Creating Leadership Alignment through the School Vitality Assessment

With counsel and data analysis by Damian Kavanaugh, Executive Director of MISBO

At EXPLO Elevate, we believe that the more school leadership team members understand the whole school enterprise – all of its key moving parts, not simply the ones related to their key responsibilities – the more likely it is that schools can create and maintain necessary alignment across the different functions of the school. This has substantial implications for the professional learning necessary for high-functioning leadership teams. Absent greater enterprise literacy, school leadership teams become vulnerable to sloppy, uninformed decision-making at the very moment they need thoughtful processes and strategic focus most.

The absence of stronger alignment and shared knowledge leads to too much knowledge being held in too few hands, resulting in a dangerous siloing of critical knowledge. Such siloes create a number of possible pain points. Perhaps the greatest of this siloing is that rather than creating cohesiveness between the various functions of the school that lead to a healthy leadership ecosystem, schools supplant systems with individual people who hold critical information in isolation, and when those people leave, there is no easy or quick way to make up for the loss, thus creating an enterprise risk issue. This most often happens in the offices of the CFO or the Enrollment Management offices, but it can surface in other areas as well.

For a leadership team to become greater than the sum of its parts, team members must do more than simply get along with each other and be vaguely aware of each other’s work – true alignment results from far deeper understanding. When teams reach alignment, they then can face complexity together instead of each person seeing through a myopic lens.

Maintaining that that kind of alignment is a persistent challenge, and it requires some help from the outside. This is where the school vitality conversation began between EXPLO Elevate and MISBO. Our first questions included: How can we help schools accurately and honestly wrap their arms around their school’s relative health? And, how can we help schools dig below the superficial and siloed understanding of the school toward a more complete view of the school’s health, which is shared across the various executive leadership roles.

Identifying Gaps in Alignment

As a result of the initial conversation between us, EXPLO Elevate and MISBO created a tool, the School Vitality Assessment (SVA), which seeks to identify gaps in alignment across ten domains so that school leadership can better engage the challenges and opportunities ahead. Unveiled at the NAIS Thrive Conference (under the title the DEFCON Scale) earlier this year, it is an assessment that facilitates honest conversations about a school's health. The work following the assessment requires teams to dig below the surfaces of the key areas that represent the health of the school. Thoughtful use of the tool accomplishes two critical tasks:

• Creates alignment at the leadership team level regarding the school’s state of health on a one through five scale.
• Surfaces critical questions that require thoughtful and data-based answers in order to create alignment and discern future actions.

In doing this work, what we have found is striking. Schools, within their boards and executive leadership teams, rarely have alignment on a number of the domains relevant to a school’s condition. Failure to maintain knowledgeable alignment represents a potentially dangerous leadership error, particularly at moments when a school is developing or creating accountability for strategy. That said, maintaining alignment, particularly in a volatile environment, requires persistent stewardship.

By "knowledgeable alignment," we mean something more specific than simply agreeing or getting along. It's the state where leadership team members and board members share a common, accurate understanding of how the school actually works, not just their own corner of it. A CFO who deeply understands the balance sheet but not how families experience the admission process, or a Head who can speak fluently about mission but not about liquidity, is missing a piece of enterprise literacy the whole team needs. Knowledgeable alignment means that when the team makes a decision, everyone at the table is reasoning from the same set of facts about the school's real condition. Without it, teams can appear unified while actually operating from very different, sometimes contradictory, pictures of the institution they're leading.

Since NAIS’s Thrive, the dataset from initial participants has grown to the extent that we now can analyze what we have learned. As the dataset grows, we will share additional learnings. We are confident that the SVA Assessment provides essential learning and paves the way for greater leadership alignment. In addition, it creates a refined sense of what the school needs to understand better.

The SVA Assessment is a useful and innovative tool, and engaging it as a team exercise as often as every two years is a powerful exercise for leadership teams. It provides particularly timely and relevant insight at moments when the school is heading toward creating strategy or engaging in the early stages of reaccreditation. The exercise includes taking the assessment, receiving immediate results, debriefing key insights, and formulating next steps. In this work, we provide a comprehensive User’s Guide and a set of representative school case studies. When we facilitate this work with schools, it takes between two and a half and three hours — a small time commitment for vital work.

The School Vitality Assessment operates on two levels: eight underlying measurements that describe A: what we're assessing, and B: the ten practical domains — drawn from real school data — that show how we assess it.

The Assessment measures how team members perceive a number of areas in the school. Your team’s results provide a gauge of the alignment of a leadership team regarding the health of the school. The assessment identifies areas where a team may need deeper understanding in order to become more aligned, and it catalyzes a conversation regarding what work may need to come next for the team and for the school.

Component Parts of the School Vitality Assessment

A: What are we measuring?

The Eight Measurements of the School Vitality Assessment

B: How are we measuring?

The Ten Domains of the School Vitality Assessment

1. Enrollment demand + Yield
2. Net Tuition Revenue + Discount Rate
3. Fundraising + Endowment Strength
4. Financial Health / Structural Balance
5. Mission Delivery + Program Quality
6. Faculty Talent, Compensation + Retention
7. Campus Condition + Capital Needs
8. Leadership + Governance Alignment
9. Data Quality, Systems + Predictive Capacity
10. Parent + Community Trust

The Analysis and Our Wonderings:

Balancing the Significance of Objective and Qualitative Data

We first considered all survey responses, regardless of respondents’ specific role, to understand the collective picture of how participants assessed their schools. While responses covered the full school vitality spectrum, participants generally expressed greater confidence in areas supported by tangible operational data — such as enrollment, fundraising, and financial performance — than in more qualitative areas like mission delivery, governance, parent trust, and organizational culture. Even when schools rated themselves highly overall, these latter domains tended to generate more caution and variability.

The pattern is worth naming directly: school leaders trust what shows up in a spreadsheet more than what shows up in areas that are more challenging to measure objectively. The actual health of the institution rests significantly in areas we measure with more qualitative data. Because of the vacuum left by domains with a lack of numerical data, teams struggle to see the broader picture of the school’s relative health, as it leads to an overemphasis on what is more objectively measured and diminishes the weight of and understanding of elements that go directly to the core of what the school seeks to deliver, including mission, trustworthiness, and healthy culture.

What is clear is that schools are better at making meaning, and likely decisions, from what shows up on a spreadsheet than what shows up in areas most directly related to the education it provides. The domains school leaders trust least are the ones most in need of a structured conversation and additional professional learning for the leadership team. It also points to a need for better and better qualitative means of evaluating these areas.

Differences by Role

We compared responses from Heads of School, CFOs/Business Officers, and Other Administrators to see whether leaders occupying different roles perceived their schools differently. Across nearly every domain, roles shaped perspective. CFOs generally viewed the institution more positively, while other administrators rated conditions more cautiously, particularly in areas related to mission, leadership, governance, and community. Heads of School fell somewhere between those two viewpoints.

The takeaway isn't that one role is wrong. It's that no single leader — not the Head, not the CFO — has full visibility into how the institution is actually functioning or is perceived. Alignment has to be built and sustained, not assumed.

Leadership Alignment – ”Are We Seeing the Same School?”

We examined the schools for which multiple members of the leadership team completed the assessment to explore internal alignment. Some leadership teams described remarkably similar schools, arriving at comparable ratings across nearly every domain. Others revealed meaningful differences in how they viewed the institution's strengths, challenges, and readiness for the future. Those differences were often greatest in areas that rely more on judgment than objective metrics, such as governance, mission, and community trust. Interestingly, the role-based patterns identified in Pass 2 often appeared within these schools as well, with CFOs generally viewing conditions more positively than other administrators and Heads of School frequently falling somewhere in between. This suggests that differences in perspective may be driven not only by the unique dynamics of a particular school, but also by the responsibilities and experiences associated with each leadership role.

The degree of alignment: A leadership team that scores itself low but agrees on the score is in a stronger position to take appropriate action than one that scores itself high but privately disagrees about why. The first question a school should ask isn't, “What's our level?” It's, “Do we see the same school?”

If you are interested in digging into the assessment and how we can help you use it for your leadership team or board, reach out and we can schedule a call. Ross Peters: rpeters@explo.org