Hiring, Volunteering, & Listening vs Leading

TESBC: Absolutely not. As coaches, we don’t want to be involved in any hiring decisions. You can certainly encourage people to apply for jobs with your clients, but you don’t want to be in the middle of that. The risk to your credibility with your client simply isn’t worth it.

TESBC: A weakness of mine is that I generally lack patience with what I perceive to be lazy public officials. So I’m probably not a good person to ask this question because I’m prone to say something like, “You literally begged the community for the job, now you have to actually do it. You need to honor your word.”

Probably a healthier approach would be to first acknowledge the statement (“yes, it’s accurate that you’re volunteers”) but then address the errant thinking embedded in the statement (“your volunteer status describes the compensation of the role, but not the consequences of the role; no families would be ok with less effort on behalf of their children just because you’re a volunteer.”).

TESBC: I start by naming the confusion plainly and without judgment: listening is an input; leading is a choice. Many boards believe that if they listen long enough — to staff, parents, students, community members — they are doing their job. But at this point, they are listening; they are not yet leading. The coaching strategy isn’t to tell them to listen less. It’s to help them understand what listening is for.

Listening is how boards gather information about the community’s vision and values. Leading is what boards do after they’ve heard enough to adopt the vision and values into Goals and Guardrails. When boards get stuck listening, it’s usually because they’re avoiding the hardest part of governance: prioritizing. If everything they hear matters equally, then nothing actually drives adult behavior. We coach boards to shift from open-ended listening to purposeful listening. That means being explicit about the question they are trying to answer before they open their ears.

Once those questions are answered, listening changes. It stops being a passive act and becomes a filter. Some feedback aligns to the adopted Goals and Guardrails; some doesn’t. Both can be heard. Only one can drive decisions.

Then we move to discipline. Boards that confuse listening with leading often pride themselves on being responsive, but responsiveness without prioritization produces chaos for the organization. Staff experience it as whiplash. The superintendent experiences it as unclear expectations. Students experience it as inconsistency. The coaching obligation is to help boards practice saying, “We’ve heard you, selected the school system’s Goals and Guardrails, and these are the direction we’re heading.” That sentence is uncomfortable for many boards. It feels exclusionary because it doesn’t address every want and issue of every community member, but in reality, that’s what effective governance looks like.

Listening earns you information. Leading requires you to decide what to do with it. Until boards are willing to disappoint some adults in service of improved student outcomes, they will keep confusing activity with impact, and listening with leadership.

Paul Smith offers an interesting analogy about board training.

The San Francisco school board has a committee that is exploring effective goal monitoring. As part of that, they invited staff and board members from other districts to serve on panels to discuss effective practice.

This state senator argues in favor of boards setting and monitoring goals.

Total Minutes: 332mins

Minutes Focused on Student Outcomes: 0mins

Key Topics: Labor negotiations, Student delegate remarks, Board rules revision, Facilities contracts

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Join us for a conversation about ways to responsibly and effectively include student voice in the board’s work.

11am central on Friday, February 13, 2026

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