Changing Faces: Establishing Teams in New Leadership Roles

Independent school leaders face the challenge of adapting their own personality and identity to the professional role and goals they take on. Yet, too often, school leaders rise through the ranks without explicit training on the human side of how to leverage their unique strengths while also building administrative teams that celebrate the different humans that make them function. 

As division heads at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Ridgeland, MS, Upper School Division Head & Assistant Head for Academics Julie Rust and Head of Middle School Buck Cooper have learned to navigate inherited administrative teams by building consistent communication systems for feedback, incorporating their own personalities with leadership moves to help build collaborative teams.

Signals: When you stepped into your leadership role, how did you approach understanding the existing team, systems, and culture before deciding where to make changes?

Julie Rust: Both Buck and I were already members of the St. Andrew’s Episcopal School faculty & staff before taking the helm as new division heads. This means we had a familiarity with the team, systems, and culture. When evaluating those systems, I struck a balance between recognizing the good foundation established by my predecessor while seeking to make things my own.

Leadership is a lot like learning, in that active, creative meaning making is the only way to make it your own. The very act of drafting a policy or editing a handbook is a piece of figuring out how to lead. Creating makes it so the person implementing the program, plan, or idea has really thought it through.

Buck Cooper: Having worked previously with the administrative team while a teacher at the school, I had a shared sense of what was working within the division and what needed some shifting. I knew that my first year as a division head was a time for learning, making some missteps, and growing. I set out to adopt the stance of a learner: to listen carefully, but also, to make decisions. Fortunately for me, the team that I inherited from my predecessor was a great team willing to share their knowledge, including the inner workings of administration that I hadn’t seen when previously in a faculty role.

Signals: How did you build trust and establish your leadership identity? Was there a point when you felt you had found the right balance between continuity and change?

Buck: When it comes to change, I approach it incrementally, erring on the side of continuity because in a middle school we need stability and some predictability for the students, by virtue of adolescent development.  

One of my first moves was to take members of the administrative team I inherited to an SAIS summer conference. The goal was not only to learn together, but to build deeper relationships as a team outside the school. I then better understood the skills our team possessed in order to better leverage those skills.

Julie: Similar to Buck, I had already built relationships with the team as a teaching peer, sharing resources with my colleagues. I was curious if my switch in roles would strain these wonderful relationships. 

Fortunately, I was given a fair amount of lead time before officially taking on my new role. I spent the spring in a series of conversations with members of the division, asking for their input on what was going well in their role and the division and what could go better. From the outset, I was clear that this was a time to think about big-picture structures and systems and things that I can impact. Those initial conversations were helpful. 

Simultaneously, as a quiet observer, I attended end-of-year meetings between faculty and my predecessor. This provided insights about how he approached meetings and what topics rose to the surface and got me thinking about how I could envision handling these situations in the future.

While I enjoy the creative process of approaching things differently, change can be scary, so it’s important to create a sense of stability for the faculty as well. Naming the main goals for the year and sharing the long game provides the direction the team needs without overwhelm. 

Signals: Leadership is deeply personal, yet the role comes with institutional expectations. How did you learn to leverage your own personalities, strengths, and leadership style while still building a cohesive team with people who may lead and communicate differently from you?

Julie: I see authentic leadership as being yourself with the people around you. A lot of that happens when you’re sitting around a table together. I ask myself, “How can I think about faculty meetings as ways to lesson plan for adults?” That intentionality is incredibly important to my identity as a teacher, helping me think through questions like, “Am I the one making the meeting, or are the faculty making the meeting? Am I celebrating my own knowledge and sense-making, or am I making space for theirs?”

I will add it is complicated to work with a team and admin with strong personalities who are all different, with faculty views ranging from, “I need you to stop emailing me” to “I need you to email me more.” The more ways we can seek feedback from people and their needs, the better we can cultivate teams that are welcoming.

Buck: I think there’s tremendous value in checking in to see how things are going. I’ve focused on cultivating a habit of taking a lap around campus to say “hello” across offices and departments, checking the mail, walking through the library, or business or counselor’s office. I may pop into the upper school, the dean of students’ office, or the nurse’s station. 

I once heard from another middle school principal, “If you stand in the school hallways, the trouble will find you.” I feel that by making these casual visits across campus, people share things and appreciate that you show up and ask how they’re doing. Talking to the team and being present for students feeds me in this work. 

Signals: How did you determine what your divisional team needed from you?

Julie: I initially worked really hard to create systems for feedback. Now, in year two, I can start to lean into the relationships I’ve cultivated to naturally ensure people are comfortable when they need to say something difficult. 

Division head roles are maybe the most interdependent roles in a school. I coordinate and communicate so organically and constantly with our school and college counselors, dean, nurse, assistant head, learning facilitator, DEIB coordinator, librarian, chaplain, student life coordinator, and more. Our weekly meetings and establishing norms and surveys are key, but having a meal together off campus not talking about work goes a long way. When trust, respect, and psychological safety  are established, we are more likely to say what needs to be said.

Buck: So much of what I learned in my first year was a function of careful listening. Like Julie, before I moved into this role, I met one-on-one with both faculty and administration to learn what had been working and what needed changing. I also spent a year observing how our meetings worked when we met as an administrative team and when we met as a student support services team. I realized that the changes I wanted to make could be most effectively made not in year one but in year two, after a year of listening, participating, and learning. 

Signals: Are there particular practices or specific systems or routines you would recommend to leaders stepping into a new role to create regular feedback loops?

Julie: I believe passionately that emails, meetings, and processes are acts of love. Being looped in, included, and needed are visible symbols of how we do this work together and get everyone on the same page. I work with the intention to only send the email or have the meeting when we have a clear need and purpose. 

The reason that emails and meetings and processes get a bad rap is because they aren’t well planned, executed, or followed up. It’s frustrating to feel your time has been wasted or to have someone in leadership make big promises and then not follow through. My biggest piece of advice for leaders is to have the meeting and send the message and create the process, but make sure you are doing it well, with fidelity and follow through.

Buck: Teams need a couple of different modes of communication. For teams that operate within the same daily space and routines, an outlet for quick communication such as Google Chats is helpful. Yet, teams also need the opportunity at regular intervals to plan together for the longer term with others, such as the support services team. Our grade-level team leaders and all of our middle school administrative teams all have a single shared document that serves as a repository for the entire year’s worth of agendas for meetings. 

Clarity about the different components of a meeting is critical for success. As Julie mentioned, it’s important to get everybody on the same page with regards to needs for support, disposition of previous items on agendas, and items for discussion. Meetings also need to allow time devoted to planning and the assignment of support with a timeline for follow-up. Having purpose to meetings and intention around how they are run signifies to people that you care and that you value them and their time.

Signals: How did you establish collective priorities for your team?

Julie: I started this year by distilling our school-wide theme of three specific categories. As we look at our yearly priorities as a team, it helps me to make sure that they all fit into one of those three buckets. I also think establishing a five-year administrative team goal plan is effective in noting that we cannot tackle all of our goals at once. 

Buck: Our team’s collective priorities stay the same most year and feel like important things for an administrative team to manage. We understand these priorities as a team. Through the practice of doing this work together year in and year out, we haven’t had a lot of turnover in my first three years as head of the middle school.

Signals: For those stepping into a new leadership role, what advice would you offer about building an effective team in those first one to two years?

Julie: Just be authentic with others, recognizing their strengths and naming them, recognizing your weaknesses and naming them, and building relationships that can help you get good work done together. If you are able to organize your systems so that you get done what you say you are going to get done and generally answer emails, you’ll be ahead. This is a marathon, not a sprint, so be yourself and find the joy in the wild chaos of each day. 

Buck: I spent a lot of my first year telling myself when I made a mistake that this mistake was probably the result of me being new to this role. It is absolutely okay to let an administrative team see that you don’t know what you don’t know and that you trust them to help you learn. 

And, basic human contact – checking in, making time to listen to others, building relationships – goes a long way. A good chunk of leadership is showing up as a decent person willing to hear what another person has to say and responding carefully and with thoughtfulness. If you take the long view that your team is going to be together for more than just a year, you realize that you have to trust your team and that you have to be worthy of their trust.