Balancing the Urgent and the Essential: A Blueprint for Systemic Change

Over the last several weeks, I have been sitting with leaders across our system and asking three simple questions:

• What is working well for you in your role in our organization?
• What do you need to feel more successful?
• What feedback do you have for me?

The answers have been honest, useful, and, at times, humbling. I heard pride, commitment, and a relentless belief in the youth of Allentown as well as the future we are building together.

I also heard the weight people are carrying.

Across our district, meaningful improvement work is underway. We are enhancing instructional practices and systems. We are deepening partnerships. We are enhancing leadership capacity.

I also heard something else. Even good work may start to feel heavy when people do not understand how the organization connects. This remains a central challenge in building coherence across schools and systems (Fullan & Quinn, 2016). The strengthened system can feel like another demand for time, attention, and energy. Every new ask can feel like another serving tossed on top of an already full plate.

When a district is building or rebuilding the most essential systems, structures, and practices, some of the work before us is not optional.

As Superintendent and Chief Executive Officer, I have to listen carefully to that lived experience. My colleagues are naming a powerful truth: Organizations cannot function when everything feels urgent all the time.

Simultaneously, I hold another truth. When a district is building or rebuilding the most essential systems, structures, and practices, some of the work before us is not optional.

Our focus centers on providing students with clear academic expectations and powerful instructional moves that foster engagement and thinking. This means equipping teachers with a strong curriculum and close-to-the-classroom support, while empowering principals with structures to effectively lead instruction alongside day-to-day operations. Simultaneously, we owe it to our families to keep them fully informed of the high aspirations our system holds for their precious children.

A new technology platform is not only a technology initiative, it is also an essential communication, data, and implementation tool to help us better engage students and families.

A new academic priority is not only an instructional improvement focus. It is an essential building block of classrooms where more students succeed.

A new partnership is not only the prospect of new resources, it is an effort to transform an entire community’s expectations for and commitment to the education of every child, regardless of their section of the city.

Moreover, each of these requires investment of time, implementation, coaching, supervision, professional learning, and monitoring.

Yes, there is a danger of doing too much. And, yes, there is a danger of not doing enough or doing it well enough.

In their famous 1997 Harvard Business Review article, "The Work of Leadership," Ron Heifetz and Donald Laurie describe adaptive leadership as the work of helping people face challenges that cannot be solved by technical fixes alone. Adaptive work requires learning, changing habits, and taking responsibility for new ways of operating. One of their most useful ideas is that leaders must regulate pressure in a system.

They famously brought this idea to life in the metaphor of a pressure cooker. Absent heat, nothing cooks. With too much pressure, the structure cannot hold. Adaptive challenges, Heifetz and Laurie argue, require leadership that can maintain the tension.

Maintaining this tension is at the heart of the superintendent’s work. We have to create enough urgency to move the system forward (turn up the heat), while also developing trust and a sense of direction.

The pace of grace does not mean lowering expectations. It does not mean slowing down so much that necessary work never happens. Our children cannot wait for adults to feel perfectly ready.

I have been calling this: leading at the pace of grace.

The pace of grace does not mean lowering expectations. It does not mean slowing down so much that necessary work never happens. Our children cannot wait for adults to feel perfectly ready.

Leaders need to display the humanity and confidence that people can grow into the work, rather than collapse beneath it, with the autonomy, competence, and connection people need to sustain motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

For me, this calls for three leadership moves.

• We have to make the why visible. People should not have to guess how a new system, partnership, platform, or expectation connects to student outcomes. If leaders do not make the why clear, people will create their own story. The work leaders do will determine whether they see coherence or clutter.
• It is important to build routines, not just aspirations. Vision matters, but vision alone does not change daily practice. A vision becomes real when it changes what adults do on Monday morning.
• We have to create feedback loops close to the work. Listening is not a pause from leadership. Listening is part of leadership. It helps us know when to increase the heat, when to release pressure, and when to hold the tension.

Regularly, I close my eyes, and I imagine an Allentown child. Orbiting around that child are families, educators, and community partners. Also orbiting are systems, programs, and structures. If those elements swirl without intentionality and connection, the child feels the confusion. But when those pieces align, the child feels the promise of public education at its best.

The next stage of leadership is not only about launching new ideas. It is about making sure the ideas we have launched take root and grow into better experiences for children.

The next stage of leadership is not only about launching new ideas. It is about making sure the ideas we have launched take root and grow into better experiences for children.

That requires foundation-building as much as innovation.

Leadership requires listening, courage, and most importantly, the pace of grace.

Fullan, M., & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence: The right drivers in action for schools, districts, and systems. Corwin.

Heifetz, R. A., & Laurie, D. L. (1997). The work of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 75(1), 124–134.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.