Attracting and retaining qualified faculty and staff, as well as balancing daily demands with strategy, are among the issues keeping heads of school up at night (SAIS March 2025 Pulse Survey). To be able to delegate and allow others to take on some of the daily demands means that heads need to put in place solid, experienced teams. These teams should be built with key approaches in mind, such as open communication, collaborative decision-making, clear goals, and distributed leadership (SAIS November 2025 Pulse Survey).
The Howard School, which serves 300 K-12 students in Atlanta, GA, shares their perspective on building and developing high-performing teams, with meaningful insights from Head of School Anna B. Moore, Ph.D., Lower School Principal Adeiye Oluwaseun-Sobo, and Director of Human Resources Emily Kleiber.
Keeping Mission and Vision as the Focus of the Leadership Team
The Howard School is composed of a community of experts who lead with warmth and rigor, within a culture where every member of the school is known, seen, and valued. Discussions are rooted in the school mission and mapped directly onto strategic priorities.
Anchored by what Head of School Anna Moore describes as its “Big Rock” – a three sentence guiding principle co-created by the team – this “internal document” is a summary statement of who the school most intends to be. Copies of the Big Rock are visible during every team meeting.
“The Howard School is a community of experts that supports and nurtures its members with the belief that if you are here, you belong here. If you are part of our community, you are known, seen, held, and valued. If you visit our community, our warmth is so apparent and real that you WANT to be part of the community in some way.”
The team talks often about moments and initiatives that are aligned with the Big Rock, including during the interview phase for potential new hires. It’s critical that prospective employees understand the culture, and buy-in is a non-negotiable part of joining the team.
From the Big Rock mentality, the school developed four core values that are shared in every classroom and office space on campus. The values open with action verbs because they are intended to be daily practices.
“At Howard we: Practice Kindness and RespectSeek a Spirit of PartnershipHonor our HumanityCelebrate our Differences”
Every leadership team meeting opens with a reading of the core values, and all-school employee gatherings also begin with an invitation to employees to recite one of the values. Being so deeply rooted in its core values is a distinctive feature of The Howard School leadership team, reinforcing perspective and the lens used to do the meaningful work of the school.
Role Clarity and Team Communication
No matter its size, schools are faced with a variety of staffing challenges. As a small school with a lean administrative staffing structure, the team at The Howard School holds many responsibilities that may, at times, overlap or merge. The team has established a few strategies to address this. With open lines of communication, the leadership team discusses moments when the work means team members “bump into” one another. This transparency means that roles and responsibilities are discussed as a normal part of doing business, not only when there is a problem to address.
The school leadership team completed the PQ® Program Training, which provided a common language to use to address stressors and opportunities. Because the program assesses one’s “cognitive saboteurs” and negative ways of thinking, the team could share with one another the most common cognitive pitfalls, turning self-awareness into shared accountability and increasing cognitive resilience. The result is a high-trust, high-performing team that turns research into results; makes nimble, learner-first decisions; and sustains the school’s vision for the long term.
For a forthcoming team retreat, team members will review their respective job description and map “assigned duties” onto elements of the mission statement and strategic planning priorities. This shared discussion will create space for the team to see how their individual contributions connect to the larger vision, while also clarifying where roles intersect or diverge. By grounding the conversation in the school mission and strategy, the team can more easily see where collaboration is essential and where accountability lies with a single leader. Collaboration is a key component of developing trust and accountability.
Transparency and open dialogue create space for leadership, faculty, and staff to work together from a place of common understanding and openness. The entire lower school teaching team completed the CliftonStrengths assessment at the start of the school year to identify each member’s individual strengths. Faculty and staff then met with their teaching teams to discuss individual profiles and how they show up in their work, committing to operate in the “balcony” of their strengths while supporting one another when in the “basement.” The school continues to use the results to guide whole and small-group collaboration, enhance communication across teams, and inform professional growth discussions, yielding more effective and supportive teamwork.
Any team will have moments of tension or miscommunications. By actively and explicitly returning to its core values in those moments (e.g., honoring our humanity and seeking a spirit of partnership), teams can build greater trust, reduce confusion, and work with both clarity and generosity toward one another.
Identifying and Nurturing High-Potential Leaders
Goal-setting and professional development has been identified as a priority by division leaders at The Howard School. New this year, every teacher was asked to write one goal that maps directly onto each of the three arms of the school’s mission statement. This intention aids classroom teachers in seeing how their daily work contributes to the overall mission of the school.
To develop leaders from within the school and nurture high-potential future leaders, faculty and staff are encouraged to apply for internal opportunities that arise. The Howard School leadership team also engages in intentional conversations about high-potential employees who may be less likely to raise a hand to volunteer but in whom the school would love to foster more engagement.
Establishing Practices to Ensure Constructive Communication and Mission-Driven Decision-Making
The Howard School leadership team employs a variety of tactics to build camaraderie and include varying perspectives. The team shares weekly “highs and lows” and also gathers for a weekly lunch, as schedules allow, to connect and socialize without a set agenda.
A model shared by Nick Petrie grounds the school’s leadership in its work. According to Petrie, high functioning-leaders have three key qualities: they are “heat seeking,” they appreciate “colliding perspectives,” and they are reflective. Naming “colliding perspectives” as something that makes a team stronger and better able to serve its students’ strengths creates a culture wherein communication is constructive and decision-making remains mission-driven.
The school has also adopted David Rock’s SCARF model of understanding resistance to change. When faced with resistance or pushback that cannot be worked through, team members step back to better understand if the person is feeling threatened at the level of Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, or Fairness. This approach assists in becoming a more creative thinker and decreases the chances that the resistance is taken personally.
Like many schools, The Howard School’s leadership team is full of high-performers with a tendency to overwork themselves. Tactics such as using the “Schedule Send” feature for emails written on weekends/late evenings respect others’ time outside typical school hours. Other concrete tactics to encourage balance include ways to communicate “out of office” and vacation schedules with one another to avoid inadvertently interrupting someone during time off, as well as “accountability partners” who text or call one another if they see a colleague staying late on campus to remind them to head home and practice self care.
Finally, during some leadership meetings, time is allotted to Dream Big and without limits. This “blue sky dreaming” is not only energizing and fun, but it also creates space to practice hearing (and not judging) “wild ideas”. This reinforces cognitive templates that are then of use when disagreements arise.
By rooting their work in the school’s mission, vision, and values, coupled with frequent idea-sharing and effective planning, The Howard School has built a cohesive, high-performing leadership team.
Ideas Into Action
For schools aiming to strengthen their leadership teams, The Howard School shares insights about the practices that have made the biggest impact on their school’s leadership team performance.
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