It is one of the most disruptive events a school board can face. The Head of School has suddenly resigned, or has been arrested, or has become incapacitated, or needed to be fired, or was killed in a car crash – or less morbidly perhaps has won the lottery and decided to retire immediately and move suddenly to a luxurious island in the South Pacific. Whatever the precise cause (see The great resignation), the school is unexpectedly lacking its substantive operational leader, and so the Board must act decisively.
As noted in Successful successions, wise boards will already have drafted an emergency school leadership transition strategy, hoping it would never be needed, but ready for immediate retrieval and implementation in this situation. The action plan within the emergency school leadership transition strategy should follow the essential principles of managing a crisis following the three priorities of (1) Stabilise, (2) Communicate, and then (3) Appoint. The resulting action plan will typically have five components:
Communications action plan
When a Head of School abruptly leaves, the Board Chair should be notified as a matter of immediate priority. The Chair would then immediately notify all board members, perhaps initially with a text message or abbreviated e-mail for speed, with the promise to call an immediate meeting to discuss the actions required to manage the situation.
The initial communication with board members should be followed as quickly as possible by an announcement to the staff by the Board Chair, preferably in person, also with the promise of further information to follow when interim arrangements have been established. The meeting with the staff is especially important because they have such a significant personal and professional stake in the transition, and are likely to be feeling particularly vulnerable. That is why the meeting with the staff should be led by the most senior person available, usually the Board Chair. In addition to conveying the facts of the situation and the Board’s immediate actions, the meeting should include an opportunity for any staff concerns to be heard and any questions answered so that staff can rest assured that the sudden transition is being managed sensitively and competently – a message they will hopefully spread through their own networks.
The Chair should quickly call an emergency board meeting for a date as early as possible, accepting that some board members may have to attend through video conferencing (presuming the school’s governing documents and applicable law allow) because of inability to attend in person at short notice. This emergency Board meeting should authorise arrangements regarding interim leadership and financial supervision (described below).
Once the relevant action plans have been approved by the Board, individuals who need to assume new temporary roles should be asked to engage in direct conversations with the Board Chair.
As soon as these conversations have occurred and satisfactory arrangements have been agreed, verbal and/or written messages should be sent by the Board Chair first to the staff, then to the parents, and ultimately to the school’s key stakeholders (including government authorities and accreditation agencies) with reassuring details of the plan to be implemented for the leadership transition. In time, and depending upon the school’s individual history and structure, it may also be helpful for the Board Chair to communicate with key alumni representatives, the school’s largest philanthropic donors, key community leaders, and perhaps respond to media enquiries.
Throughout the process, the Board should ensure that all information is disseminated quickly, factually and confidently because schools are renowned ‘grapevine orchards’ where false information flowing through gossip channels has the potential to seriously damage the school’s reputation. All communications should be clear, concise and factual, they should follow the principles of communication for persuasion, and whatever the reason for the Head’s sudden departure, refrain from engaging in any public criticism.
Interim Leadership action plan
The first key urgent decision for the Board is appointing someone to perform the Head of School’s essential duties as CEO. The Board’s regularly maintained Risk Management Strategy should ideally already contain the name of a senior leader within the school who can assume the Head’s duties in the event of an unforeseen emergency. Hopefully there is someone already on the staff who can step into this role immediately – today – because the school cannot afford to be without a specified operational leader. Even if this internally appointed interim leader performs the role for just a few days (or weeks, or months) until a longer-term interim arrangement can be finalised, it is essential to make this appointment.
The internal appointment of an interim Head will almost certainly set off a chain reaction of subsequent acting appointments through the leadership structure. The advice of the newly appointed Interim Head will be critically important here to tap into insights regarding the various strengths, weaknesses, capacity, and potential of the leadership team to take on alternative and/or additional duties.
After the immediate appointment of an interim Head has been made, the Board has two options. The Board could formally appoint an Acting Head to provide transitional leadership during the planning and/or the implementation phase of an executive search for a new long-term Head. Typically, this appointment would be a senior manager within the school, or on rare occasions, a board member (who would take leave from the board for the term of the Acting appointment). A second option would be to appoint an Interim Head of School for a longer period (typically one or perhaps two years) who could stabilise operations, address urgent issues and prepare the school for its next phase of leadership. Such longer term Interim Headships are often retired Heads, former Heads, or experienced current Heads from other schools who are taking sabbatical leave.
Irrespective of the option chosen by the Board, an agreed timeline must be developed to cover at least the initial phase of the transition. This timeline should include a comprehensive communication schedule as well as details of new or modified roles for school personnel and board members. Needless to say, this timeline should be an organic document that is constantly refined and updated as the situation unfolds and circumstances warrant.
Financial, legal and operational protection
The true costs of a Head of School transition are significant and almost always underestimated by school boards. In the event of an emergency transition, the Board has an acute duty to oversee and monitor these costs.
At a practical level, although Heads of School do not typically conduct the school’s day-to-day financial operations, they usually have a supervising role that includes the authority to approve transactions that exceed a certain designated figure. It is therefore important for the Board to delegate this authority to someone in the absence of the Head of School to ensure any financial crisis facing the school are addressed and to ensure all agreed financial priorities continue to function seamlessly.
These arrangements will include making that person a signatory to official documents that require CEO-level approvals. On a temporary basis, the signatories might include the interim Head, Chief Finance Officer, the Board Chair, and perhaps appropriately authorised members of the Board. Contact information for the school’s financial advisors should be available to the Interim Head of School for questions related to financial issues, and the Board should ensure that all necessary authorisation processes are in place for payroll processing and other business functions. It is imperative that the Board is kept aware of the school’s financial situation. Therefore, other critical information and contact lists that are usually available to the Head of School should be available to the Board Chair as a safeguard to use in the event of an emergency.
There will usually be an urgent necessity to remove the former Head’s access to the school’s e-mail, secure servers and financial platforms as part of normal departure and information security processes. If the Head’s departure was acrimonious, the Board will need to assess what materials the former Head may have belonging to the school, and ensure keys, credit cards, and computers are returned, and passwords to secure servers are changed. It will also be necessary to preserve relevant e-mails, files and other records before accounts are altered or deleted, particularly if the former Head’s departure involved allegations, investigations, litigation or regulatory issues.
Safeguarding, regulatory and reputational considerations
The sudden departure of a Head of School can coincide with allegations concerning student safeguarding, staff misconduct, financial impropriety, regulatory breaches or other serious matters. The Board therefore needs an immediate process for determining whether external advice or notification is required.
The Board should therefore engage independent, external legal advice if some or all of the following factors may be relevant to the Head’s sudden departure:
This is not the place to offer a legal treatise. The point is that the Board should be aware of its legal obligations and should obtain specialist legal advice promptly if the circumstances of the Head’s sudden departure involve allegations, misconduct, incapacity or possible regulatory breaches.
Long-term Head of School search and succession
In the light of the sudden departure of a Head of School, the Board needs to spend some time reflecting on two key questions: “What just happened?”, and “What does the school need from its next Head of School?”.
An unexpected departure can reveal hitherto unknown (or ignored) weaknesses in the school’s leadership structure, culture, governance, financial position or strategic direction. The Board should therefore resist the temptation to reproduce the previous Head’s job description with a quick “copy and paste”.
The Board should resist any temptation to begin recruiting a new, long-term Head of School immediately. Only once all interim management and financial supervision arrangements have been set in place, the Board may choose to work with a search consultant to find and recruit a new long-term Head of School. If so, some helpful guidelines and advice are provided in the articles Recruiting a new head of school and Scale or Substance. The first step the Board needs to take is to appoint a transition committee. This group must not become a “shadow board”. It must have explicit, specific, delegated authority from the Board specifying what it can decide, what it must recommend to the full Board, and what authority remains reserved for the full Board. Within this framework, it should be authorised to make quick decisions that are required to stabilise any emerging disruptions or other challenges. The transition committee may in due course morph into the search committee which works with the search consultant to recruit a new Head of School, but that is a future decision for the Board to make.
The real test of a Board’s emergency leadership plan is not whether it can produce a document describing what should happen. It is whether, at 7:00am on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning, the Board Chair knows who to call, who can take operational command, who has authority over the school’s finances, who needs to be informed, what must remain confidential, and what the Board needs to decide that day.
The sudden departure of a Head of School will always and inevitably be disruptive. It does not, however, need to become a crisis. A well-prepared Board can stabilise the school quickly, protect its people and assets, communicate with confidence and create enough breathing space to make a considered decision about the school’s next leader.
The best time to decide what happens if the Head of School suddenly leaves is while the Head is still in the office.
- Dr Stephen Codrington
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