Big midyear decision: Keep the leader, improve support
“We take personally much that is not personal, and, as a consequence, many potentially productive contributions are lost to the system.”
—Barry Oshry, Seeing Systems
Superintendents, chiefs and principal supervisors usually begin the annual debate about which leaders are successful or not right after winter break. But we’ve noticed that districts often misinterpret struggle as a sign that leaders can’t grow and then move too quickly to replace or reassign them.
Here’s the real issue: most leadership struggles are developmental, not dispositional. Often, leaders aren’t failing because they lack ability; they’re failing because they haven’t been given the support, modeling and rehearsal time required to perform the work at a high level: your level.
And when senior leaders respond by replacing a leader too quickly, two things happen:
- They interrupt a leader who may have been on the edge of real growth.
- They trigger the well-documented implementation dip, a predictable decline in performance that occurs after any leadership transition.
Research from Michael Fullan and others shows that even positive, well-planned leadership changes temporarily disrupt clarity, momentum, and instructional coherence.
If we assume that struggle signals permanent inability, we move leaders prematurely and inadvertently weaken the pipeline. If we assume, instead, that struggle signals an unmet developmental need, we make completely different decisions.
That shift is where the two frameworks in this article come in. Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development” and Andy Grove’s “Task-Relevant Maturity” offer district leaders faster, more accurate ways to understand what a leader needs before they are reassigned or replaced.
Why the leadership bench is thinner than it could be
While state leadership standards and evaluation frameworks have improved clarity around expectations, they have also, unintentionally, shifted attention toward outcome-focused behaviors and away from the deeper work of leadership formation.
That shift alone doesn’t explain the current bench challenges, but it contributes to a broader pattern that districts feel but often struggle to name. It’s a truism that principals and executive leaders are rarely fired for failing to get results; they’re fired for failing to use their soft skills effectively.
Over the last decade, mentoring and apprenticeship opportunities have declined across most professions, a trend that’s accelerating with the increased use of artificial intelligence. Assistant principals often rise through roles that focus heavily on discipline and operations.
Whereas assistant principals used to have seven or more years of experience before promotion, they now typically have fewer than three years. What they lack, through no fault of their own, are authentic opportunities to supervise adults, lead instruction, select and develop novice teachers, build culture, and influence the work of teams across a school.
We often say that the biggest step in a leader’s career is from school to district leadership. While assistant principals are at least familiar with the work of principals, the day-to-day work of district leadership is often a black box, lengthening the learning curve and the leap to the strategic leadership expected of district leaders.
When these leaders are promoted, the gap between what the role requires and what they’ve previously practiced becomes stark. It’s not a capability problem; it’s an experience problem, and it’s a systems problem. The leader is expected to perform at high levels in skills they have never had the chance to observe, rehearse or receive coaching on.
When mid-year performance conversations arise, we need to remember: the struggle we see is often the predictable outcome of a system that hasn’t invested in in-role development. And if that’s true, then the solution lies not in rapid replacement, but in strengthening the developmental environment.
This is where two developmental frameworks can help district leaders take more precise, humane and effective action.
Reframing school leadership performance
1. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development
This concept explains the distance between what a learner can do independently and what they can do with the right support. It offers a useful way to understand adult professional growth.
Three elements matter most:
- Actual development level: The tasks the leader can perform reliably today without assistance.
- Potential development level: The tasks the leader could perform with guidance, modeling, or joint work.
- Scaffolding—and fade: Growth happens when the leader receives targeted support at the right moment and, crucially, when that support gradually fades as the leader becomes more competent and confident.
The edge of the zone is where most leadership performance challenges occur. It’s also where districts unintentionally misdiagnose the problem.
If a principal is struggling with instructional feedback conversations, the issue might not be ability; it may be that they’ve never had the modeling, practice or calibrated examples that would enable them to shift from “potential” to “actual” development. Development often boils down to something as simple as hearing a more experienced leader talk through their thinking and decision-making, live, in the moment.
The Zone of Proximal Development invites supervisors to ask:
What specific task is just beyond this leader’s reach, and what support would allow them to reach it?
2. Andy Grove’s Task-Relevant Maturity
Task-relevant maturity is particularly useful for school districts because it focuses on the maturity level—competence, experience and confidence—a leader has for a specific task, not for an entire role.
We routinely overestimate leaders’ maturity in tasks they have never practiced. We’re often caught in the “halo effect” of cognitive bias, labeling leaders as good or bad as opposed to delineating which actions are effective or ineffective.
A common example of this for new district leaders is prioritization and time management. As principals, the day and week were pretty well structured and the prioritization was often done on the fly.
In a district role, the calendar is filled with meetings and it’s hard to know what to prioritize. (Of course principals often struggle to sort out the difference between important and urgent priorities, but that’s a topic for another time.)
Some leaders demonstrate high task-relevant maturity in team building, but low task-relevant maturity in improving their department’s processes. Others are strong operationally but show low maturity in managing adult conflict.
The implication for supervisors is straightforward and actionable: Expectations must match the leader’s maturity level for each task. A mismatch, expecting high-maturity performance in a low-maturity domain, creates frustration on both sides.
Together, ZPD and TRM give districts a language and framework for diagnosing the real developmental need, not the surface-level challenges.
What to do before reassigning or replacing anyone
Here are five actions district leaders can take this spring to avoid premature movement and instead build the leadership bench in the roles leaders currently hold.
1. Diagnose before deciding
Use the Zone of Proximal Development and Task-Relevant Maturity during mid-year leadership reviews. Ask:
- What can this leader do independently?
- What could they do with the right modeling or collaboration?
- Which leadership tasks show low maturity, and why?
- Have we calibrated expectations to the leader’s maturity in each domain?
- What scaffolds have been in place and have they been sufficient?
This type of diagnostic conversation often reveals a different picture than the one surfaced in typical performance discussions.
2. Strengthen supports “in situ”
Many leaders can succeed in their current roles with stronger, more precise developmental scaffolds. These include:
- Weekly side-by-side walkthroughs with modeling
- Joint “voice over” problem-solving sessions focused on specific leadership cases
- Role-play and rehearsal for difficult conversations
- Peer shadowing
- Short-cycle feedback loops anchored to practice, not paperwork
- Temporary rebalancing of responsibilities to create protected practice time
The key is that support happens in context and in real time, not just in training sessions.
3. Look at the system, not just the individual
District leaders should ask:
- Has this leader ever seen high-quality practice modeled?
- Has the supervisor had the time and space to model and coach?
- Do we have initiative overload that undermines emerging leaders?
- Are expectations consistent across supervisors?
- Did we promote leaders before they had the chance to build essential muscles?
Often, the performance issue is rooted in system design, not the individual leader. Replacing the leader doesn’t address the root cause, and low performance on that team may well continue.
4. Use short-cycle development plans, not performance improvement plans
Before making a reassignment decision, give the leader:
- A 60–90-day development plan
- 2–3 very specific leadership behaviors to practice
- Joint work with a supervisor or mentor
- Clear developmental scaffolds
- Weekly task-relevant maturity check-ins (“Where is your confidence now? What support do you need next?”)
This isn’t an improvement plan; it’s apprenticeship in action.
5. Only then consider reassignment
If, after targeted scaffolding and calibrated expectations, the leader still shows low task-relevant maturity in essential tasks—or if the role is simply a poor match—reassignment may be appropriate. But when reassignment becomes the end of a thoughtful developmental process rather than the beginning, districts make better decisions and build stronger pipelines.
Implications for the full leadership pipeline
A stable, high-performing bench requires treating the pipeline as a development ecosystem, not a set of siloed experiences.
This means:
- Hiring for potential as much as for current competence
- Ensuring assistant principals have real opportunities to lead adults, not just manage logistics
- Rebalancing principal supervisor roles toward developmental coaching instead of compliance alone
- Treating HR, teaching and learning and school leadership as co-owners of the leadership pipeline
- Protecting time for mentoring, modeling and apprenticeship
- Providing early exposure to the leadership tasks that matter most: leading teams, supervising adults, and driving instructional improvement
When districts use the Zone of Proximal Development and Task-Relevant Maturity as developmental approaches, they begin to see their pipeline differently.
Success Stories
While most districts are intentional in their efforts to “build a bench” of principals, some districts have identified specific opportunities to provide role-specific leadership development.
Elevate 215, a collaboration to support Philadelphia’s district and charter schools, sees high-touch leadership development as a core success factor.
Scott Gaiber, deputy chief of talent, describes one approach: “There’s so much value in simple peer-to-peer connection: people in similar roles, but different contexts, provided structured opportunities to just raise challenges and discuss different ways of addressing those challenges. Too often new leaders just come up with a technical solution to something that’s really an adaptive challenge, so encouraging leaders to share challenges and then find root causes strengthens their approach and gets better results over time.”
Hillsborough County School District was central to the success of the Wallace Foundation’s work on principal leadership and central office reform. Later, the foundation created the Hillsborough Executive Leadership Academy for high-potential principals likely to become district leaders. The year-long pathway included:
- Real-time apprenticeship, where principals shadowed senior leaders and took on short-cycle leadership assignments just beyond their current skill set
- Targeted coaching, pairing each participant with an experienced district leader who modeled thinking, scaffolded new tasks, and gradually faded support
- Executive learning sessions that focused on systems leadership, policy, budgeting, governance, cross-functional work, and strategy execution.
At mid-year, the district began using some of the participants to support struggling principals. Harrison Peters, the creator of that program, went on to found MCEL using the same principles to foster sustainable development for leaders of color.
Like most large systems, The School District of Palm Beach County has formal assistant and principal pathway programs, but it has recently prioritized peer-to-peer induction for novice principals.
Director of Leadership Development Melinda Springman-Herrera describes their approach as, “New principals learn from sitting principals. They get coached by people who are doing the work right now, in the moment that they need it. That real-time modeling is what helps them build the muscles the job actually requires.”
Purely supervisory support for struggling principals is “sometimes hit or miss without a system behind it, she notes. The district is working to start intentionally matching strong principals with those who need targeted help.
More deliberate mid-year leadership decisions
Moving leaders too quickly is tempting, and sometimes necessary. But most of the time, a leader’s struggle is an invitation to examine the system that produced it.
Before reassigning anyone this spring:
- Understand their Zone of Proximal Development. Where are they ready to grow with targeted support?
- Align expectations to their task-relevant maturity. Where are we demanding high-maturity performance in a low-maturity domain such as change management?
- Strengthen scaffolds. What modeling, joint work or protection of time would allow this leader to grow in role?
- Use short-cycle development. What can we learn about their growth trajectory over the next 60–90 days, before we decide?
Your bench will not strengthen by swapping leaders in and out. It strengthens when districts build leaders where they are, with the support they need, at the moment they need it most.
That is how systems become stable. That is how performance improves. And that is how you keep talented people in the work, growing, contributing, and leading at higher levels over time.
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