How to Achieve Alignment Within Your Administrative Team

School leadership is already challenging, made even more difficult with so much administrative turnover, fewer people interested in going into admin, and having to fill open positions with temporarily assigned personnel with minimal leadership training. For newly formed school leadership teams, developing and aligning expectations is essential for a strong, healthy working relationship, and for the team to develop and grow.

Too often we assume having a shared understanding, only to discover we are actually operating from very different perspectives. Leaders must understand that clear expectations from the start are not just helpful; they are essential to the health of the school and community.

EXPLICITLY DEFINING EXPECTATIONS FOR THE administrative team

Our own administrative partnership was initially formed by a directive from our superintendent. That said, we chose to begin getting on the same page by engaging in a structured expectations exercise (Diane’s idea). The exercise is simple but requires honesty and commitment. Each person independently reflects on two key questions: What do I expect from the other(s) on the team, and what can others expect of me?

When answering the questions, each person should include both mindsets and actions. It’s OK to take a few days to think about it, but we recommend setting a short deadline to ensure that it actually gets done. Here are some examples you might write down:

• “You can expect me to arrive early every day.”
• “You can expect me to share all personnel issues with you.”
• “I expect you to keep me informed of all disciplinary actions so we can keep student consequences consistent.”
• “I expect you to handle our disagreements privately, not in front of others at a meeting.”

These concrete examples help translate vague expectations into observable behaviors.

CREATING A SHARED UNDERSTANDING

Once you’ve explicitly defined your expectations independently, it is time to share them with your teammates. We recommend that each person share their statements and then give others an opportunity to clarify or ask any questions.

Having this type of focused discussion not only allows each person to share their own philosophy, but leads to better understanding of each other’s personality, beliefs, and motivations, and helps them to find some common ground for working together. This process also encourages ownership and vulnerability and sets the stage for meaningful dialogue throughout the year.

When we sat down to complete this activity together, one of the most impactful things Shawn shared was the idea of being “pre-forgiven” for mistakes. He was saying that he believed in our shared desire to make the best decisions for our school, our students, and their families, but we all know mistakes can happen.

He was telling me that he would put his belief in the fact that I would make decisions with my best intentions, and forgive me when it didn’t work the way I hoped. This created psychological safety and acknowledged that learning and growth are a part of leadership development.

When Diane began sharing, one of the more impactful statements she included was that she was the “forever vice principal” rather than someone planning to leave after a year or two. She genuinely loved being a vice principal and saw it as the meaningful role she wanted to remain in. This assurance allowed operating with a mindset of trust, stability, and long-term investment.

This shared list of expectations creates a foundation for continuous open dialogue, allowing the team to clarify assumptions, resolve issues, and reach mutual understanding as changes happen and challenges arise. Rather than this being a onetime activity, the expectations can be a “living document” with team members committing to professionally holding one another accountable to the agreements and revisiting them regularly as roles, responsibilities, and circumstances change.

UNDERSTANDING WHAT EACH PERSON BRINGS TO THE TEAM

After establishing some trust and understanding, the next step is to focus on learning about and leveraging each other’s individual strengths and weaknesses. We all bring a unique set of experiences, talents, and perspectives to the school, whether in instructional leadership, operations and systems, relationship-building, etc.

At the same time, it’s understood that everyone has areas for growth. Understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses allows the team to be strategic as opportunities and challenges arise.

When we wanted to learn more about our own strengths and weaknesses, and each other’s, we decided to lean on a number of personality and leadership inventory activities. We completed the Compass Points (an exercise that determines four leadership types and how each is important to the whole) activity, took a personality test based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) (determining 16 personality types along with potential strengths and weaknesses), and completed a book study on Strengths Based Leadership, by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie.

These activities provided a common language and concrete results we could reference, work on, and later share with our staff. With this information we made better-informed decisions about when to assign tasks that played to our strengths or if something was a growth opportunity to challenge ourselves.

ENSURING CONTINUED ALIGNMENT in administrative teams

Once you’ve established these understandings with your team, it is important to continually meet to discuss how things are going, both for your school at large and for your working relationship. We recommend intentionally planning time to meet regularly, preferably daily (which was our commitment).

Whether your team meets before school, gets together during lunches, or walks the field after school (that was us), your working relationship with each other needs to be prioritized in order to positively impact your campus because when you’re unified, everyone knows they cannot “play mom off dad” between principal and assistant principal.

At the end of the day, this work requires openness and vulnerability. Taking these steps allows leadership teams to build trust, take advantage of opportunities to learn and grow, and reap the benefits of the strengths of each team member. School leadership teams are far more effective when they work together, and these steps can help set the stage for years of successful working relationships.