What I’m Listening for in Leadership Meetings

I’ve sat in a lot of independent school leadership meetings over the years, as a member of the leadership team, as an advisor, and as a guest brought in to help solve a particular problem. I’ve come to believe that if you really want to understand how a school operates, sit quietly in the corner for a few of their leadership team meetings.

Not because of what’s on the agenda, but because of what happens around it.

I pay attention to the dynamics in the room- I’m looking to hear which voices carry the conversation and which are heard less often and watching what happens when someone disagrees or challenges an idea. Is it okay for someone to say, “I think we’re looking at this the wrong way”? Does disagreement lead to a better conversation, or does everyone quickly shut down and focus on their notebook? Most importantly, do conversations in these meetings lead to decisions, and once those decisions are made, is the team able to move forward?

The patterns I see in those meetings tell me a lot about a school. 

Meetings are a helpful diagnostic tool.

Leadership teams spend a great deal of time talking about problems. Enrollment is down. Faculty are frustrated with a new policy. Families are complaining about the new pick up line process. The software we just spent a ton of money on isn’t working the way it was intended. 

The kinds of issues that end up on the agenda can tell me about what is going on with a school and what their current challenges are. But if I’m being honest, I’ve learned that the way a team talks about these issues and then works together to address them tells me a whole lot more about where we should be focusing our efforts to move the needle forward.

A process may clearly need to change, but if no one is quite sure where the authority to change it sits, then it just lingers. I’ve seen a decision get made in the meeting, but then be reopened afterward through a series of individual conversations. One person may own a problem because it seems to stem from their department, but several others have become involved because responsibilities aren’t clear and now there’s resentment or frustration. Often I find that everyone is really busy, moving from one urgent issue to another, without enough time to reflect on whether all their activity is actually moving the school forward.

Those aren't really meeting problems. They're organizational ones. And they often reveal themselves around the leadership table long before they appear on strategic plans, in performance evaluations, or in Board reports. 

Listen for the conversation underneath the conversation.

One of the things I find myself doing in leadership meetings is listening on two levels. There is the conversation everyone is having, and then there is the conversation underneath it.

A discussion about admissions follow-up may actually be about accountability. A debate over purchasing new tech may reveal that no one has the capacity to manage the systems the school already owns. Questions about a marketing campaign may point to a larger issue: the school hasn’t fully aligned around what makes it distinctive. A conversation about filling a position may raise a more important question about whether the role as it’s written still makes sense.

This is one reason I’m cautious about jumping too quickly to solutions when I talk with a school. If we respond only to the issue sitting on the agenda, we may solve the most visible problem without addressing what created it.

The visible problem matters, but it isn’t always the problem worth solving first.

Healthy teams don’t have to agree.

A strong leadership culture isn’t one where everyone agrees with each other. The best leadership teams I’ve worked with are safe and secure enough that anyone can challenge an idea. Having your ideas or practices questioned is not felt as a personal challenge or slight. People can raise concerns, ask uncomfortable questions, change their minds, and bring different perspectives to the table. Expertise matters, but titles don't determine which ideas are worth hearing.

But creating space for every voice doesn't mean every voice gets the final say.

Every conversation won’t end in consensus. Healthy teams make room for disagreement, but they also know when it’s time to make a decision and move forward. Otherwise, collaboration can quietly become consensus-seeking, and leaders spend valuable time revisiting questions they thought they had already answered.

Pay attention to what keeps coming back.

Another thing I notice in leadership meetings is the issue everyone remembers discussing before. I usually hear it as something like: “We’ve talked about this.” “We really need to figure this out.” “This came up last year.”

Those kinds of phrases are worth noticing because when the same problem or same type of problem repeatedly returns to the agenda, the question may no longer be, How do we solve this? It may need to shift to, What is preventing us from solving this?

Some of the reasons I see most frequently: ownership isn't clear, so a difficult decision keeps getting deferred; the person responsible for moving the work forward doesn't have the authority, time, skill, or support to do it; or competing priorities continually push it down the line. Another interesting scenario is when I find a team has spent so much time discussing a problem that talking about it has become a substitute for addressing it- and there are usually many layers to that onion when we find it! 

Here’s the thing, once you start asking what is keeping a problem in place, the conversation changes. You're no longer trying to solve the same issue for the fourth (or tenth!) time. It’s worth taking the time to find the pattern that keeps bringing an issue back to the agenda.

Your leadership meeting is giving you data.

We tend to think about organizational data as numbers: enrollment, retention, budget, fundraising, applications, yield. Those numbers matter, and schools should absolutely be paying attention to them. But leadership teams generate another kind of data every time they meet.

There’s a lot to learn simply by paying attention to what gets discussed and what gets avoided. Notice which decisions move forward and which continually return to the table. Look at where the team gets stuck, where energy builds, and where it disappears. Are the people around the table operating primarily as leaders of their individual departments or as a leadership team collectively responsible for the institution as a whole?

None of those things will appear on an enrollment dashboard. But they influence almost everything that does.

That’s why I’ve come to see leadership meetings as more than a time when schools conduct business. They offer a window into how the school actually works: how people communicate, how decisions get made, how responsibility is shared, and how effectively a group of talented individuals functions as a team.

The next time you sit down at a leadership team meeting, pay attention to more than what’s on the agenda. The most important question in the room might be the one that isn't written there.