Making the Case for Succession Planning

“Everything, literally everything, moves. Nothing, literally nothing, is stationary.”

~James C. Scott

In schools, with their hundreds of moving parts, work priorities emerge from intent, pressure, advocacy, planning, passion, interest, disinterest, luck, its opposite, and so on. Repeated progress on such priorities is like a drip in a cave — over time, it will create unique, individual, frequently interesting stalagmites. The history teacher slowly becomes the global programs lead. Drip. The dean of students starts as a stern disciplinarian and ends as a practitioner-champion of restorative practice. Drip.

As such: Many schools have leadership positions that have developed or evolved around the person in a given seat; these look different from their originally conceived job descriptions; and this disparity holds true for midlevel leader roles, senior administrator roles, and head of school roles alike.