One of the lessons I’ve learned this year is that distributed leadership requires you to be more organized, not less.

I can tell when I’m really on my game as an educational leader, because when I am, I am able to think about the bigger picture of SLA and think about who can do various parts of my job better than I can. That’s when I can create a long-term calendar of events… of faculty workshops (thank you, Matt Baird, for coming up with a phrase that better captures what we’re trying to do…) of needs. That’s when other voices can start to emerge in leadership roles. It’s when I’m flying by the seat of my pants that I can’t delegate, because I’m not organized enough to set up people to do things well, and I don’t think it’s fair to ask people to lead workshops at the last minute.

As the year has gone on — and as we’ve had some health issues with Theo lately (apparently, bronchilitis is running rampant this year, but it means that we’ve had four hospital stays in the last six weeks with him) — I haven’t been able to be as on top of things as I wanted to, which means that I’ve been in management mode more than big picture mode. I think it’s a subtle thing, and I’m not sure that the difference shows to everyone, but it shows to me. We had a staff development day today, and I think we got a lot done, but I realized that there were several parts of the day that could have been facilitated — and probably facilitated better — had someone other than me run it. And long term, that’s important for SLA. The vision of the school will grow and evolve as more and more people take leadership roles.

And with all of this, it’s important to recognize how much distributed leadership we have had. Our afternoon session was a tech workshop that Marcie set up. Matt VK came back from his meeting with really important updates about rostering and grade information, and he was able to take something we had worked on earlier in the week and build from there, even after the entire faculty was "meeting-ed out." And within the course of our day, there were lunchtime meetings, lots of voices in conversations, and — hopefully — opportunities for people to come up with solutions and offer ideas and collaborate. (I hate the sound of my voice in meetings… funny for those folks who might suggest I like the sound of my voice in plenty of other settings, I know… but I am always trying to talk less in our meetings, probably to varying degrees of success.)

Still… across several conversations today, lots of people echoed a theme… we had a great first year, and we’ve accomplished a ton, and there’s a lot about this year that went better than expected… and next year has to be better. One of my goals for next year is to be better at the day-to-day planning, so that more people have access points for leadership, and more people are set up to succeed in "teacher leader" moments in the school.

Which brings me back to my original paradox — for me to give more people the chance to step-up and lead, I have to be more organized and more prepared, not less.