Lead the Leap

Why Principals Must Push Their Schools Forward

Sheila and her team had worked on it for weeks. The signage, the tours, the welcome packets, the way the hallways looked when families walked in. By the time the doors opened, it was the best open house the school had run in years. New families everywhere. The board thrilled.

Then under her breath, Sheila whispered the truth, "I don't think I can do that again. I carried most of it myself, and I'm wrecked."

She did the hard thing. She just did it as a hero. Which means the day she stops running, the school slides back to where it started.

Your school needs two things from you that point in opposite directions. You have to create stability and predictability, a school where people know what is expected, where systems hold, where mission stays clear through the noise. And you also have to pull your team into leaps. Growth does not happen incrementally by accident. It happens when you choose a goal your board set for five years out, decide that this year you are sprinting toward part of it, and you ask your team to do something hard they have never done before.

Most principals I coach are strong in one and weak in the other. Some are brilliant at keeping the ship steady, and the very thought of a big push makes them nervous. Others see the next thing the school could be, but they are impatient with the systems that lock in the gain. You need both. And you are the only person in your organization who can hold both at once.

What a Leap Actually Does

A leap is not just about the project. When you push your team into something hard and bounded, say a new program, a major fundraising push, or preparing for sudden growth, something happens inside the people around you. They start relying on each other in ways they do not during normal operations. You see the exceptional work people do when the job is too big for anyone to hero it alone. You watch people step into leadership they did not know they had. A shared hard push bonds a team, because there is no room for keeping your head down. Everybody's skills matter. Everybody gets noticed.

Here is what happens to a team after a real push. People are tired, and for a few weeks the work slows. That dip is normal. But the team does not come back to where it started. It comes back stronger, because people now know they can do something they had never done, and they did it together.

In church ministry we ran this play several times a year, at Easter, Christmas, and back-to-school. Two things grew at once. We reached more people, and we built more leaders to reach them. That second part is what made the first part last. When the season ended the crowds settled, but the leaders stayed, so the next push always started from a higher floor.

Hold onto both. Reaching more families is the goal. That is the mission. But reach them through heroics and the gain evaporates the moment you stop running. Build capacity that never serves the mission and you have built nothing worth keeping. One without the other will not hold. Together they compound.

A push succeeds when you treat it as an excuse to pull more people in. The leap becomes your reason to recruit new leaders, to ask someone to step into a level of leadership they have not tried, to build capacity you would never have created in a quiet season.

So how do you decide who to pull in? In a normal season you keep a task when you are the one most equipped to do it. A leap flips that test. The question stops being "who does this best" and becomes "who can do this about 80% as well, and grow by doing it?" That 80% rule is your permission to put someone in a role even when they are less skilled or less experienced than you. The gap between your 100% and their 80% is exactly where a leader gets built. In a quiet season that gap feels like a loss. In a leap it is the whole point.

Systems matter too. Some of the best policies and procedures we ever built only got built because a push finally gave us a reason to. But people are the real lock-in. Recruit and elevate during the leap, keep the capacity afterward, and the new baseline holds.

And measure both. Count how many people stepped up and held a level of leadership they could not hold before. Then count the move in a key metric that matters to the school, enrollment, retention, giving, whatever you were leaping toward. The first number tells you whether you built capacity. The second tells you whether it served the mission. You want both to climb.

Run to Win

If your team is nervous about a leap, do not sell them the work. Sell them the outcome. People will run hard toward a destination they believe is good for their kids and the mission. They will not run toward "more effort." Get everyone agreeing on the win first. The leap is just the path to it.

Paul put it plainly. Run to win, with strict training, nothing aimless about it (1 Corinthians 9:24-26). Growth like that never happens by accident. You grow on purpose. And it does not happen in the training itself. The workshops and learning communities are the support, not the source. Growth happens when you put it into practice, doing something hard that matters. That is what a well-led leap is. Intentional growth, for you and for everyone you bring along.

If you know your school needs a leap this year but you are not sure how to lead it without burning out your team, that is the work I do with principals. We turn a hard push into lasting capacity instead of a temporary spike.