The Difference Between Running a School and Being Run By One

The Job You Signed Up For vs. The Job You Have

The vision: Shaping curriculum. Mentoring teachers. Building culture. Having conversations with students that matter. Being present in the hallways, not trapped in an office.

The reality: A calendar blocked from 7am to 6pm. Email until 10pm. Compliance reports. Parent complaints. HR documentation. Budget revisions. A to-do list that regenerates faster than you can clear it.

Somewhere between your idealistic first day and your exhausted present, the school started running you instead of the other way around.

This isn't a personal failure. It's a structural one. And understanding the structure is the first step to reclaiming your role.

How Schools Consume Leaders

The consumption patterns:

1. The Accountability Trap

Modern school leadership is drowning in accountability without commensurate authority. You're responsible for test scores, but can't control who walks through your door. You're accountable for teacher quality, but can't hire and fire freely. You're on the hook for student wellbeing while navigating 47 different policies about what you can and can't do.

Every new regulation creates compliance work. None of them create time.

2. The Communication Vortex

You are the bottleneck for every concern, complaint, and question. Parents want to talk to "the head." Teachers need approval. The board needs updates. Each constituency needs a slightly different version of you, and switching between them is exhausting.

3. The Urgency Illusion

Everything in a school feels urgent. A student conflict needs immediate attention. A parent is upset right now. A facilities issue can't wait. The urgent colonizes all available space, leaving nothing for the important.

4. The Visibility Tax

Leadership is performance. You need to be seen - at drop-off, at events, in classrooms, at meetings. This visible presence matters. It also fragments your day into unusable 15-minute chunks.

The Shift: From Reactive to Intentional

You can't eliminate these pressures. They're structural to the role. But you can change your relationship to them.

The key insight: Most school leaders manage their tasks. Few manage their attention. And attention is the scarce resource that actually matters.

Three questions that reframe everything:

1. "What can only I do?" - Your unique value is judgment, relationships, and vision. Everything else is potentially delegatable, automatable, or eliminable.

2. "What would happen if this didn't get done?" - Most to-dos feel mandatory. Many aren't. Some things can simply not happen with minimal consequences.

3. "Who else is carrying this?" - If you're the only person worried about something, maybe it's either not important or your team doesn't understand their ownership.

The Practical Shifts

Shift 1: From Open Door to Office Hours

The open-door policy sounds caring. It's actually chaos. Every interruption costs 23 minutes of recovery time (research backs this up).

The alternative: Set dedicated times when you're available for walk-ins. Outside those times, you're doing focused work. Yes, this feels uncomfortable. Yes, it's necessary.

Shift 2: From CC'd to Informed Differently

You don't need to be on every email thread. You need to know outcomes, not processes.

Create a system where your team documents decisions without copying you on the deliberation. A weekly digest of "decisions made" beats 40 emails about "decisions being discussed."

Shift 3: From Attending to Sponsoring

Not every meeting needs your presence. Some need your authority. You can sponsor a decision-making process without sitting in the room.

"You have my support to decide X within these parameters" is leadership. Sitting in the meeting because you don't trust others to decide is management failure.

Shift 4: From Responsive to Proactive

Block time for strategic work first. Protect it ruthlessly. Let reactive work fill the gaps, not the other way around.

The 80/20 of School Leadership

The 20% that creates 80% of your impact:

• Hiring and developing the right people
• Setting and communicating clear expectations
• Making difficult decisions others are avoiding
• Maintaining key relationships (board, major donors, critical parents)
• Visibly modeling the culture you want

The 80% that creates 20% of your impact:

• Attending every committee meeting
• Being CC'd on all communications
• Approving routine decisions
• Handling complaints that others could resolve
• Formatting reports that no one really reads

The hard question: Where does your time actually go? Track a week honestly. The gap between where your time goes and where it should go is your development opportunity.

The Permission Problem

Questions to pressure-test your constraints:

• "Who actually requires this report in this format?"
• "What would happen if I delegated this entirely?"
• "When was the last time this was questioned?"
• "Am I doing this because it's expected or because I expect it of myself?"

Some structures are real (accreditation requirements, board mandates, legal compliance). Many are inherited habits that nobody has challenged.

The Leadership You Want to Provide

Write down three things:

1. What did you get into education leadership to do?
2. What are the three most important outcomes for your school this year?
3. How much time this week did you spend on #1 and #2?

The Personal Cost

This isn't just about effectiveness. It's about sustainability.

School leaders burn out because they're doing the wrong work, not because they're lazy. They're working incredibly hard on things that don't actually require their gifts. That's exhausting in a way that aligned work isn't.

Signs you're being run by the school:

• Dreading Mondays (not occasionally - consistently)
• Unable to articulate what you accomplished at week's end
• Feeling busy but not impactful
• Knowing what needs to change but having no time to change it
• Reactive from 7am to 10pm

Signs you're running the school:

• Clarity about your top 3 priorities this week
• At least one protected block daily for strategic work
• Delegation that actually sticks
• Endings to your workday (most days)
• Energy left for your actual life

Starting the Shift

This week's experiment:

1. Identify one recurring obligation that could be delegated, automated, or eliminated
2. Stop doing it
3. See what happens

Most of the time: nothing. That's the revelation.