The Clarity Your Team Craves | Summer Shorts Series - Ep 25

🎧 Episode Overview

Every school has job descriptions.

But very few schools have true accountability frameworks.

In this episode of the Summer Shorts Series, Mario and Courtney unpack one of the most overlooked leadership moves of the summer: building Pillars Documents.

These are not just role descriptions.

They are clarity systems.

They define:

•  Why each role exists 
•  What success looks like 
•  What high-leverage actions matter most 
•  What outcomes should be measured 

The reality?

Many school leaders have people working hard—but not always with clear alignment.

This episode challenges leaders to stop assuming people know what success looks like and start creating operational clarity across the entire organization.

Because clarity is one of the greatest gifts a leader can give.

💡 Big Ideas From This Episode

• Job descriptions are too vague to drive excellence
• Pillars Documents clarify purpose, practice, and performance
• Every role should have a value statement
• Leading indicators define the daily work that creates success
• Lagging indicators define the measurable outcomes
• Checkpoints prevent waiting until the end to know if something failed
• Accountability frameworks improve coaching
• Clear role ownership exposes gaps and overlap
• Strong onboarding begins with role clarity
• AI can dramatically speed up this work

🧠 Leadership Takeaways

1. Job descriptions aren’t enough

A job description tells someone what they are hired to do.

A Pillars Document tells them:

What excellence looks like.

That difference changes everything.

2. Every role needs a value statement

Before responsibilities…

Start with:

Why does this role exist?

What unique value does it bring?

This creates ownership.

3. Leading indicators define the work

Leading indicators are the daily practices that create strong conditions.

Examples:
 ✔ Safe schools
 ✔ Efficient systems
 ✔ Strong communication
 ✔ Positive office culture
 ✔ Effective instructional coaching

These are the “doing” actions.

4. Lagging indicators define the proof

Lagging indicators answer:

What should we see if this work is working?

Examples:
 ✔ Faster enrollment turnaround
 ✔ Higher attendance
 ✔ Better parent satisfaction
 ✔ Reduced discipline issues
 ✔ Better retention

These are your success markers.

5. Build checkpoints before the final outcome

Do not wait until:

•  testing season 
•  end-of-year surveys 
•  staffing losses 

to know something failed.

Use:
 ✔ weekly checks
 ✔ monthly reviews
 ✔ quarterly progress audits

Real-time adjustment is leadership.

6. Pillars improve coaching

When expectations are visible:

coaching gets easier.

No guessing.

No vague conversations.

Just:

•  Here’s the role. 
•  Here’s the work. 
•  Here’s the evidence. 

7. Great onboarding starts here

Imagine hiring someone and saying:

“Here is your actual playbook.”

Not:
 “Good luck.”

That changes new hire success dramatically.

🔥 Powerful Quotes

“The difference between a job description and a Pillars Document is accountability.”

“What does success actually look like in my role?”

“Leading indicators are the work. Lagging indicators are the proof.”

“Clarity creates coaching.”

“If all the lights are green, we’re good. If one starts blinking red, it’s time to investigate.”

🛠 Practical Framework: The Pillars Framework

STEP 1: Define the Value

Why does this role exist?

What is its unique contribution?

STEP 2: Define the Leading Indicators

What daily actions create success?

What practices matter most?

STEP 3: Define the Checkpoints

How often will we review progress?

Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly?

STEP 4: Define the Lagging Indicators

What results prove this role is effective?

What are the KPIs?

STEP 5: Define Ownership

Who owns what?

Where are there gaps?

Where is there overlap?

🎯 Quick Reflection Questions

•  Does every person on my campus know what success looks like? 
•  Where do we have vague ownership? 
•  Where do we have overlap? 
•  Where do we have blind spots? 
•  Which 3 roles should I build Pillars Documents for first? 

⚡ Final Thought

Clarity is not extra. It is foundational.

The strongest schools are not built on vague expectations.

They are built on:

✔ clear roles
 ✔ clear practices
 ✔ clear measures
 ✔ clear accountability

Before August comes…

Ask yourself:

Does my team know exactly what winning looks like?

Because when clarity goes up—

performance usually follows. 

🔗 Connect With Us

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📸 Instagram: @edleadership_pair

▶️ YouTube: The EdLeadership Pair

🎥 TikTok: @theedleadershippair

🌐 Website & Newsletter: www.theedleadershippair.com

Join our growing community of school leaders navigating today’s challenges together.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey, Court, question for you. You're a building leader. You're sitting in your building during the long summer weeks as you're preparing and all the things you're doing for next school year. What are some of the most high-leverage things that maybe leaders aren't thinking about, that they have the quiet moments a little to to do a little bit more here in the summer?

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Let's talk about the ways that you can provide clarity for the people that you are supporting. I'm Courtney. And I'm Mario. And this is the Ed Leadership Pair Podcast now brought to you by Marzano Resources and Solution Tree.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

All right. So the summer short series continues. Summer Shorts. Summer Shorts series. And and we want everybody to know we've even like it dressed down since it's summer. It's t-shirts and sweaters and things instead of instead of sport coats and yeah, I probably would have worn this anyway, to be honest with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

I'm dressing. I have pajama pants on right now, and nobody knows it but you. Well, no, I guess everybody knows it.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

I guess everybody knows it now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

All right.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Yeah, I was thinking about some of the ways that I am trying to provide clarity and consistency of practice for our team members. And it led me to taking a good hard look at our pillars document. And that one is how you are defining the roles and responsibilities for people in your building or in your district. How does that work? And so, yeah, I think we'll jump into that if that sounds good to you, sir.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Sounds great to me.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Absolutely. So fun. Lots of fun. So fun. Okay, let's talk about roles and responsibilities, what I call our pillars document. So, this is how you are defining the value of each role that is working with you. The I'm gonna have you go through the explanation of leading and lagging indicators and checkpoints in these roles and the outcomes that are expected within your organization. And it should answer the question that each member of your staff is silently carrying. Like, what does success actually look like in my role? And how does my work connect to the bigger picture? And that's the thing that I got really excited about with this pillars document as I was drafting it out for um Apex Learning Virtual School and Ed Options Academy, which are the private schools that I am the head of school for at Edmonton. And as we're drafting out the pillars, it's telling everybody how their roles interact with each other. It's just the thoughtfulness behind have you spelled this out for people and given them that level of clarity. So when you think about the roles in your school or the roles in your district, sh we all have a job description, right? And how often does the job description really explain what happens when someone gets into that job?

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Yeah, not frequently. No, and so broad, it's just a broad description.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

It is, it's meant to be, it's meant to be really broad and open because also every school is different. And what that role is needed to do at that point in time of the year or that point in time in the community or in the political environment, it may look a little different. And so what a pillars document does is it really describes out in detail what are the expectations for that role. And if you have, you know, obviously various teacher roles in your school, then maybe you have like one teacher description, like one teacher pillar, but maybe you have here's a department chair pillar, and here's what their roles and expectations are, and here's what an instructional coach would be on my campus, and here's whatever. So it's replacing these vague drop job descriptions with really clear, actionable accountability frameworks for each position. Does this take a lot of time? Yes. Should you get a lot of input? Absolutely. But once you have it put together, it's really such a great guiding document.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

So what you're doing is painting a picture in my mind as a former campus principal. I'm thinking about um you know, admin administrative assistance in different offices, receptionists, uh, counselors. Um you said instructional support personnel, like a coach, if if I have if I'm blessed to have that. Um thinking about even like my security staff, hall monitors, parking security, what what other security staff do I have? Um, of course, you've got your teachers generally speaking laid out. Uh and then I like what you're saying, even then leadership roles. What does a department chair do? What does a grade level lead do? And so in spelling out not the job description, but what does that job how does that job operationalize on this campus? What I'm hearing you say then is what it'll do is make sure that everybody knows what their lane is. Everybody can run in their lane, right? This is what you own, this is what you're responsible for. Yes, this is what she owns, this is what she's responsible for. Then you do this audit and you're like, I got three people responsible for the same thing, or I've got nobody responsible for this thing. We have been talking in our summer summer shorts about removing the gaps, like close the gaps, remove the gaps, that idea of like, oh, we've got a blind spot right here. That's why every year it's like, well, whose job is that? Right? Should they both own it? Uh, does one person need to own it? Is that somewhere where I tell them, no, you're both gonna own that and make sure you do it together? So I'm hearing you say it's not just roles, responsibilities, but it's then the leader being able to look at the entire organization and understand who's holding what, so that I can check efficiencies, I can check for gaps of things that are blind spots.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Yes to all of that. And my favorite part of the document is the first. So for every role, like we have admissions advisors, right? Because we're not a public education institution. And so we actually have admissions where we are working with parents to get they're making payments and they are uh renewing contracts, and they're the admissions advisors are prospecting to find new students and all of that. But my favorite part of all of it is what is the value that this role brings? It's the first piece of every role is why does this exist and what are the unique contributions of this particular role? And I love having that all spelled out because exactly what you're saying is it's saying what are the actual responsibilities for this position and what do you need to know that you have to own these pieces? And you could put in there, here are the shared responsibilities that are shared with a different role or shared with people amongst your team. Um, and so I love that first part of it, but I would love for you to talk about the second and third pieces that we have in here, which are the leading indicators of the role and the lagging indicators of the role, but especially the leading indicators talking about the intentional practices. So, what could that look like on a public high school campus? Sure. Or elementary middle school.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Uh the concepts of leading and lagging indicators as they apply to schools come from literature written by Dr. Bob Marzano, Dr. Phil Warwick, Julia Sims, uh, high reliability schools. Leading a high reliability, um, I have been fortunate enough to be brought in as a co-author on this series further down into the work more recently. Five big ideas for leading a high reliability school. But if we talk about leading and lagging indicators, just so that our listeners know that's where they can find this in the literature. The leading indicators are the conditions of best practice that have been proven for about 60 to 70 years in our profession that exist in effective schools. Now, these are conditions because what Dr. Marzano teaches us and what I've learned in my career and you too is no one strategy works for all schools all the time. So that's where you go, hey, we've got to have these protocols and these operating procedures. Yeah, what does that really look like here? So a leading indicator is the condition. But what made me think of what this conversation is then the leader or leaders better have clarity on how are we actually going to operationalize or manifest this condition. So that's a leading indicator.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

And do that for roles other than educational and leadership roles, like you're talking about your registrar and you're talking about your office staff, and you're talking all of those roles you can have.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

What conditions would create a good office? Let's go, it's friendly, it's it's clean, it's clean clean, it is efficient. Those would be leading indicator conditions. And then you would have to say, How do we do that here? How are we actually going to operate that?

SPEAKER_00 9:00

What are the practices with the intentional practices that we do to create those conditions?

SPEAKER_01 9:05

What what would be the leading indicators for a registrar? Well, what are the most important conditions to have effective registrar uh uh operations? You know, they they uh intake and they they withdraw and enroll students, that would be one. Um they maintain and manage the uh student management records, the student management of grades and of attendance and I mean all right. So, yes, you could sit down as a leader and say, okay, what are the conditions that work for this space in my school? And then you got to operationalize them. How do we actually do that here to make it work?

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Yep. I love that because then you can take those leading indicators that are in that document of pillars. You've got their value statement of the value that they should be bringing to the organization, and you've got their leading indicators that are their intentional practices that create those conditions. And right there, you're able to coach all of your people if you've got all of those things defined for them.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Absolutely. Yeah, that's the doing part. So HRS has two parts. It's got the doing part. Well, we say do the right work. So you got to know the conditions that are supposed to be in place, and then you've got to operationalize how are we going to do this? Now I'm gonna coach everybody to do that work. That's half of the work.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Yeah. And then talk to us about the lagging indicators because I have those on there as well. So what would that look like?

SPEAKER_01 10:26

The other half is see, truly, Dr. Marzano in this process, he helps us all as school leaders understand that being highly reliable really means you are measuring your work. It's a measurement process. And so a lagging indicator is the other side of the coin, which is if we're doing the work of the leading indicator conditions, now we have to ask ourselves that magic question you already put out there, which is what results are we expecting if this work is working? A lagging indicator is the answer to that question. What results do we expect if this work is working? It is your success criteria. I know in business you guys call them KPIs.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Key performance indicators.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

And that's what a lagging indicator is. In other words, if this is happening correct, then we should see these outcomes. Sometimes they're quantitative, sometimes they're qualitative, sometimes they're existential. I'll give you a quick example: uh, school safety, physical safety. In order to meet that condition, we have to lock our doors. Unfortunately, in the United States, in this era, you gotta have your doors locked to have a safe school. Okay, so the condition is be safe. The action is make sure everything's locked. All right, there's your doing part. Now let's build a lagging indicator. What results do we expect, Courtney, when we lock our doors to our schools? Hmm. We expect that no one gets in the building that we didn't vet to come in the building. In other words, no unidentified humans are inside of this building. That would be a lagging indicator, a key performance indicator. In other words, if our doors are working the way they're supposed to, no one should be in here that we don't want in here.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

You see, that's just that's your signal of success.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

It's a success criteria, and we call it a lagging indicator. Then the last part of it is go around and check. Are there any people in this building that aren't that aren't identified? If there are, guess what that tells me about my success criterion? Something's broken, right? We got to go back to the doing part and then we adjust our operations to say, why do we keep this is what happened to me at my school. We kept having people get into our building down by the athletic wing. So I had to figure out, okay, what's happening, coach? Why do we have people getting in here? And there were valid reasons for it. So I had to adjust the way we operated down there. It wasn't the coach's fault. It's that we had to change the way we're operating down there in order to meet our lagging indicator, that success criteria. So, right there is what's called being highly reliable. You know the work you're working on via these leading indicator conditions. This is the right work. We customize it for our environment. Then we measure it by ask answering the question, what results are we expecting? If it's going well, we build that success criterion, and then we just go about checking it. If we are hitting our success criteria, we're in good shape. If we're not, we go back to the doing part and we make some small adjustments. Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

So, what I also had in this document was I was, and tell me if I'm wrong in this, I was kind of using lagging indicators as a summative assessment of sorts. And then I also had checkpoints and timelines that were more periodic throughout the year, like some things we were checking every other week, some things we were checking once a month, some things every semester, whatever. So I had these like I had the leading indicators, and then I would have checkpoints and the timelines for each checkpoint and what the expectations were, and then the summative or lagging checks at the end. Is that off, or is that no?

SPEAKER_01 13:45

I think you're on it because you're you're talking about your big KPIs, your big success criteria. And by the end of the year, we expect this. That's there's nothing wrong with that. Only thing I would say is your lagging indicator can be whatever you want it to be. Let's say for some of your pillars, you can't wait to the end of the of the fiscal year to make that decision. You need to know by Q1. Happens a lot to us in schools. I shouldn't wait until testing season to know that something's going wrong. I should probably know by October. So a lagging indicator can be whatever you want it to be. Dr. Marzano, the author of this literature, I've heard him say out of his own mouth, this is a self-validating process. In other words, what does success mean to you? Set it. If that's summative at the end of a fiscal year or school year, fine. If it needs to be quarterly, fine. If it needs to be every other week, fine.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

But you, the piece you did very well, which is whatever your summative markers are, whether they're by quarter, by week, whatever, you got to be checking in the interim because you want to have those markers that sort of be telling you, are we even headed in the right direction? So we can adjust in real time and not wait for the final data point to tell us that we're not doing well. And see, in schools, leaders, if you're thinking of something over the summer, that's that's a mindset I would urge you to try and work your way out of. We have been training schools for too long to think summatively. We look at big data, graduation rates, attendance rates, uh, passing rates on exams, or even passing rates on our grad on our grade reports. But all of those come in these giant spaces of long, long time windows. This process of looking at a lagging indicator, you could be looking at that daily, weekly, monthly. And that way you're able to adjust in real time and not wait to the end of your journey to know did we do a good job or not.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

Yeah. And I think for us, because we're it's a corporation, so we're thinking more in terms of the fiscal year. So we're setting it here are the goals, the big goals by the end of the year.

SPEAKER_01 15:35

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

So then we had to put these smaller checkpoints in place.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Totally appropriate.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

I mean, also do whatever you got to do to make it make sense for you. And that's what Dr.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

Marzano says. This is a self-validating process being highly reliable. Yeah. What does what do you need? What are your timelines? Build your measures in the way that you need them to look.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Right. And I know that this can be, it can sound really overwhelming to think as a school leader, all the roles that you have in a school, and oh my God, I have to build out value statements, leading indicators, checkpoints and timelines, summative checks, and then all like that feels like a lot and probably a little overwhelming. However, I'll say a few things to that. Number one, I've been working on this document for probably three years now, like over time, and it changes and shifts as the roles change and shift. We have success coaches that support students in our full-time program, and we have a registrar and a records clerk. Like, we have all these different roles, not nearly as many as you would have in a public school, right? Or uh even a school district. However, as I have added roles that touch the educational program and I've added them to this document, what it's done for me is not just provided clarity for the people working within the system, but really also to give clarity for people outside of the schools, like what might be district leaders or maybe your principal supervisors or superintendents, like, why do you even need that role? Okay, cool. Let me show you what impact this role has. And when you have this kind of data and information within each of those roles, it validates the need for those roles. And so you can go back to your HR and be like, don't take this personnel unit away because I need it. Here's how I can tell you. If you can go to your HR with that kind of information behind you, that's super powerful. Not saying they're gonna give it to you every time, but Those HR people, they don't listen, they listen to nobody.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Talking to you, Annette Viera. Just kidding. Annette was a wonderful HR director.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

She was, she was.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

But no, but anytime you have data, that's how you win. That's how you your best shot of winning whatever you need is to have some kind of data to back up.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

Right. We had a lot of people that in our organization that didn't understand that our admissions advisors were not just bringing in new kids and getting them enrolled. They were also our support queue. Like they, as parents and students, were calling with questions like, hey, I need a syllabus for this course because I need to make sure I'm a part-time kid taking a course on the side and I need to make sure my district's gonna accept this credit. These were the people sending them the syllabus to make sure that we could get that sale. And so for us, it looks a little bit different, but it could be very overwhelming for a school person to be like, I can't do that for every role on my campus. However, you can pick some and you can start and you can even build out a plan that says, I'm gonna do this many, I'm gonna draft this many of these every semester and just set that goal for yourself so that over time you're building it out with your team. And this is such a great place to bring in AI. Like it's such a good place to have here's the job description, here's what I expect from this role, here's what, here's um, how I define leading indicators, lagging indicators, checkpoints. Here are the timelines. Like you can plug all that stuff in and have it start to draft what some of this could look like before you take it to these people and then have them get their eyes on it too, and have them start to edit it with their input.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Yeah, you're right. AI can speed a lot of this up in the old days, like two years ago. We had to do this all by hand. I started it by hand. Yeah, no, and and and of course, I've I've got a great example of this that I will happy to share out um from my old school where we did our receptionist. What was it? What was the roles and responsibilities? Uh, an administrative assistant, a counselor, uh, a registrar, the assistant principal versus the principal versus the we we had a lot of it, we had a lot of it laid out. And so I'm again if you are subscribed to our newsletter at www.theedleadershippair.com, I can share an exemplar. It doesn't mean it's the only way to do it, but just to so you can see the power behind understanding everybody's lane and being able to sit at the top of that. And you're right, it's a lot of work, but this is the time of year where you have a little bit more time. And if you're looking for like juice for your squeeze, like this is one of those that can really help make sure that your that your school is functioning at a very high level. And then as the leader, you now have a map of what everybody should be doing, and now you can start to monitor every individual role player on your team, and you can stay at a very high level and be able to see all the pieces functioning a lot better.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Yeah, and provide clarity for your teams. And again, so much coaching comes out of this.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

A lot of great coaching. You know what else it made me think of is when you hire new folks. Two weeks ago, we talked about the transition plan, and we talked about how important it was to have all of this spelled out for somebody coming in. So you think about these roles, responsibilities, what are their action steps via the leading indicators, what are their measures they should be looking at via the lagging indicators? Think about the power of hiring somebody into that. The job is right here for you. Now we want you to put your expertise and your skill in it. But how many times, how many jobs have we taken where you get in and they're like, here's all your stuff, good luck. And you're just like George Costanza sitting with the Penske file. You know, you're just like, here's here's a big old stack of stuff. I don't, okay, I don't know what to do with it. So it's so powerful for onboarding when you're hiring folks too, because now you have an actual playbook to give to people and say, Here we go. I can coach you through it, but here is your job. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

Yep, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Whoo, Court, that's really cool thinking about these pillars. Just basically, like, if I'm if I zoom up a level as a school leader, that's a superintendent, an executive director, a principal, doesn't matter. I'm gonna zoom up and I'm looking down on my organization. And it's like, here's all the people who do all the things, these pillars that hold up our work. And I just gotta make sure that I'm painting the roles, the responsibilities, the expected outcomes for each one of these, the measurements that I will use to check so that I can sit up here at the top and sort of see, right? I'm looking down, and as long as all the lights are green, everything's good. When a light starts blinking red, I gotta get my butt in there and start to figure out why this light is blinking red. Is that what I understood you to teach us?

SPEAKER_00 21:57

That's beautiful. It is the difference between just having job descriptions and actual accountability frameworks. That's what it's leading to.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Oh, God, an accountability. There you go. At the individual employee level, as my as the leader. So I'm not just job description. Hey, here's how I expect you to manifest this job on a day-to-day basis.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Oh, so you know your girl loves a framework.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Yeah, that is true. I do know that about you. It's one of the ways I wooed you way back in the day. Right, right. All right. Hey, a reminder to all of our listeners to uh join us at our website, www.theedleadershippair.com. All right, we'll sign off. Thank you to Marzano Resources and Solution Tree. I am Mario.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

And I'm Courtney, and this is the Ed Leadership Pair Podcast. Thanks for listening.