EPISODE #356

Hey, builders. Before we begin, I have a quick question for you. Are we connected on social media? The reason I'm asking is because as much as I love giving you the podcast episode every single week, I'd love to take our relationship deeper. So if we're not connected on social media, let's connect. I'm on LinkedIn @robinmindsteps. I'm on Twitter @robinmindsteps. I'M ON FACEBOOK at Robyn Jackson, please let's connect so we can keep the conversation going.

Now. On with the show. You're listening to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast, episode 356. How do builders like us make a dramatic difference in the lives of our students in spite of all the obstacles we face? How do you keep your vision for your school from being held hostage by resistant teachers, uncooperative parents, ridiculous district policies, or lack of time, money, or resources? If you're facing those challenges right now, here is where you'll find the answers, strategies, and actionable tips you need to overcome any obstacle you face. You don't have to wait to make a difference in the lives of the people you serve. You can turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have. Let's get started. Hey, builders. 

Welcome to another episode of the School Leadership Reimagined podcast. 

I'm your host, Robin Jackson, and today we are still celebrating all this month, we are celebrating our eighth podcast anniversary. And I've been spending these episodes reflecting on this moment in time for educators and thinking about what it means for us going forward. The last time I talked about the moment that schools are in right now, the three forces that are converging to make this probably the hardest stretch in education that most of us have ever faced. And today I wanna talk about what this moment is exposing. It's something that's been there all along, and frankly, most of us have been living with it for years, but until now, we haven't given it a clear name.

And I promise you that once you have a name for it, everything that you are feeling right now starts to make a lot more sense. So let's go back to last time for a moment, because last time I described these three forces that are converging right now in ways that are fundamentally changing the conditions inside of schools. The first force was the academic disruption and all of the learning gaps that we're experiencing. And these were exacerbated with COVID And they didn't go away when the headlines around Covid did it's it's not just now you can walk into a fifth grade classroom and find students who are reading at the second grade level sitting next to kids who are functioning at the eighth grade level. And all of them need to move forward this year. It's more that kids are fundamentally different after remote learning and in ways that we're not prepared to really deal with yet. The second one is that there's a lot of community instability and it walks through your front door every morning with your kids. Families are carrying immigration fears and economic pressure and community tension, and all of that stuff is spilling into schools now more than ever.

And that, let's add to that, like this political environment, the divide that has created more anxiety and fear and division. And schools are expected to absorb all of that and handle it. And it's more than we can handle now. The third force are that financial resources are shrinking just when you need them most. We're facing funding shortfalls and teacher shortages and cutbacks that are directly affecting our ability to deal with all of the other things. And with this economy, the margin for error is now gone. And so last week I ended with this observation. Schools everywhere, they're straining under the pressure in ways that feel familiar.

The exhaustion, the stall results, the sense that no matter how hard everyone is working, something isn't moving the way that it should. But, but here's what I didn't say last week. And, and I want to kind of say it today. That strain isn't just because this moment is hard. It's because most of our schools were never built to handle this kind of pressure in the first place. And there is a very specific reason for that. You see, I think there's something happening in schools right now that nobody has. I don't know, we haven't really named clearly.

And I believe that if you don't name something, you can't fix it. You need to understand it to fix it. So I want to talk to you directly for a moment. Not the professional you, not the one you know that shows up to the staff meeting with a plan and a smile. I want to talk to the you that's in the car on the way home. I want to talk to the you that's. That's lying awake at 2am running through everything you did and everything you still need to do. I want to talk to that you.

Okay, you ready? See, I think there's a chance that what I'm about to describe is going to sound really familiar to that you. And I want you to hear it. I mean, really hear it before we go any further, because no matter how successful you are on the outside, I suspect that on the inside, you might be struggling right now, not struggling in the way that we usually mean when we say somebody's struggling, right? You're not in danger of losing your job or you're not checked out. You haven't given up yet. In fact, you're probably really, really good, if not excellent, at the job that you were trained to do. You're visible in your building.

You know your teachers, not just their names. 

You know their stories, you know their strengths. You know you care about them. You. You don't just know your teachers. You know your kids. You. You know your data.

You know what kids are doing well. You know which ones are falling through the cracks, and it bothers you. You know, you show up early, you stay late, you work, you know, what, 60, sometimes 70 hours a week. You. You. You care, genuinely, you. You care deeply about every single student in. But you're stuck.

You're not stuck because you've given up. You're not stuck because you've stopped trying. You're not even stuck because you don't know what you're doing. You know what you're doing. You're stuck because no matter how hard you push, no matter what new approach you introduce, no matter what you read, no matter what conference you attend or what coaching you invest in or how much of yourself that you are pouring into this work, every single day, your school keeps hitting the same ceiling. You know what the results, they improve, and then they plateau. Your staff gets energized, and then they drift back. Something works, and then for no reason, it just stops working.

Initiatives launch with real momentum and then quietly die six months later. And in the private moments, you know, the ones that nobody sees, you're starting to wonder whether something is wrong with you. And I want to say this as clearly as I know how to say it. There's nothing wrong with you. The ceiling is not in you. The ceiling is the leadership paradigm that you were trained to use. And so I want to give that ceiling a name so that you stop blaming yourself. Because once you name it, then you can see it.

Once you see it, you can stop hitting it and start figuring out how to get beyond it. So here's the name. I am calling that feeling, that sense. The Leadership Ceiling. The leadership ceiling is that point beyond which leadership alone cannot take a school. And no matter how skilled or how dedicated or how relentless you are, it will not go any further. You see, leadership is this thing that we were taught, and it was designed to do something very specific. It was designed to leadership manages people.

It shows you how to inspire, how to drive initiatives, how to build relationships, how to solve problems as they surface and create a culture where. Where people want to do good work. And, you know, frankly, leadership does all those things. It genuinely does. It can get a school to good. You know, it can get a school to, you know, 80%, maybe even 85, 90%. It can, when, you know, leadership can produce real results, and kids are benefiting from your leadership right now. I am not dismissing any of that, but what I am saying is that leadership was never designed to get a school to 100% and keep it there.

So let me. Let me illustrate. I want to give you kind of like a metaphor, right? I want you to imagine a hiker climbing a mountain. And at sea level, everything works. The body strong, the equipment solid. The training that the hiker's gone through is sufficient.

The climber knows what they're doing, and they're doing it well.

They get started, they're walking up the mountain, but as they begin to climb, things change. And they get to a certain altitude and something shifts. The climb gets harder. You know, they have to. You know, they may start getting a little sick. And what's interesting is this. Nothing changed in the hiker himself. He's still the same person.

The equipment is exactly the same. The training, the map, everything is the same. The only thing that's different is the air. The air changed. And once the air changes, it changes the everything else. Because when you climb above a certain altitude, your body starts sending you signals. You start getting headaches, fatigue, shortness of breath, maybe a little dizzy, maybe a little nauseous. And the thing is that's really interesting about that is none of those things mean that the hiker suddenly became weak or out of shape, right?

It doesn't mean that the hiker's still the same. But when you hit a certain altitude, your body starts to say, hey, listen, the air's different up here. This is different. And the same thing is happening in schools. You haven't suddenly become less capable. It's not like you forgot how to do your jobs. It's just that the environment has changed. And the leadership playbook that most of us were trained to use simply was not built for these conditions.

And right now, with everything that we talked about last time, we are hitting that altitude faster and. And harder than ever before. So that's the leadership ceiling. And now I want to talk about how you know when you've hit the leadership ceiling, because the same way that the hiker knows that they've hit a certain altitude and those signals start showing up. They start showing up when you hit the leadership ceiling too. So there are three kinds of signals. The first kind of signal are system signals, and those are the things you notice and how the school is operating on a day to day basis. You start seeing signals in the system.

The second signal are people signals. And those are the things you notice in your staff, how people treat each other and how they treat you. And then the third thing, and this is probably the one that's most hidden, are those internal signals. And these are things that you notice in yourself, usually late at night or when nobody else is around. Okay, so let's start with the system signals, because these are probably the most obvious signals that we see. And the first one that will probably show up is that you will be working harder than ever and the needle is still not moving. And it doesn't matter how many meetings you have, or how many walkthroughs you do, or how many initiatives you you create, or how much PD you do, or how many one on ones you have, you do more of everything. But the school's core results stay stubbornly the same.

Your test scores plateau there, there's a lot of activity, a lot of movement, a lot of effort visible everywhere you look, and yet nothing feels fundamentally different from last year or the year before that or the year before that. Like everybody's just exhausted and nothing has changed, no matter how hard you work. That, that gap between how hard you're working and the results you're getting is one of the clearest early signals that a school has hit the leadership ceiling. Because in a healthy system, effort is supposed to compound, right? When you put in more of the right work, you should be getting more results. Those results should build. But when you hit a leadership ceiling, that stops happening. So sure, people are still working hard, sometimes they're working harder than ever.

But the effort isn't building. 

It's not compounding. It's not building on itself anymore. It's just, you know, it's just piling up. And when effort, effort starts piling up, instead of building momentum and producing results, the only thing that grows is exhaustion. And so you keep introducing these new ideas because the previous ones didn't move the needle enough. And listen, this isn't because you're chasing shiny objects. I've talked to you about shiny objects before, so this isn't just a shiny object thing.

Right. Like you're genuinely trying to find things that work. And so you do things like, you know, you bring in a new literacy framework or a new math program or a new code, you bring in a new data protocol or a new approach to PLCs. And so what's happening is teachers are experiencing this constant stream of this year, we're focusing on this moments, and none of this is outright bad. Right? You've got good taste, you're being selective, you're not just doing anything, you're trying to choose real things that work in other schools. But the problem is that nothing sticks long enough to fundamentally change teachers practice. Because before one initiative, initiative has had time to take root, here comes the next one.

And over time, your school becomes this graveyard of half implemented initiatives. And when you walk through a school that's been running this pattern for five or six years, you can feel it. The posters on the wall from three different frameworks, the handouts from the last four PDs in a binder somewhere. The teacher who, who they've, they've, your teachers have learned to wait you out because whatever this is that you're doing now, it's going to pass. And what you end up with is ultimately fragmentation because every teacher will start doing something slightly different in response to the same problem. So some are going to be reteaching and others are going to be pushing ahead. You'll start to see it show up in grade level teams because they'll start having disagreements about instruction that never get resolved. You know, your department chairs are going to start making independent decisions that don't connect to the building wide vision and direction that you set.

So what's happening is everybody is working hard, but the work isn't aligned enough to produce real lasting results. And so what your kids are experiencing is that, you know, what they do in first period doesn't connect to what they experience in second period. And what they worked on last week doesn't build towards what they're working on this week or the intervention that they're receiving. It's not reinforcing the core instruction, it's just kind of running parallel to it. And everybody's working hard, but because their efforts aren't aligned, it's like their efforts almost end up canceling each other out. And so then you end up running from room to room trying to create alignment out of thin air that quite frankly, the system should be producing on its own. Hey Builders, real quick, before we get on with the rest of the episode, I want to talk to you about the 100% collective. If you are interested in becoming a builder and developing that 100% mindset, then the 100% collective is for you.

Not only do we have monthly masterclasses, live masterclasses, where I show you how to take some work that you are already doing, but do it like a builder. Do it in a way that is more effective, more efficient, in a way that takes the work and stops it from being drudgery and makes it actually something that feels meaningful, that moves you forward. We also have done for you toolboxes with all the tools you need to be able to implement. And we have step by step playbooks that lay out the entire process for you so you don't have to even think about it.

You just take the playbook and you can implement it right away in your schools. 

And we have a supportive community. So this is a safe place where you can bring your challenges. And there are other people, other builders just like you, who are encouraging you, who are applauding you when you win, and who are giving you their experiences as well so that you can learn from each other.

If you are tired of just kind of going through and doing the work the way you've always been doing it, and you're ready to stop being a leader and to start building something amazing, the 100% collective is where you need to be. Join us@bearerhipuniversity.com community now, back with the program. Those system signals of the leadership ceiling, those are bad enough, but then what those system signals do is they then produce people signals of the leadership ceiling. And the first one that usually shows up is compliance. People are compliant instead of committed. So teachers are doing what they are asked to do. And on the surface that looks fine, right? People show up, they follow the protocols, they turn in the data, they participate in the PLCs, but they're doing it because somebody's watching.

So what happens is you'll do a walkthrough, and after your walkthrough, you'll see some temporary improvement. The week after the walkthrough, things look sharper. People are on it, right? But two weeks later, they've gone back to what they were doing before. You have these PLC meetings, they generate notes, they generate action items, but those action items sit on the shared drive that nobody opens again until the next meeting. You have these PD days, right? And they create this genuine enthusiasm. There's real energy in a room, real conversations are happening.

You're happy, successful PD day. But the following month, everybody's like, what? Huh? What do we do. So in this case, the work continues, but nobody really takes ownership of it. And you can feel the difference. There's a specific texture to a staff that's compliant. It's kind of this low grade passivity underneath all of this professional cooperation, right?

People are, people are doing what they're supposed to do. They're just not doing it because they decided to do it. They're doing it because you did. And all of the motivation strategies in the world won't fix it because you can't motivate your way out of compliance. Compliance is what happens when people sit around waiting to be told what to do next. And it happens because they don't have a clear internalized sense of what you're building together for their students. So they're just waiting for you to tell them what to do next. And no pep talk or swag or incentives or motivational activity is going to fix that.

So because of that, because you have compliance, what you end up doing is that you become the engine of everything. You, you're the one solving all the problems. You're the one who notices when something is off. You're the one who intervenes. You're the one who's always chasing, checking, correcting, monitoring progress, making adjustments, keeping the initiatives alive through the sheer force of your attention and your energy. So if you're in the building, things are working, but heaven forbid you have to be out for a day, things are going to drift. And you know, listen, if you have to leave for a week, you know, like maybe to go to a conference or a family emergency or just a, you know, a vacation, you come back and find that all the momentum that you've worked so hard to build, it's evaporated, Right?

And that's because the organization isn't carrying the work.

You are. And here's the thing about this kind of heroic leadership, you know, where you're putting on a cape every day and going in and dragging your school towards your goal. It feels like strength. It looks like strength from the outside. You know, a principal who is the engine of everything, that principle strong and dedicated and charismatic. They look like a highly effective leader. You know, parents appreciate you. I mean, okay, for the most part, right, you get rewarded by your district and, you know, quite frankly, you often feel more alive when you're in that mode, when you're, you know, solving problems and making things happen and keeping the whole thing running.

But this kind of heroic leadership is actually one of the clearest signals that you've hit the leadership ceiling because if your school only moves when you're pushing it, then it's going to stop the moment you can't push anymore. And in this moment in time, with everything that's going on in the world, the point where you can't push anymore is coming faster than any of us are really willing to admit right now. Which leads me to the third signal that you've hit the leadership ceiling. And this is the one we don't like to talk about because it feels private, it feels a little scary. And also, we don't like talking about it because even now, even though we are supposedly more self aware and everything, there's a sense that if you admit this, it means admitting to some kind of failure. And so what happens is it starts with what I call motivational whiplash. And motivational whiplash goes like this. You discover something new, a new approach, a new framework, a new idea from a book or a podcast, maybe even this podcast, or you go to a conference and hear somebody do something.

And for a moment you feel genuinely hopeful, not naively hopeful, because, listen, you've been burned before, but it's still hope. You think that maybe this might be the thing, this might actually work. So you implement it. You bring your staff along, you monitor it carefully, and for a while, it does work. You see signs, right? They're real signs of movement. You might even have like a few moments of real progress. The data starts to shift.

Teachers get engaged, and so when that happens, you allow yourself to feel just a little optimism. But then slowly but surely, the same pattern always returns. Staff enthusiasm fades, old habits reappear. The new thing starts to look like every other thing that came before it. And you find yourself back at the beginning. But this time you're depleted, maybe confused, maybe a little less willing to feel hopeful the next time. And so there's this cycle that happens. You know, you start out with hope, and then you have this effort and you see this early progress, and then the drift and the disappointment and the reset.

That's motivational whiplash. 

And the longer it repeats, the harder it becomes to sustain the belief that a hundred percent is really possible. Over time, what happens is you begin to lose your own confidence. And it's not public, right? So from the outside, you still look the same. You still look competent and composed and in command. You walk in the building like you know what you're doing. You know, you still, you still do all the things that you've been doing and.

And not only that, you still do them well, right? Nobody's complaining but privately, in the car on the way home, in those quiet moments between waking up and getting out of bed or that space right before you go to sleep, you start to ask yourself a question that is a little scary and maybe you've never even asked before. You start to wonder, if I'm doing anything, everything that I was trained to do, why isn't it working? And that question, that specific question, is often the first crack in the leadership ceiling. Because it's not a question about effort. I mean, you know, you're working hard. It's not a. It's not a question about care.

You know, that you care deeply. It's. It's not even really a question about your skill, right? You. You have evidence of your own effectiveness. That's how you got where you are, right? And it's. How you.

You've. You've been effective long enough that it's. It's hard to doub. Your effectiveness. So at the heart of the question is really a question about the leadership model itself. And once you ask it honestly, I mean, really honestly, without, you know, immediately reaching for some reassuring answer, like if you really sit with that question and think about it, you start to become open to the possibility that maybe you've never fully entertained before, that maybe the problem isn't your effort or your skill or your teachers or your school. Maybe the problem is the entire leadership model that you were given and you're realizing it's not working for you. You see, the leadership ceiling isn't new.

It's always been there. We've been bumping up against it for as long as we've been asking schools to close achievement gaps or serve every single student well. The symptoms that I just described, that effort without real movement, the initiative fatigue, the compliance with teachers, the heroic leadership, the motivational whiplash, and that quiet loss of confidence, those are not new experiences. Most of us have been living with some version of that for years. What's new is the altitude. Remember those three forces I talked about at the beginning and last week? They've raised the stakes to the point where the leadership ceiling that was always there has now become impossible to ignore. We can't afford to live with it anymore.

We can't afford for progress to depend on your personal energy when your energy is already being consumed by everything outside of your building. You can't afford initiative fatigue when your margin for error has disappeared and your financial resources are shrinking by the day sometimes, right? The leadership ceiling has always been a problem. But in this moment in time, it's just not something we can ignore any longer. So here's where we are. We have a name for the problem now. It's the leadership ceiling, and it's real. But the thing is, it's structural, which means that it's not your fault.

It's not a reflection of your ability or your effort or your dedication. 

It's just a feature of leadership. And so naming it matters. Because the principles that I've watched struggle the longest are almost always the ones who keep trying to solve a leadership paradigm problem with a personal solution. So they think it's going to get fixed by working harder or learning more or trying harder. So they pour more and more of themselves into their work, and they've sacrificed so much of themselves trying to make a difference. But their sacrifices are never enough, and they never will be, because you can't work your way or sacrifice your way through a leadership ceiling. You need a different approach entirely.

And here's what I know from 20 years of watching principals break through the leadership ceiling. The ones who do, they don't do it by becoming better leaders, because the flaw is in the leadership ceiling, not the leader himself or herself. So you're not going to break through the leadership ceiling by becoming a better leader. You have to become something different entirely. You have to try something that was designed to operate above the leadership ceiling, something that was built specifically for the altitude that leadership can't reach. And so next time, I want to tell you what that something is, what it's called, why it works when leadership doesn't, and what it actually looks like in real schools and on a real Tuesday morning with real teachers and real kids. Because the leadership ceiling is not the end of the story. It's just the beginning of a different story.

So let's stop sacrificing to the leadership ceiling. Let's start breaking through it together like a builder. I'll talk to you next time. Hey, if you're ready to get started being a builder right away, then I want to invite you to join us at Buildership University. It's our exclusive online community for builders just like you, where you. You'll be able to get the exact training that you need to turn your school into a success story. Right now, with the people and resources you already have. Inside, you'll find our best online courses, live trainings with me, tons of resources, templates and exemplars, and monthly live office hours with me where you can ask me anything and get my help on whatever challenge you're facing right now.

If you're tired of hitting obstacle after obstacle, obstacle. And you're sick of tiny little incremental gains each year. If you're ready to make a dramatic difference in your school right now, then you need to join Buildership University. Just go to buildershipuniversity.com and get started writing your school success story today. Hey, it's Robin here and I want to thank you for listening to today's episode. Now, if you have a question about today's episode or you just want to keep the conversation going, did you know that we had a School Leadership Reimagined Facebook group? All you need to do is go to Facebook join the School Leadership Reimagined Facebook group. Now, there are going to be a couple of questions that we ask at the beginning because we want to protect this group and make sure that we don't have any trolls come in and that it really is for people who are principals, assistant principals, district administrators.

So make sure you answer those questions or you won't get in. But then we can keep the conversation going. Plus, we do a lot of great bonus content. I'm in there every single weekday. So if you have a question or comment about the episode, let's continue the conversation. Join us at the School Leadership Reimagined Facebook group and I'll talk to you next time.