QUESTIONS AND RESPONSES
Question: What strategies do you recommend for strengthening board-superintendent relations? -- Board Member in California
TESBM: Your framing of "strengthening the relationship" is well intended but can have unintended consequences if misinterpreted. The focus needs to be on building a professional and effective relationship — two very different things that we'll get to below — not on building a friendship with the superintendent. One of the common failures of school boards is to become a founder-focused/superintendent-focused board where the job of the board gets reduced to building rapport with the superintendent and giving them what they want. The healthy way through this dysfunction is to focus the board's behavior toward the superintendent on being professional and effective, not on being friends.
For a board to have a professional relationship with their superintendent simply means that the nature of the relationship runs the spectrum from not allowing their shared work to be completed at all (think of this as a 0) to allowing their shared work to be completed efficiently (think of this as a 5).
Do board members spend time shouting at the superintendent in meetings and trying to publicly embarrass them on social media? That's probably closer to a 0. Are board members cordial with the superintendent but trust without verifying? That's probably a 3. Do board members work collaboratively with the superintendent but require priority-based accountability mechanisms to verify their work? That's probably closer to a 5.
Unfortunately, a professional relationship is necessary but insufficient to maximize the potential of a board-superintendent relationship. To go further, the relationship also needs to be effective.
For a board to have an effective relationship with their superintendent means that the nature of the relationship runs the spectrum from not focusing on improving student outcomes at all (think of this as a 0) to the relationship being intensely focused on improving student outcomes (think of this as a 5).
Does the board not have Goals about student outcomes that the superintendent has been told to prioritize? That's closer to a 0. Does the board have Goals but they're not exclusively about student outcomes, or they are but the board doesn't monitor them monthly? That's closer to a 3. Does the board have Goals about student outcomes, monitor progress toward them monthly, and use them as the core of the superintendent's annual evaluation? That's closer to a 5.
When you add it up, assume that your board-superintendent relationship is a net harm to children if it's 7 or lower and a net benefit to your students if it's an 8 or higher.
The most effective board-superintendent relationships aren't built on friendship; they're built on a shared commitment to improving student outcomes and crystal-clear expectations about who does what. Start by ensuring the board has adopted Goals and Guardrails that reflect the community's vision and values. Then make those Goals and Guardrails the foundation of every interaction with the superintendent — evaluations, budget adoption, work sessions, public meetings, everything. When the board stays focused on improving student outcomes through effective governance and the superintendent stays focused on improving student outcomes through effective management, the relationship strengthens naturally because both parties understand their contribution to serving students. Conflict typically arises not from personality clashes but from role confusion — when board members drift away from professional and effective interactions with the superintendent. Clarify the roles, center on student outcomes, and the relationship will take care of itself.
Question: How do boards avoid confusing staff activity with progress? -- Board Member in Arizona
TESBM: This is a common mistake school boards make themselves — "longer meetings must mean more effective oversight, right?" and "more committees must mean better results, right?" — so it's not surprising when they expand this weakness to encompass the superintendent and staff as well. When school boards pay more attention to adult inputs and activities than to student outcomes and results, children pay the price.
Part of why boards confuse activity with results is because it's easy to focus on what the superintendent is doing rather than whether Goals are being met. But this is a very fixable mental error.
Our first step in addressing this is to encourage boards to be explicit about adopting a student outcomes focused mindset. Don't hide from your community the fact that you have priorities and that those priorities are about what students should know and be able to do. This won't make you popular and may in fact anger those who have other preferences for what your priorities should be. But it will help you avoid making the "activity equals results" mental mistake.
The next step after having a student outcomes focused mindset is to adopt student outcomes focused Goals. It's not enough to believe that student learning should be the priority — the board needs to explicitly identify a set of SMART Goals about student outcomes that will be used to answer the question, "Are our students getting the education we owe them?" instead of just, "Which programs are taking place?"
The third step is spending 50% of the school board's time each month monitoring progress toward those Goals. Monitoring updates should lead with results data, not initiative lists. Boards should focus on strategic questions — "How does this align to our Goals?" — and resist the pull toward focusing exclusively on technical/tactical questions about programs. Without the discipline of monthly, focused monitoring, Goals become aspirational decorations rather than accountable commitments, and adult activities become the proxy for student improvement.
Question: We’ve talked about the importance of being more strategic as a board, but we’re not there yet. How can we strengthen strategic leadership as a board? -- Board Member in Minnesota
TESBM: People throw around the term “strategy” without really defining it or being clear about what separates strategic conversations from non-strategic ones. Let’s start there. We differentiate strategic conversations from tactical conversations from technical conversations.
Technical conversations are about trying to understand how something is measured (“why did we use this test?” or “what are the properties of this assessment?” or “how valid is this instrument?").
Tactical conversations are about trying to understand how something is done (“who administered the test?” or “how many students participated in the assessment?” or “have staff received training on this instrument?”).
Strategic conversations are about trying to understand how something aligns to the priorities (“which strategies most worked to help students improve?” or “what percentage of our students have reached our Goals already?” or “what actions of the board most helped/hindered the accomplishment of this priority?”).
When seen this way, it’s more clear that in practice, boards become strategic when their work is structured in a way that makes strategic conversation unavoidable. If conversations are consistently drifting into immediate issues or operational details or which test people do/don’t like (tactical / technical), that is not a failure of intent. It is a signal that something in the board’s design is pulling attention in that direction. Here are some ways to push back.
Clarifying priorities is the first step. If the board has not adopted a small number of clear Goals describing what students should know and be able to do, then everything will feel equally important. When everything is important, strategy disappears and urgency takes over.
Boards that demonstrate strategic leadership design their meetings so that a significant portion of time is spent early in the meeting on monitoring progress toward the Goals. When the agenda consistently centers on evidence of student outcomes and the strategies influencing them, the conversation shifts. Not because members are trying harder, but because the structure demands it.
Strategy shows up in how questions are asked. Strategic boards ask questions about patterns, progress, and what the system is learning relative to the priorities. When questions focus on individual situations or operational choices, the conversation will follow.
It is also important to accept that some issues will remain unresolved in the moment. The instinct to solve every problem is what most often pulls boards into management. Governance requires allowing the system to operate while the board focuses on whether it is improving.
Strategic leadership is not something a board turns on during discussion.
It is something the board builds into its priorities, its agenda, and its expectations. When those are aligned, strategy stops being an aspiration and becomes the default.
Teachers need coaches to be their best. Principals need coaches to be their best. Superintendents need coaches to be their best. School boards need coaches to be their best. If your school board wants support to be great on behalf of the students you serve, click below for a free consultation.
INTERESTING READS & LISTENS
Rick Maloney talks about how juggling board responsibilities requires balance and support as he shares four big ideas about governance.
BOARD MEETING ANALYSIS
A subscriber asked us to watch the January meeting of a school board in Florida. Here are the highlights from the Regular Board Meeting:
Total Minutes: 404mins
Minutes Focused on Student Outcomes: 0mins
Key Topics: Financial literacy, Construction contracts, Immigration resolution
What Coach Celebrates:
Board members maintained procedural order during an extended and emotionally charged meeting.
Votes were clear and recorded.
Instructional materials discussion (9.1) reflects board engagement in academic direction, though not in a monitoring structure.
What Coach Recommends:
Schedule a monthly Goal Monitoring agenda item aligned to board-adopted SMART Goals (3–5 year outcomes with named summative measures).
Invest at least 50% of meeting time into monitoring progress toward student outcome Goals, consistent with ESB standards .
Structure board questions during monitoring to be strategy-focused, measure-focused, ask-oriented, results-focused, and time-bound (SMART questioning).
Separate high-emotion policy debate from monitoring conversations to protect disciplined focus on student outcomes.
Consider agenda redesign: move routine consent and construction business to streamlined voting blocks to create space for outcome monitoring.
UPCOMING OPPORTUNITIES
Effective Superintendent Search Process
During our monthly free 30-min webinar, we'll go over what to do before, what to do during, and what to do after a superintendent search. We’ll cover the role of search firms, effective interview question design, and more.
11am central on Friday, April 10, 2026
Did you miss last month's 30-minute free webinar? Email Greg for a make-up session on any of our growing list of topics, including governance policy, delegation policy, effective budgeting, superintendent evaluation, professional services management, strategic planning, consent agendas, and more.
BONUS MATERIALS
For paid subscribers, here are links to additional resources (to gain access to the links below, please consider subscribing):
Additional details about the analyzed meeting:
Board Meeting Video
Meeting Agenda
Strategic Plan
Time Use Analysis
Guidance documents related to this issue:
Effective Goal Monitoring
Effective Superintendent Search
Effective Agenda Design
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