Research for Teachers

When I first moved into leadership, I believed my role was primarily about management.

I focused on organization, efficiency, and accountability. I created agendas, delegated responsibilities, monitored timelines, solved problems, and made sure tasks were completed. If meetings stayed on schedule and the work got done, I felt successful as a leader.

At the time, leadership felt procedural.

I believed strong leadership meant keeping things moving.

Looking back, I do not think this mindset was unusual. Schools often position leadership as coordination. Teacher leaders are expected to manage initiatives, oversee curriculum, organize assessments, facilitate meetings, and ensure consistency across teams. Much of the work is operational by necessity.

And to be fair, those skills matter.

But early in my leadership journey, I treated nearly every challenge as though it were technical: identify the problem, implement the solution, monitor completion.

Then I encountered Adaptive Leadership.

That training fundamentally shifted how I understood leadership and collaboration. I began realizing that many of the challenges schools face are not technical problems with straightforward solutions. They are adaptive challenges that require shifts in beliefs, relationships, habits, and collective understanding.

A technical problem can often be solved through expertise or procedure.
An adaptive challenge requires people to learn, rethink, and change together.

That distinction changed the way I approached leadership.

I started recognizing that collaboration is not something leaders enforce. It is something leaders cultivate.

Previously, I often focused on ensuring meetings were productive and efficient. I worried about whether agendas were completed and whether teams left with concrete outcomes. Over time, however, I began paying far more attention to the quality of the discussion itself.

Who was speaking?
Who was remaining silent?
Whose ideas shaped the conversation?
Did people feel safe disagreeing?
Were we engaging in inquiry, or simply moving through tasks?

I realized that leadership was not simply about directing work. It was about shaping the conditions where meaningful collective thinking could emerge.

This shift aligns closely with the work of Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, whose work on Adaptive Leadership emphasizes that leaders cannot solve adaptive challenges for people. Instead, leaders help groups navigate uncertainty, regulate tension, and engage in the difficult learning required for change (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002).

That idea initially felt uncomfortable to me because it challenged my instinct to provide answers quickly. Earlier in my career, I often felt pressure to resolve tension immediately during collaborative meetings. If disagreement emerged, I interpreted it as a problem to fix.

Now I understand that productive struggle is often necessary for meaningful collaboration.

Of course, that kind of collaboration depends heavily on psychological safety. Teachers need to feel safe enough to ask questions, share uncertainty, disagree respectfully, and admit when something is not working. Without psychological safety, collaboration easily becomes performative. Meetings remain polite, but real thinking stays hidden.

Research by Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (Edmondson, 1999). In schools, this matters enormously. Teachers are unlikely to engage honestly in collaborative inquiry if they fear judgment, embarrassment, or professional vulnerability.

I began noticing how often leadership practices unintentionally shape the emotional dynamics of collaboration. Leaders who dominate discussions, rush conversations, over-control agendas, or immediately evaluate ideas can inadvertently shut down the very thinking they hope to encourage.

This realization also changed the way I thought about facilitation.

Earlier in my leadership experience, I believed facilitation meant guiding teams efficiently toward conclusions. Now, I see facilitation as creating structures that support equitable participation and thoughtful inquiry. Sometimes that means slowing conversations down rather than speeding them up.

Protocols became particularly important in my practice after Adaptive Leadership training. Initially, I viewed discussion protocols as somewhat artificial or restrictive. Over time, however, I realized they often create the conditions necessary for more authentic participation. Structured discussion routines can prevent dominant voices from controlling conversations and help quieter team members contribute more comfortably.

I also began understanding leadership less as individual authority and more as collective practice. James Spillane argues that leadership is distributed across interactions between people, structures, and situations rather than residing solely within formal leadership roles (Spillane, 2006). That perspective resonated deeply with my own experiences in schools. Some of the most meaningful leadership moments I have witnessed came not from positional authority, but from collaborative conversations where teachers collectively shaped understanding together.

Similarly, Etienne Wenger describes learning as fundamentally social and rooted within communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). The more I worked with collaborative teams, the more I realized that professional learning is rarely something delivered to teachers. It emerges through dialogue, reflection, shared struggle, and collective meaning-making.

That realization changed my priorities as a leader.

I still care about organization. Agendas matter. Timelines matter. Accountability matters. But I no longer think those elements are the heart of leadership.

Effective collaboration is less about controlling people and more about shaping environments where people can think together productively.

The longer I lead, the more I realize that leadership is not primarily about managing conversations toward predetermined outcomes. It is about holding conversations well enough that collective learning can occur.

And for me, that has been one of the most important shifts from management toward leadership.

References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the line: Staying alive through the dangers of leading. Harvard Business School Press.

Spillane, J. P. (2006). Distributed leadership. Jossey-Bass.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.