Vulnerability and practical frameworks for new school leaders

Executive overview

Formal education trains people in content expertise but rarely in leadership. When thrust into authority, new leaders face real personnel, hiring, and decision-making challenges with no playbook.

Admitting what you don't know invites collaboration. Projecting false confidence alienates people who already know you're learning.

Leaders who are honest about their gaps create safer environments where others surface real problems.

The case for vulnerability in leadership

• People can tell when someone is faking competence — especially former peers
• Admitting uncertainty signals psychological safety; others then bring authentic problems
• Projecting confidence when unearned closes off the help you need
• Being the "answer guy" suppresses others' curiosity and initiative — a form of unintentional diminishing
• Top-down command models work poorly where collaboration and trust matter

Hiring with the hungry, humble, smart framework

• When 100 resumes all clear a technical bar, differentiating on character becomes critical
• Hungry, humble, people smart (Lencioni) gives a shared rubric the whole hiring team can use
• Applied the framework retroactively to past hires to validate it — patterns confirmed their prior instincts
• In schools, a bad hire is especially costly: teachers shape students for nine months and are very hard to exit
• Used the framework to generate targeted interview questions once a candidate clears the technical screen

Making decisions before the ship sets sail

• Pressure to fill roles fast is where hiring discipline breaks down most often
• Like an Atlantic crossing: mid-ocean is too late to replace the captain — vet before you depart
• Delegating hiring decisions to a shared rubric reduces individual bias under pressure

Vivid vision for personal and professional alignment

• Vivid vision: write out what you want each domain of your life to look like, then measure progress against it
• Domains included: family, health, professional role, community commitments
• Forces the harder question: what am I okay with not being great at?
• Clarifies where to allocate time and money — if you say physics education matters, stop attending history conferences
• As a leader, having stated goals lets you ask direct reports (and yourself): how am I doing against what I said I valued?

Knowing when not to help

• Division heads who workshop problems directly with teachers bypass and undermine department chairs
• Trust the chain: if the layer below can handle it, don't step in
• A "loving no" protects institutional process and develops capability in the people below you
• Strategic alignment: declared priorities should match resource allocation — money, time, attention

Learning from outside education

• Moving from teacher to school head is a transition from instructional expert to running a small nonprofit
• Business frameworks — leading indicators, lagging indicators, multipliers, diminishers — transfer directly
• Cross-industry peers surface solutions that domain insiders overlook
• Diverse cohort input produces better drafts; peer editing is the same logic whether in an essay or a leadership decision