Setting the annual agendas by the Board President and School Head is a key skill for executing the strategic plan/strategic financial plan. No matter how great the strategic plan and strategic financial plan are, they remain inert and powerless unless they are annually tethered to an actionable process. Using annual agendas turns them into the difference-makers that move the school forward.

Research and experience has led ISM to hypothesize that the School Head’s well-being significantly relates to school outcomes. ISM recently conducted a study of School Heads to extend our knowledge of executive leadership and investigate the relationship among our Tier 1 markers of the ISM Stability Markers®, School Heads’ characteristics and experience, and their well-being. In upcoming I&P issues, we will publish the more nuanced results of this study. The purpose of this article is to re-introduce our approach to the measurement of executive leadership and describe the general results and conclusions. Great leaders can transform a school and take it to new heights, whereas poor leaders can cause great challenges for schools. We have long asserted that, as the executive leader, your “style” does not seem to account for the differences in organizational performance. Nonetheless, you are a critical component of a school’s ability to deliver its mission with excellence. If it is not style, then what are the critical aspects of executive leaders that separate the best leaders from the rest?

In a previous article, we listed observable behaviors that collectively form an action premise from which each Headship develops. In this article, we consider the senior administrator position—those who report directly to the Head and collectively form the Leadership Team. The essential expectations list is one of two criteria for administrator evaluation. The other criteria are objectives created from the annual administrative agenda. This agenda’s objectives change each year as the strategic needs of the school continue to evolve, as articulated through the Board’s strategic plan/strategic financial plan. The essential expectations, on the other hand, are a constant reflecting the observable behaviors that the School Head expects each member the Leadership Team to exhibit and the Head evaluates.

In a previous article, we provided four factors to keep in mind when considering facilities planning. Curriculum does not drive facility needs. Environmental regulatory concerns and communications infrastructure require a flexible approach. Design matters to students, and their voice is important. Facilities must move from command and control (adult-centered) to multifunctional collaborative learning (student-centered). We now expand these factors to inform key campus master development planning.

ISM has written much over the years about Head evaluation. We now update and further explain the basis for the employer/employee relationship between the Board of Trustees and the School Head. An understanding of the critical distinction between the strategic plane and the operations plane resides at the heart of private-independent school governance. The Board lives on the strategic plane with its actions and focus encapsulated in the strategic plan/strategic financial plan. This vision of the school’s future, with its companion fiscally conservative assumptions, provides the guide rails to Board action through the annual Board agenda and to operations action through the annual administrative agenda. Thus, the strategic plane not only determines the school’s visionary future but, by direct implication, also determines the most important actions to take on the operations plane by the School Head and administration. The direction is inviolate—the Board decides the school’s direction and only the Board can change that direction. The School Head controls how to make that direction operational and has almost complete discretion over that, limited only by the strategic financial plan’s fiscal assumptions.

For you as a School Head, Human Resources Director, or an academic administrator, toxic teachers can be a puzzling phenomenon. Teachers, at the beginning of their careers, are typically: full of hope; excited about changing the world one child at a time; interested in—or even obsessive about—their subject material; and prone to moving every conversation (even those outside the school) to “what happened at school today.”