Beyond Traditional Coaching: The Case for Fractional Senior Leadership

A number of years ago, I was talking with a head of school who was wrestling with what to do with her admission team. Her admissions director was talented and dedicated, but the school's enrollment had been on a gradual decline the past three years. Traditional leadership coaching had helped the director develop better management skills and confidence, but the fundamental admissions strategy remained unchanged. The processes, systems, and approach looked remarkably similar to what they'd been doing five years earlier.

The head explained, "I know she needs support, but I'm not sure more leadership coaching is the answer. She needs – and I need – someone who knows what a high performing admissions operation looks like. Someone who can roll up their sleeves and help us redesign our approach and operations."

What this head was talking about is the difference between hiring an executive leadership coach and hiring someone who combines coaching with deep functional expertise. This is where fractional senior leadership can be the answer.

The Limitations of Traditional Coaching

Don't get me wrong. Executive coaching has tremendous value. It’s an important part of our practice at EXPLO Elevate and we deeply believe in it. A skilled coach can help leaders develop self-awareness, improve communication, navigate difficult conversations, and build confidence. These are universally applicable leadership skills that transfer across contexts, whether you're leading an upper school or managing a business office.

But what traditional coaching may not provide is the specific functional guidance that would allow your communications office to function as a genuine enrollment marketing arm for admissions, or how to move from an event based development program to one focused on leadership donors, or how to implement zero-based budgeting in a school environment that would allow a school to more easily bridge budget gaps and make needed investments in new areas.

The reality is that many independent school departments are stuck not because their leaders lack general leadership skills, but because they lack exposure to best practices, strategy development, and deep operational knowledge within their specific functional area. They're running departments the way they've always been run, often because that's the only way they've seen it done.

The Talent Attraction Challenge

Independent schools face a particularly acute version of what every industry grapples with: attracting top-tier talent. Consider these scenarios: 

• A school spent eight months searching for a development director, eventually settling for someone with general nonprofit experience but no background in educational fundraising or alumni relations.
• Another school's CFO left for a corporate role paying 40% more. The replacement candidate pool included several promising people, but none with experience managing the unique financial complexities of schools—tuition discounting models, auxiliary revenue streams, or the way some departments and divisions financially underwrite others.
• A head of school wants to hire someone with deep expertise in learning differences to lead their learning services program, but the salary they could offer would be a significant step down for anyone with that level of experience.

The pattern is clear: schools often can't afford to hire—or can't attract—people with the depth of expertise they need in critical functional areas. So departments continue operating with good people doing their best, but without the strategic thinking or operational excellence that comes from deep, specialized experience.

Enter Fractional Senior Leadership

Here's where fractional senior leadership offers a different model. Instead of hiring someone to work on a one-off project or to address a crisis, schools can engage someone who works as a fractional department head—someone who brings both coaching capabilities and deep functional expertise to work alongside the existing department head.

Think of it as a hybrid role that provides:

Strategic Partnership: Working with the department head to develop a long-term strategy that aligns with the school's overall mission and goals.

Operational Excellence: Bringing best practices, systems, and processes from other schools and organizations.

Skill Development: Coaching not just leadership skills, but specific functional competencies.

Team Building: Helping develop the capabilities of the entire department, not just the leader.

Results Accountability: Unlike traditional coaching relationships that focus on personal development, fractional senior leadership is explicitly tied to departmental performance and outcomes.

Here’s How It Can Work

Admissions: A fractional admissions leader might spend three days a month working with your admissions director to redesign your inquiry-to-application process, implement predictive analytics for yield management, train the team on contemporary enrollment strategies, and work with the enrollment and marketing teams on how to evaluate marketing and travel budgets for performance.

Development: A fractional development leader might spend ongoing time helping your development director to build a comprehensive donor stewardship program, train board members on fundraising, and personally cultivate major gift prospects while teaching your internal team to do the same.

Business Operations: A fractional CFO might work with your business manager to implement cost accounting (something I've written about), develop multi-year dynamic financial models, and establish the kinds of financial controls and reporting that allow for truly strategic decision-making leading to net revenue growth.

The key difference is sustainability and skill transfer. These aren't band-aid solutions or quick fixes. The fractional leader is invested in building the long-term capabilities of your team while driving immediate results.

The Investment Question

Yes, fractional senior leadership can cost more than traditional coaching, if only because the fractional leader is more embedded with your team and is spending more time with your school than a traditional coach. You're also paying for someone to bring specific functional area expertise, to develop departmental strategy, and to be accountable for outcomes.

But consider the true cost of the status quo. How much revenue potential is lost when your admissions strategy hasn't evolved? What's the opportunity cost when your development efforts aren't maximizing donor potential? How much inefficiency exists because your operations haven't been optimized by someone who's seen how high-performing schools actually function?

One trustee told me, "We spent two years with a leadership coach working with our development director. He became a better manager and communicator, but our fundraising results were essentially flat. A year ago we switched to a fractional development lead. She quickly assessed that our events were costly to run in dollars and people time and didn’t net us as much as they should given the resources we were putting into them. But it’s what we had always done. We thought the answer was we needed to get better at events. She helped us see that we needed to eliminate our events based approach and move to a leadership giving approach. We did no events this year, netted just as much revenue, saved tons of time, and we’ve identified how we’ll double philanthropic support in the next two years.” 

When This Model Makes Sense

Fractional senior leadership isn't right for every situation. It's most valuable when:

• The department head is competent and motivated but lacks specific functional expertise
• The school has identified clear performance gaps that require both strategic thinking and operational change
• There's organizational readiness for significant change, not just incremental improvement
• The school can make the financial investment and has realistic expectations about timeline and outcomes

It's less appropriate when the primary need is basic management skills, when there are fundamental personnel issues that need addressing first, or when the organization isn't ready for the level of change that typically results from this kind of engagement.

A Different Kind of Leadership Development

The heads of schools my colleagues and I work with are incredibly capable people, but the expectation that they should be equally expert in admissions, development, finance, HR, legal compliance, facilities management, and academic leadership is simply unrealistic. Most have deep expertise in one or two areas and are learning the rest on the job.

Fractional senior leadership allows heads to provide their department leaders with the kind of specialized mentorship and expertise that they themselves might have benefited from earlier in their careers. It's leadership development, but leadership development that's grounded in functional excellence and tied to measurable outcomes.

Professional Development as Strategic Investment

When I frame fractional senior leadership as professional development, it changes how boards and heads think about the investment. Too often, schools treat professional development as a nice-to-have expense—a conference here, a workshop there, maybe an online course. But fractional senior leadership represents professional development that's both intensive and applied.
Consider what your development director gains from working alongside someone who has successfully managed multiple capital campaigns: they're not just learning theory from a book or presentation, but seeing strategy in action, participating in donor conversations, and developing nuanced judgment about timing, messaging, and relationship building. It's the kind of apprenticeship model that used to be common in many fields but has largely disappeared.

A business manager working with a fractional CFO doesn't just learn about financial controls—they implement them together, experiencing firsthand how to navigate the political dynamics of introducing new systems, how to present financial data to boards effectively, and how to build the analytical capabilities that inform strategic decision-making.

This is professional development that compounds. The department head isn't just getting better at their current role; they're developing the expertise that could position them for advancement. The school isn't just solving immediate operational challenges; they're building institutional capacity that continues long after the fractional engagement ends.

For schools struggling with retention of talented leaders, this model offers a compelling value proposition. Instead of losing good people because they feel they've hit a development ceiling, schools can provide the kind of high-level mentorship and skill building that keeps ambitious leaders engaged and growing.

The independent school landscape has become more complex and competitive. Parent expectations have risen. Alternative educational options are exploding. Recruiting faculty is more difficult. Financial pressures have intensified. In this environment, the schools that will thrive are those that can combine their mission-driven culture with operational excellence.

Sometimes that means thinking beyond traditional coaching relationships to consider models that bring both the personal development that good coaching provides and the functional expertise that drives results. For schools ready to make that investment, fractional senior leadership offers a path to the next level of institutional effectiveness.