities, a new team and a new plan. Employees learn to keep their heads down and wait for the next one.
In public education, this is normal. In the United States, superintendent turnover rose from 14.2% to 17.1% in just a few years. In 2022–23, one in five superintendents in the nation’s 500 largest districts left the role.
If this were any other industry, customers would boycott the business. In education, the customers are children and families, and they cannot walk away.
Turnover is not a personnel problem
It is tempting to treat a leader leaving as an HR event: post the job, hire the replacement, move on. The research says otherwise. A change in leadership “changes the lines of communication, realigns relationships of power, affects decision-making, and generally disturbs the equilibrium of normal activities.”
The damage is greatest where stability matters most: in systems already facing budget cuts, community conflict or a recent leadership exit. Those are exactly the systems most likely to lose their next leader too.
What business already knows
Management research has a name for what happens next: initiative fatigue. It occurs when leaders jump too quickly from one improvement effort to another. Staff stop investing in new work because they expect it to disappear.
Now multiply that by leadership turnover. Every new superintendent brings a fresh agenda. After two or three cycles, teachers and principals learn a rational lesson: wait it out. The system becomes very good at surviving leaders and very bad at improving.
Business research points to a second trap. When leaders inherit a crisis, the instinct is to work harder and launch more initiatives. That usually improves results in the short term. In the long term, leaders burn out, and the organization drowns in projects it cannot finish.
Why leaders actually leave
The most common reason is not salary or student results. It is the relationship with the board. In one study, 76% of board presidents and 83% of superintendents named superintendent–board relations as the most frequent cause of superintendents leaving. Lack of trust and conflict over roles sit at the center of it.
This matters because it changes the solution. We cannot fix turnover only by hiring more heroic leaders. We have to change the conditions they lead in: clear priorities, real trust, and accountability that runs in every direction between leader, team and board.
These figures come from the United States, but the question travels
Any school system, anywhere, can ask the same thing: are we building conditions where good leaders stay long enough to finish what they start?
One thing to try this week
- If you lead a school or system: list every initiative currently running. Circle the three that matter most. Ask what would happen if the rest paused for a semester.
- If you serve on a board: ask your leader one question. “What should we stop asking you to do?” Then listen to the answer.
Stable leadership is not a luxury. For the children in our schools, it may be the most important improvement strategy we have.
What is one thing that would help the leaders in your system stay? I’d like to hear from superintendents, board members and educators.
Amalia Delamora is a doctoral researcher in educational leadership at Washington State University and founder of Education Space LLC. She helps school and system leaders use business-tested principles to lead through change. Learn more at educationspace.co or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources: White (2023), Educational Researcher; Blad (2023), as cited in Schilling et al. (2025), Journal of Educational Administration; Miskel & Cosgrove (1985), as cited in White (2023); Holweg, Staats & Upton (2020) and Zenger & Folkman (2020), HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives; Weiss et al. (2014), School Leadership Review; Sutherland (2023), Educational Administration Quarterly.
When someone says schools should be run like a business, many educators wince. They have good reason. The first time schools borrowed from business, they borrowed the factory.
In the early twentieth century, the job of school superintendent was built on scientific management, the efficiency movement of the industrial age. Superintendents acted as business managers. Their task was to keep order in school systems modeled on industrial structures: standardized, supervised and controlled.
A lot has changed since then. Most of it has not changed the way we think about leading schools.
The job grew. The model didn’t.
Over the century, the role expanded far beyond management. Researchers now describe the superintendent as a teacher-scholar, business manager, democratic leader, social scientist and communicator, all at once. One former superintendent argued the work really comes down to “connection, communication, collaboration, community building, child advocacy, and curricular choices.”
Almost every item is about relationships. Very little of it is about control.
Yet much of what leaders are trained in, and judged on, is still the managerial side: budgets, compliance, personnel and policy. When superintendents in one recent study described their own roles, they called themselves the “face” and “chief executive officer of the district,” the “overseer of the district finances” and the overseer of “managerial functions.” Only one description was relational: “relationship builder.”
What modern business actually learned
Here is the irony. While schools held on to factory-era thinking, business moved on.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, leadership researchers James MacGregor Burns and Bernard Bass described two kinds of leadership. Transactional leadership supervises, assigns, monitors and corrects. It rewards people who hit targets and corrects those who stray. Transformational leadership does something different. It builds trust, inspires commitment to a shared vision, challenges people to think in new ways, and pays attention to each person’s needs.
Organizations need both. Transactional work keeps the place running. Transformational work is what moves an organization through change.
Schools borrowed the first kind and mostly missed the second. That is the gap worth closing.
What this means for school leaders
The answer is not to abandon management. Budgets still have to balance, and policies still have to be followed. A leader who ignores that work will not last long.
The answer is to stop treating management as the whole job. In a system facing budget cuts, political conflict or a recent leadership exit, the managerial work keeps things from falling apart. The relational work is what makes improvement possible at all.
This also changes how boards and preparation programs should think about readiness. If we hire and evaluate leaders mostly on managerial skill, we should not be surprised when they struggle to lead change.
One thing to try this week
- If you lead a school or system: look at last week’s calendar. Mark each block as managing (budgets, compliance, operations) or leading (building trust, setting direction, developing people). What share went to each?
- If you serve on a board: look at how you evaluate your leader. How much of it measures relationships and direction, and how much measures compliance?
The goal is not to run schools like a business. It is to borrow the right lessons from business, the ones about people, trust and change.
Which business idea has helped your school the most, and which one has done the most harm?
Amalia Delamora is a doctoral researcher in educational leadership at Washington State University and founder of Education Space LLC. She helps school and system leaders use business-tested principles to lead through change. Learn more at educationspace.co or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources: Weiss et al. (2014), School Leadership Review, including Kowalski (2013) and Houston (2001) as cited; Schilling et al. (2025), Journal of Educational Administration; Alwali & Alwali (2022), Leadership & Organization Development Journal.
Ask senior leaders what matters most in a leader, and many will give the same answer: getting things done.
Leadership researchers Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman tested this. They gave people a list of 16 leadership skills. Senior managers ranked execution first. Everyone else in the organization ranked it fourth, behind inspiring and motivating others, having integrity and honesty, and solving problems.
Same organizations, same leaders, very different views of what leadership requires.
The view from the top is not the view from the classroom
This gap should get the attention of every school and system leader. From the top, the pressure is to deliver: raise scores, close the budget gap, meet the deadline. Execution feels like the job.
From the classroom, the school office or the bus depot, the view is different. People want a leader they can trust, a reason to believe the work matters, and someone who can help solve real problems. Execution matters to them too. It just isn’t what makes them willing to follow.
The behaviors staff ranked first line up closely with what researchers call transformational leadership. Leaders earn trust and respect through their own example. They give people a vision worth committing to. Neither shows up on a project plan.
Why pushing harder backfires
When results lag, the natural move is to push. More check-ins, tighter deadlines, more pressure.
Zenger and Folkman found the risk in that approach: “too much pushing can erode trust, which will hurt execution in the long run. When an untrusted leader asks for additional effort, people question their motives and resist their requests.”
In other words, a leader who focuses only on execution can end up with less of it. The trust that makes extra effort possible gets used up.
What works instead
The same research points to a better path. Leaders who provide “clear direction and a sense of connection to the strategy of the organization” help people see how their own work fits the mission. That connection is what turns compliance into commitment.
For a school leader, this might look like:
- Explaining why a priority matters to students before explaining how it will be measured
- Showing a teacher or principal exactly how their work moves the system’s goals forward
- Keeping commitments visibly, so that requests for extra effort come from a leader people already trust
The distraction is the leader’s own lens
The hardest part of this lesson is personal. Under pressure, leaders tend to see their organization through the narrow lens of deadlines and deliverables. That lens is a distraction. It hides what the people doing the work need in order to deliver.
Clearing it means stepping back often enough to see the organization the way your staff see it.
One thing to try this week
- If you lead a school or system: ask three people at different levels one question. “What does this team most need from me right now?” Write down their answers before you respond.
- If you serve on a board: in your next conversation with your leader, ask how staff would describe the direction of the system. Then ask how the leader knows.
Execution still matters. But your team is telling you what comes first.
Where would your team rank execution? Have you ever asked them?
Amalia Delamora is a doctoral researcher in educational leadership at Washington State University and founder of Education Space LLC. She helps school and system leaders use business-tested principles to lead through change. Learn more at educationspace.co or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources: Zenger & Folkman (2020), HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives; Alwali & Alwali (2022), Leadership & Organization Development Journal.
“We assume everything. We assume all of the bullets for all of the backlash that we get.”
That is how one superintendent described the job in a recent study. Another put it more simply: “It is just beyond exhausting. It’s hard.”
Most school leaders will recognize the feeling. When the pressure rises, the instinct is to absorb it: arrive earlier, stay later, answer every email, attend every meeting. It feels like commitment. Over time, it becomes the problem.
The short-term win, the long-term loss
Business research is blunt about where this leads. Zenger and Folkman found that when leaders respond to pressure by working harder, “in the short term, this typically yields improved results, but in the long term, leaders burn out.”
School leaders face this pressure at unusual intensity. In earlier research, superintendents named their greatest stressors as complying with state and federal mandates without the resources to do so (82%) and preparing and allocating budgets (78%). Add political conflict and public scrutiny, and the load becomes enormous.
Researchers studying superintendent resilience describe the result: challenges that “can be overwhelming and result in burnout, which diminishes their confidence to do the job and can potentially lead to a choice of exiting the position.”
When a leader burns out and leaves, the system pays again. New leader, new priorities, and a staff that has learned to wait.
Overload is contagious
Overwork rarely stays with the leader. Management researchers Hollister and Watkins found that when organizations take on more than they can sustain, “overload can result in costly productivity and quality problems and employee burnout.”
A leader who never stops usually builds an organization that never stops either. Principals and central office staff mirror the pace they see at the top.
Protecting the leader first
The fix starts with the leader’s own focus, time and energy. That is not selfish. It is the condition for leading anyone else well.
Practically, it means:
- Guarding time for the work only you can do. Setting direction, building key relationships and making the hardest decisions. Much else can be delegated.
- Deciding what you will personally stop carrying. Every new demand needs a matching subtraction.
- Building a support network on purpose. Superintendents in the resilience study advised new leaders to “use a mentor” and “develop a network to confide in.” One said, “there’s no way I got through the last two years without that group of people.”
The same research found that resilience takes time to build. Most superintendents “do not feel truly resilient until they have been working hard and intelligently over an extended period.” The key word is intelligently.
One thing to try this week
- If you lead a school or system: list five things you did last week that someone else could have done. Pick one to hand off for good.
- If you serve on a board: ask your leader what support would help them stay in the role for the long term. Ask whether they have a mentor or peer network, and whether the board would fund one.
Working harder can get you through a hard month. It will not get you through a hard decade. Strategy will.
What is one thing you stopped doing that made you a better leader?
Amalia Delamora is a doctoral researcher in educational leadership at Washington State University and founder of Education Space LLC. She helps school and system leaders use business-tested principles to lead through change. Learn more at educationspace.co or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources: Schilling et al. (2025), Journal of Educational Administration, including Hawk & Martin (2011) as cited; Zenger & Folkman (2020) and Hollister & Watkins (2020), HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives.
How many initiatives is your school system running right now?
Most leaders cannot answer quickly. There is the literacy push, the new curriculum, the attendance campaign, the technology rollout, the strategic plan, the equity work, the safety review and whatever the state required last spring. Each made sense when it started. Together, they are noise.
The overload nobody planned
Management researchers Robert Hollister and Michael Watkins studied this pattern in companies. Building on Michael Porter’s view of strategy, they argue that “the essence of execution is truly not doing it.”
Their finding: leaders who “keep layering on initiatives” create “severe overload at levels below the executive team.” The people at the top see each initiative as one decision. The people below experience all of them at once.
In schools, the levels below are principals, teachers and support staff. They are the ones asked to attend the trainings, complete the forms and change their practice, often for several initiatives in the same semester.
Three traps that create noise
Hollister and Watkins name patterns that will sound familiar to anyone who has worked in a school system:
- The unfunded mandate: leaders task teams “with meeting important goals without giving managers and their teams the necessary resources to accomplish them.”
- Cost myopia: “cutting people without cutting the related work.” After a budget reduction, the positions disappear but the expectations stay.
- The Band-Aid: organizations “make substantial investments in training programs in response to superficial assessments of the skills required” and then give little support for using the new skills.
Each trap adds work without adding capacity. The result is a system that is busy everywhere and effective almost nowhere.
Clearing the noise
Other researchers describe priority setting as the way an organization makes sure it “is not launching more initiatives than it can accomplish successfully.” That sounds obvious. It is rarely done, because stopping things is uncomfortable. Every initiative has a champion, a funding stream or a board member who cares about it.
Noise is not only initiatives. It is also mixed messages from different departments and political static that pulls attention away from the core work. A study of superintendents found they could focus on their most important priorities, “however, at times they allowed disruptive forces, such as the school board, community, or families, to interfere with their goals.”
Clearing the noise means separating real signals from distractions and saying so openly.
One thing to try this week
- If you lead a school or system: make a full list of every initiative underway. For each, write who owns it, what it costs and what has been stopped to make room for it. Notice how often the last column is empty.
- If you serve on a board: before approving any new initiative, ask one question. “What will we stop doing to make room for this?”
The most productive decision a leader makes this year may be the one to stop something.
How many initiatives is your system running? I’d like to hear your number.
Amalia Delamora is a doctoral researcher in educational leadership at Washington State University and founder of Education Space LLC. She helps school and system leaders use business-tested principles to lead through change. Learn more at educationspace.co or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources: Hollister & Watkins (2020) and Bodley-Scott & Brache (2020), HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives; Schilling et al. (2025), Journal of Educational Administration.
New leaders often feel pressure to move fast. The board wants results, the community wants answers, and the first 100 days seem like the window to make a mark.
The research suggests a different order: trust first, then change.
What the superintendents did
A 2023 study followed superintendents leading one of the hardest changes a school system can attempt: redrawing school boundaries to further integration. It is work that touches property values, neighborhood identity and deeply held beliefs about fairness.
The researchers found a clear pattern. The superintendents “undertook systemic changes to further school integration only after intrapersonal and interpersonal shifts occurred.” Before changing the system, they built “reciprocal relationships where constituents could feel included, heard and empowered.”
One superintendent described the pace: “dig deeper into this ongoing work because this is not going to be a quick fix.”
Listening that counts
Many leaders hold listening sessions. Fewer act on what they hear. The difference matters.
In the study, listening was active rather than theatrical. “As the superintendents listened to people in the school community, they acknowledged what they heard and sometimes shifted tactics in response to new information.”
That is the test of real listening: people can see that what they said changed something.
Leadership researchers call this individualized consideration. Leaders “listen to followers’ concerns and can behave flexibly to match the needs of specific individuals.” Management research adds that leaders should “align their leadership behaviors with individual followers’ identity and orientation differences.” A principal, a parent and a bus driver may need different things from the same leader.
Trust is the work, not the warm-up
It is tempting to treat relationship-building as a step to finish before the real work begins. Business research suggests otherwise. Zenger and Folkman found that “when an untrusted leader asks for additional effort, people question their motives and resist their requests.”
Trust is what makes every later request possible. Without it, even good plans meet resistance.
A caution worth naming
The same study found a gap. “Beyond issuing invitations, it was unclear how most of the superintendents ensured the most marginalized community members were involved.” Opening the door is not the same as making sure everyone can walk through it. Leaders who listen well go looking for the voices that do not usually show up.
One thing to try this week
- If you lead a school or system: after your next meeting with staff or families, send a short note naming one thing you heard and one thing you will do or change because of it.
- If you serve on a board: ask your leader whose voices are missing from current decisions, and how the system plans to reach them.
Change that lasts is built on trust. Trust is built by listening that leads somewhere.
What is the best example of listening you have seen from a school leader?
Amalia Delamora is a doctoral researcher in educational leadership at Washington State University and founder of Education Space LLC. She helps school and system leaders use business-tested principles to lead through change. Learn more at educationspace.co or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources: Leh, Mayger & Yuknis (2023), Journal of Educational Administration; Duan et al. (2017), Journal of Organizational Behavior; Alwali & Alwali (2022), Leadership & Organization Development Journal; Zenger & Folkman (2020), HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives.
School leaders say yes for good reasons. A parent group has a real concern. A teacher has a promising idea. A board member wants to address an urgent issue. Every request connects to students.
That is exactly what makes “no” so hard. And it is why saying it well may be the most important skill a leader has.
Choosing what not to do
Business strategist Derek Lidow puts it directly: “smart leaders understand that their job requires them to identify trade-offs, choosing what not to do as much as what to do.”
He calls the ranking of initiatives “in an environment of finite resources” a “primary test of leadership.” Not a planning exercise. A test.
Schools always operate with finite resources. Time, money, staff attention and community patience all run out. A leader who says yes to everything has not avoided a choice. They have let the choice be made by default, usually by whoever is most exhausted.
Focus is not a slogan
Resilience research on school leaders reaches the same place. As one researcher put it, “above all else resilient leaders are clear about what matters most.”
Clarity about what matters most is only real when it shows up in decisions. A focus that does not cost anything is not a focus. It is a wish list.
Lidow offers a useful check: “resources reign supreme,” because “without dedicated means, an initiative is pure fantasy.” If a priority has no money, people or time attached to it, it is not really a priority.
From focus to deadlines
Once the focus is clear, it needs an order and a timeline. Not everything can start in September. A realistic sequence protects the most important work from being crowded out by everything else.
A practical approach:
- Name no more than three priorities for the year.
- Attach real resources to each: a budget line, an owner and protected time.
- Set a realistic date for each milestone.
- Write down what you are choosing not to do, and share it.
Saying no in a shared-power system
School leaders face a challenge most CEOs do not. Boards hold broad powers over goal setting and budgets. A superintendent cannot simply cut a program the board cares about.
That makes the conversation more important, not less. The goal is to build agreement with the board on priorities before the pressure arrives, so that a future “no” is a shared decision rather than a personal fight.
One thing to try this week
- If you lead a school or system: write a “not this year” list. Include at least three good ideas you are choosing to set aside, and the reason for each.
- If you serve on a board: ask your leader to name the top three priorities and the resources behind each. If you cannot see the resources, ask whether it is really a priority.
Every yes is also a no to something else. Strong leaders make that trade-off on purpose.
What is the best “no” you ever said as a leader?
Amalia Delamora is a doctoral researcher in educational leadership at Washington State University and founder of Education Space LLC. She helps school and system leaders use business-tested principles to lead through change. Learn more at educationspace.co or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources: Lidow (2020), HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives; Patterson et al. (2010), as cited in Schilling et al. (2025), Journal of Educational Administration; Weiss et al. (2014), School Leadership Review.
In most school systems, accountability flows in one direction: down. Boards hold superintendents accountable. Superintendents hold principals accountable. Principals hold teachers accountable.
When something goes wrong, the question is usually who failed. Rarely is it asked what each part of the system owed the others.
Why leaders really leave
The research on superintendent turnover points to one relationship above all. In one study, 76% of board presidents and 83% of superintendents named superintendent–board relations as the most frequent reason superintendents leave. Researchers identify “a lack of trust between the board and superintendent” and “significant conflict” as the most common factors.
A central source of that conflict is role confusion: board members trying to take on work assigned to the superintendent. Researchers found that role confusion “created a level of dysfunction that prevented the board and superintendent from being able to properly make the decisions necessary for moving the school forward.” Another observed that “inexperienced board members often mistake governance for close supervision and end up meddling in administrative affairs.”
This is not a story about bad boards or bad leaders. It is a story about unclear expectations running in both directions.
The cornerstones
Researchers studying board–superintendent relationships put it plainly: “mutually agreed upon goals, trust, and respect are the cornerstones for effective working relationships.” They also found that “the process by which the superintendent is evaluated is critical in building and establishing a long-term stable relationship.”
That process is often weak. In some places, including Washington State, the law gives boards little structure for evaluating their top leader. And because board membership “changes rapidly by election cycle,” a leader hired by one board may be evaluated by a very different one two years later. Unstable boards produce unstable evaluations, and new leaders are left unsure what is expected of them.
What mutual accountability looks like
Mutual accountability means every party knows what it owes the others:
- The leader owes clear direction, the resources the plan needs, and visible follow-through on commitments.
- The team owes ownership of results and candid, early warning when something is off track.
- The board owes goals agreed on together, a fair and consistent evaluation, and respect for the line between governing and managing.
This is not softer accountability. It is more complete. When everyone’s part is clear, it becomes much easier to see where things broke down and fix it.
One thing to try this week
- If you lead a school or system: write down what you need from your board to succeed this year. Share it in your next goal-setting conversation, alongside what you commit to deliver.
- If you serve on a board: ask your leader to describe the board’s role and the leader’s role in one sentence each. If your answers differ, you have found the first thing to work on.
Accountability that only runs down tells you who to blame. Accountability that runs both ways tells you how to improve.
What does your board owe its leader? I’d like to hear from board members and superintendents alike.
Amalia Delamora is a doctoral researcher in educational leadership at Washington State University and founder of Education Space LLC. She helps school and system leaders use business-tested principles to lead through change. Learn more at educationspace.co or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources: Weiss et al. (2014), School Leadership Review, including Kruse & Richard (2008) as cited; Sutherland (2023), Educational Administration Quarterly.
Every experienced teacher knows the cycle. A new leader arrives with a new vision. There is a kickoff, a new acronym and a round of training. A year or two later, the leader moves on, and the initiative quietly fades.
After enough cycles, staff learn a sensible lesson: keep your head down and wait. This is not resistance or laziness. It is a rational response to experience.
The research has a name for it
Studies of improvement efforts describe “initiative fatigue, which occurs when leaders jump too quickly from one improvement fad to another.” Each new effort draws on the same limited energy, and each abandoned one teaches people that the next will probably be abandoned too.
In school systems, leadership turnover multiplies the problem. When new leaders bring new priorities, the whole system experiences initiative fatigue, not just one department. Turnover is highest in small and rural systems, where many leaders begin their careers and where the job is often treated as a stepping-stone.
What keeps improvement going
The same research identifies what makes improvement stick. “One condition needed to keep improving was visible support from board members and senior leadership.” The researchers recommend “ensuring that senior leaders act as coaches, enabling small wins to increase employees’ motivation and engagement.”
Three ideas stand out:
- Visible support. Not a launch speech, but continued presence. Superintendents in one study valued a colleague for “being in the trenches and working side by side with his staff.”
- Coaching. Leaders who help people get better at the new work, instead of only checking whether they are doing it.
- Small wins. Early, visible progress that shows the effort is real and worth the investment.
Ending things honestly
Sometimes an initiative should end. Management researcher Isabelle Royer found that failing projects often continue because of “a fervent and widespread belief among managers in the inevitability of their projects’ ultimate success,” a belief that “can blind you to increasingly negative feedback.”
Her remedy is to make it clear that “challenges to a popular project would be welcome or even rewarded.” When leaders end weak initiatives on purpose and explain why, staff learn something different: that the work which continues is work the leader truly stands behind.
For leaders who inherit a system
If you are new, resist the urge to replace everything. Find what your predecessor started that is worth keeping, say so publicly, and build on it. Nothing breaks the wait-it-out cycle faster than a new leader who honors good work already underway.
One thing to try this week
- If you lead a school or system: pick your most important initiative and identify one small win you can make visible in the next 30 days. Then show up in person to recognize it.
- If you serve on a board: ask which current initiatives the board still actively supports, and say so publicly. Visible board support is one of the strongest signals staff can receive.
Staff don’t wait leaders out because they don’t care. They wait because they have learned to. The job is to teach them something new.
How many “new initiatives” have you seen come and go in your career?
Amalia Delamora is a doctoral researcher in educational leadership at Washington State University and founder of Education Space LLC. She helps school and system leaders use business-tested principles to lead through change. Learn more at educationspace.co or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources: Holweg, Staats & Upton (2020) and Royer (2020), HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives; Schilling et al. (2025), Journal of Educational Administration; Sutherland (2023), Educational Administration Quarterly; Yang, Park & Batt (2025), Journal of Educational Administration.
School systems are full of lessons learned. They appear in end-of-year reports, retreat notes and strategic plan updates. “We learned that communication needs to improve.” “We learned that implementation takes time.”
Then the next year looks a lot like the last one.
Looking for lessons is not learning them
Researchers studying organizational learning make a sharp distinction: “looking for lessons isn’t the same as learning them.” People “may generate a lesson during the after-action review (AAR) process, but they won’t have learned the lesson until they’ve changed their behavior.”
That standard is demanding. A lesson written in a report but not reflected in practice has not been learned. It has only been noticed.
Why reviews often fail
Many organizations do reviews. Few change because of them. Management research points to a few reasons:
- The review comes too late. By the end of the year, people have moved on and details have faded.
- The review assigns blame. When reviews feel like evaluations, people protect themselves instead of telling the truth.
- Nothing is decided. The review produces observations, but no one commits to doing anything differently.
Training has the same problem. Researchers describe organizations that “make substantial investments in training programs” but “provide limited support for integrating the new skills into day-to-day practice.” Learning without practice rarely sticks.
A review that changes behavior
A useful review is short, regular and honest. It asks four simple questions:
- What did we intend to happen?
- What actually happened?
- Why was there a difference?
- What will we keep, change or stop before the next round?
The fourth question is where learning happens. It turns observation into a decision. Each review should end with at least one specific change in what people will do, and that change should show up in the next plan.
Feedback has to run both ways for this to work. Leadership research recommends that “two-way feedback collection should be adopted” so leaders understand how their messages are received. A review where only the leader talks is not a review.
Learning as a cycle
The best leaders treat improvement as a cycle, not a project. They plan, act and review, then return to their priorities to check whether the focus still holds. Each cycle makes the organization a little smarter.
This applies to leaders themselves. Superintendents say the support they most need is not more coursework, but mentors and peer networks that help them reflect and adjust in real time. Growth comes from practice with honest feedback, repeated over time.
One thing to try this week
- If you lead a school or system: after your next major event or decision, hold a 20-minute review with your team using the four questions. End with one change you will make next time.
- If you serve on a board: add a short review to the end of your next board meeting. What went well? What would you change about how the board worked tonight?
This is the last article in this series. The thread through all ten is simple: leaders who last create clarity, execute with discipline, and keep learning together.
What is one lesson your system has truly learned, meaning something you actually do differently now?
Amalia Delamora is a doctoral researcher in educational leadership at Washington State University and founder of Education Space LLC. She helps school and system leaders use business-tested principles to lead through change. Learn more at educationspace.co or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources: Darling, Parry & Moore (2020), Hollister & Watkins (2020), HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives; Duan et al. (2017), Journal of Organizational Behavior; Schilling et al. (2025), Journal of Educational Administration.