Six lessons from four international school leaders on moving from personal to collective effectiveness.

Most school leaders are promoted because they were great at something else. They ran a brilliant classroom, led the curriculum committee, or kept the technology running. Then one day the job changes, and the skills that got them there stop being enough.

In a recent live webinar, we’ve gathered some great minds for a conversation on: Your Expertise Got You Into Leadership. It Won’t Make You Successful There.

Facilitated by Dr. Ben Sheridan, the panel brought together Lural Ramírez (Head of School, Academia Cotopaxi, Quito), Dr. Ryan Persaud (Director, Bonn International School), Dr. Tim Stewart (Director of Leadership Recruitment and Global Partnerships, Search Associates) and Dr. John Nash (Associate Professor of Educational Leadership, University of Kentucky), with Dr. Howard Stribbell, 21C Learning’s Chief Learning Officer. Between them they have worked in schools on five continents. Here is what they wish they had known sooner.

1. The first lesson is humility

Tim Stewart did not hesitate. “The biggest lesson in leadership when I actually became a leader was humility,” he said. “Up until the point where I was actually in charge, I thought I could do it all, and I thought I could do it better than most people.” Stepping into the role made it clear he needed to surround himself with people who were smarter than him.

Ryan Persaud agreed. The work ethic that gets you noticed only carries you so far, because as you move up, “that bucket’s just going to get exponentially bigger.” The answer is to hire for the skills you lack, “and not having an ego about it.”

Lural Ramírez added what comes next. Once a strong team is in place, “your job is really just to support.” She spends much of her time in one-on-ones asking her leaders simple questions: What are you working on? What do you need? What can I help you think about?

2. Stop being the fastest person to answer

John Nash named a habit many new leaders carry over from their old roles. “If you come in someplace and you’re always answering first, you’re just teaching everyone else to wait for you to say something.”

Ben Sheridan described the same shift from his own career in technology, where things either work or they don’t. Leadership is different. You rarely have the whole picture, yet you still have to move. The discipline is to decide with the best information you have, then watch closely and adjust. As Ben put it, “If you’re talking, you’re not learning.”

3. Learn the business side, so operations serve learning

Howard Stribbell pointed out that international school leaders rarely have a central office behind them. In a small school, a new leader can be curriculum director, SEL director and athletic director at once, while also fixing the Wi-Fi. The panel shared practical ways to close the gap:

• Take a finance course. Ryan, who trained in business before teaching, urged every leader to get comfortable enough to sit with the director of finance and understand the numbers.
• Ask your board to invest. Tim’s board sent him to business school. “The boards are often filled with business people. They value somebody who is a learner in that space.”
• Use AI as “a silent but very powerful partner” to fill operational knowledge gaps, as Tim suggested. Ben’s own senior team is piloting AI to automate operational work and free up time for teaching and learning.
• Hire a strong director of teaching and learning who can keep curriculum moving when operations pull you away.

Lural offered a warning. “Sometimes I’ve arrived in contexts where the operational tail is wagging the dog.” Operations should sit underneath learning and support it. The more a head understands finance and operations, the better they can keep learning at the center.

4. Fix the system, not just the problem

John Nash shared a line he borrows from healthcare: “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” If the same parent complaint or student behavior keeps coming back, your school is producing it. Fixing it once only fixes it once.

His practical test: keep a list. If you find yourself solving the same thing more than twice, “that might be a systems agenda.” To see the system, “ask one more question before you offer any answers.” Talk to long-serving staff and ask what they would do if you weren’t there. And “sometimes you let a solution that’s about 80% as good as yours go forward because they own it.”

Tim’s version was simpler: “You’ve got to turn into a three-year-old.” Keep asking why. He was candid that the root cause is sometimes uncomfortable. A hiring pattern, traced back far enough, can reveal institutional bias, and tackling it takes courage.

5. Listen and act: push on purpose, stay open on method

Howard described experience as a double-edged sword. The moment you say “that happened at my last school, and we fixed it like this,” you stop looking at the context. Yet he also hires leaders, and when candidates promise to do nothing but listen for a year, his answer is blunt: “I’m not paying you to just listen.”

John resolved the tension. Leaders can listen, learn and act. But a listening tour that leads nowhere burns “a little bit of a social bridge there that could really bite you later.” His advice: “Push on the purpose. Be firm about what students need, but listen on the method.” Start with small tests, and expect what Michael Fullan calls the implementation dip before things improve.

The panel also shared how to listen with direction:

• Ask questions that point the way. Tim asks teachers how their formative assessments shape instruction and interventions. The question signals what he values before he says it.
• Ask everyone the same two questions. Lural asks each person, “What do you hope that I never change?” and “What do you most want me to spend my attention on in that first semester?” As she said, “It’s not really what each individual person answers. It’s the pattern.” Protect what they love, focus where they ask, and there is little pushback when you act.
• Respect the web of relationships. Ryan noted that staff who have worked together for 15 or 20 years have deep connections that a newcomer cannot see in the first few weeks. Your fix may be right, but your method may not fit the culture.

6. Give yourself grace, and protect your capacity

Lural became a head of school at 32, often as the first female leader a school had known. Her advice to her younger self was grace. “We’re all doing our very best, and sometimes our very best is not great.” Ryan, who is often “the first in that room” at regional heads’ meetings, spoke to the extra pressure that brings and the patience it requires.

Howard was honest about the job. “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. It’s all rhythm and choices.” He treats physical and mental capacity as the fuel for leadership capacity: when either is drained, so is your leadership. The panelists’ own rhythms were refreshingly ordinary:

• Tim keeps one evening a week with people who have nothing to do with school.
• Ryan lifts weights five days a week and cooks for his family on weekends.
• Lural relies on humor every day and sport whenever she can.
• John has reframed an old people-pleasing habit with one sentence: “Not everything is my problem.” He plays guitar with his wife.
• Ben blocks time in his own calendar every Sunday, before everyone else fills it.

The hard way, or a better way

One attendee asked whether the move from expert to leader can be trained for, or whether people just learn it the hard way. Too often it is the hard way, alone. This panel showed another route: humble questions, small tests, honest peers and a lot of listening, followed by action.

The full conversation is available to watch here. Our next leadership panel is on 8 December; we’d love to see you there, join our mailing list to get notified when registration opens.

This webinar is part of the free community events organized in conjunction with the Applied Leadership Certificate. Find out more.