In a recent episode of The Table, I sat down with Susanne Carpenter, founder and principal of Carpenter Leadership Consulting and former assistant head of school, to discuss what makes leadership teams truly effective. Our conversation explored the foundations of high-performing teams in schools, from building trust to creating space for strategic thinking in environments that seem to demand constant action.
What emerged from our discussion wasn’t another checklist of leadership competencies. Instead, Susanne shared insights from her years in school leadership and her current work coaching leadership teams about what actually holds leaders back from their potential and what transforms a group of talented individuals into a cohesive, high-performing team.
The Noise That Holds Leaders Back
Susanne identified something that resonates deeply with anyone who’s led in schools: leaders try to do too much on their own. The burden of decision-making, culture-setting, vision-crafting, and operational management often falls on individual shoulders rather than being truly distributed across a team.
But the real blocker isn’t capacity. It’s noise.
According to Susanne, this noise manifests in several ways: urgency that drowns out importance, people-pleasing that clouds judgment, unclear expectations that create confusion, and the fear of disappointing others when making necessary but difficult decisions. When leaders can quiet this noise, purpose, priorities, and focus emerge naturally.
This insight challenges the common narrative that leadership struggles stem from lack of time or resources. While those constraints are real, the deeper issue is often the mental and emotional clutter that prevents leaders from seeing clearly and thinking strategically about what matters most.
What Trust Actually Looks Like
Trust is one of those concepts everyone agrees is important, but few can articulate clearly. Susanne provided concrete indicators that help leadership teams assess whether trust truly exists.
High-trust teams share specific characteristics:
- Team members name real issues openly rather than dancing around difficult topics
- People disagree without personal attacks, challenging ideas rather than individuals
- Commitments get followed through consistently
- Members assume positive intent from their colleagues
- Psychological safety allows people to bring their whole selves to the work
- Healthy conflict feels productive rather than threatening
The absence of trust is equally recognizable. Susanne highlighted telltale signs: the meeting after the meeting where the real conversation happens; constantly revisiting decisions that were supposedly finalized; questioning others’ motives; meetings dominated by one or two voices while others remain silent; and leaders who become bottlenecks because team members won’t make decisions without explicit approval.
One particularly striking observation: low-trust teams often show up in quiet meetings where people hold back, whereas high-trust teams engage in robust debate that might seem contentious to outsiders but actually reflects deep security in the relationship.
Beyond Team Building Exercises
Many schools approach trust-building through traditional team-building activities. Susanne’s perspective on these efforts is nuanced. While retreats and exercises aren’t inherently problematic, they fail when schools treat them as one-time events rather than ongoing investments in team development.
The real work of building trust happens in how teams function day to day. It emerges through consistently demonstrating vulnerability, following through on commitments, addressing conflicts directly rather than avoiding them, and creating regular space for honest conversation about what’s working and what isn’t.
Susanne emphasized that trust-building cannot be separated from the actual work of leadership. Teams build trust by working through challenging problems together, not by completing ropes courses or trust falls. The shared experience of wrestling with real issues, navigating disagreement, and collectively arriving at solutions lays the foundation for genuine trust.
Strategic Thinking in Reactive Environments
Schools operate in inherently reactive environments. Student crises, parent concerns, faculty needs, and community expectations create constant demands for immediate response. Yet effective leadership requires strategic thinking, which demands time, space, and mental clarity.
Susanne described strategic thinking as seeing the full picture before making decisions. This includes understanding how different parts of the organization connect, anticipating second and third-order consequences of decisions, and aligning daily actions with long-term vision.
The challenge for school leadership teams is creating space for this kind of thinking when every day brings new urgencies. Susanne’s approach involves helping teams distinguish between what requires immediate response and what needs deeper consideration. Not every problem is actually urgent, though our school culture often treats everything as if it is.
She also talked about the power of asking more questions before jumping to solutions. Many leadership teams move too quickly from problem identification to solution implementation without fully understanding the issue or exploring multiple approaches. This speed, ironically, often slows progress because teams end up addressing symptoms rather than root causes.
The Meeting After the Meeting
One of the most practical insights from our conversation was Susanne’s focus on “the meeting after the meeting.” This phenomenon occurs in low-trust environments, where people hold back their true thoughts during official meetings but share concerns, disagreements, or alternative ideas in hallway conversations afterward.
The meeting after the meeting signals several problems simultaneously: people don’t feel safe speaking honestly in the formal setting, decisions aren’t actually finalized because key stakeholders aren’t genuinely on board, and the team lacks the vulnerability-based trust necessary for productive conflict.
Addressing this pattern requires direct confrontation. Susanne works with leadership teams to name the dynamic explicitly and establish norms that make it acceptable to disagree openly during meetings. This includes having leaders model the behavior by acknowledging their own uncertainty, asking for pushback on their ideas, and responding positively when team members offer different perspectives.
The goal isn’t consensus on every issue. High-functioning teams don’t agree about everything. The goal is commitment, even when consensus isn’t possible. When team members feel genuinely heard and trust that their input was seriously considered, they can commit to decisions they don’t entirely agree with. But this only works when the conversation happens in the actual meeting, not afterwards.
Slowing Down to Speed Up
If Susanne could get every leadership team to do one thing differently, it would be this: slow down.
Her mantra, borrowed from her late colleague Linda Hughes, is “go slow to go fast.” This counterintuitive principle recognizes that rushing through decisions without adequate thought, conversation, or input creates more problems than it solves.
Slowing down means asking more questions before jumping to solutions, ensuring all voices are heard before making decisions, taking time to understand the full context of issues, and creating space for strategic thinking rather than constant reaction.
Many school leaders resist this approach because it feels inefficient in the moment. There’s always another crisis demanding attention, another parent email requiring response, another decision that seems urgent. But Susanne’s experience shows that teams who slow down actually move faster in the long run because they make better decisions, create genuine alignment, and avoid the time-consuming work of revisiting decisions or fixing problems created by hasty choices.
This doesn’t mean endless debate or analysis paralysis. It means being intentional about when to move quickly and when to take time for deeper consideration. Some decisions genuinely require immediate response. Most don’t, though our school culture hasn’t always developed the discernment to tell the difference.
You Don’t Need All the Answers
Perhaps the most liberating insight from our conversation was Susanne’s reflection on her own leadership journey. The lesson that fundamentally changed her approach: leaders don’t need to have all the answers.
This realization runs counter to how many of us were socialized into leadership roles. The promotion to director, assistant head, or head of school can feel like an expectation to become the all-knowing authority. New leaders especially struggle with this pressure, feeling judged if they admit uncertainty or ask questions rather than providing immediate solutions.
But Susanne’s experience coaching leaders has reinforced that the most effective leaders aren’t those with all the answers. They’re the ones who ask really good questions. This approach serves multiple purposes: it engages team members’ expertise and experience, it models curiosity rather than certainty, it creates space for diverse perspectives, and it often leads to better solutions than any one person could develop alone.
For leadership teams, this shift from answer-giving to question-asking changes the entire dynamic. Instead of waiting for the head of school or senior administrator to pronounce a solution, team members actively engage in problem-solving together. This distributes leadership more authentically and builds the team’s collective capacity.
Creating Leadership Teams That Work
Susanne’s work spans one-on-one coaching, team development, leadership retreats, and strategic planning support. But underlying all of it is a core belief: schools should be wonderful places where people grow, learn, and move forward together.
This vision requires leadership teams that function as genuine teams rather than collections of individuals managing separate domains. It requires trust built through consistent action rather than occasional exercises. It requires space for strategic thinking carved out from reactive environments. And it requires leaders willing to slow down, ask questions, and admit they don’t have all the answers.
The good news is that these aren’t mysterious qualities requiring extraordinary talent. They’re practices that any leadership team can develop with intention and commitment. The starting point is often simply recognizing what’s missing and choosing to prioritize team development as seriously as schools prioritize student learning.
Moving Forward
As we wrapped up our conversation, Susanne emphasized that we spend so much of our lives at work. For those of us in schools, that work involves shaping the experiences of young people and supporting the adults who teach and care for them. The quality of our leadership teams directly affects everyone in our school communities.
Building high-functioning leadership teams isn’t a luxury or a nice-to-have; it’s essential to the real work. It is the real work. When leadership teams operate with high trust, think strategically, and work cohesively, everything else in schools becomes possible. When they don’t, even the best programs and initiatives struggle to gain traction.
For school leaders listening to this conversation, the invitation is clear: take time to assess your own leadership team honestly. Where does trust exist? Where is it lacking? When do you make space for strategic thinking versus constant reaction? How often do you experience the meeting after the meeting? And are you moving fast enough that you’re actually slowing yourselves down?
The answers to these questions point toward the work ahead. And while that work isn’t easy, it’s absolutely possible. It starts with the choice to slow down, create space, and invest in the team’s development as intentionally as you invest in anything else that matters in your school.
