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Does it feel like you’re caught in an endless cycle of crisis management, where each day brings new fires to extinguish, and you feel like you’re playing a giant game of whack-a-mole? Do you feel like everything depends on your constant vigilance and if you’re not personally monitoring, nudging, and correcting, progress grinds to a halt?

At the root of all these challenges is the same cause: a lack of staff alignment.

You see, when your staff isn’t aligned, it’s like rowing a boat where everyone’s paddling in different directions. Even if some of your team is working hard, you’re not moving forward—you’re just spinning in circles.

Misalignment isn’t just frustrating; it’s costly. It drains your energy, wastes precious time, and erodes morale. It creates conflict, slows down progress, and leaves you constantly firefighting instead of focusing on the big picture.

But here’s the real kicker: No number of new initiatives and no amount of professional development or micromanaging will fix the deeper problem. Because without alignment, every strategy you try will feel like a temporary Band-Aid instead of a real solution.

Alignment isn’t just a “nice to have.” It’s the foundation of everything.

Let’s imagine something different for a moment. Imagine walking into your school each morning with absolute clarity of purpose, where every member of your team knows exactly what matters most and moves in harmony toward shared goals. Picture your school where you’re no longer carrying the entire burden alone, where teachers confidently step up to lead initiatives and drive progress without constant oversight. Most importantly, envision fewer distractions, less back-and-forth, and less time spent putting out fires. Instead of constantly checking in and having to micromanage everyone, you’ll have more time to focus on what really matters—helping your students succeed.

All this is possible, but it only happens when you have a fully aligned staff.

True staff alignment is when you get everyone on your staff doing the right work, the right way, for the right reasons, even when you’re not checking. Here’s how you achieve it.

Robyn R. Jackson speaks at a 2023 NASSP conference in Denver. PHOTO COURTESY OF NASSP

Right Work

The first step is to identify the right work everyone should be engaged in doing right now to achieve your goals. Many times, your teachers think they are doing the right work and focused on the right priorities, but their efforts often reflect only their own ideas. As a result, everyone ends up working on their own priorities, and the important work you’re passionate about gets pushed aside. Helping teachers understand what the right work is right now gives them clarity and focus.

Once you’ve clearly communicated the school’s priorities your work isn’t done. To ensure everyone stays focused on your priorities and aligns their work to your priorities, you need to offer them ongoing feedback.

I’m not talking about the kind of feedback most of us were trained to use where we simply check off behaviors on a generic rubric. I’m talking about dynamic feedback that is laser focused on helping every teacher align their practice to your school goals. It’s also feedback differentiated to the needs of your teachers and focused on helping them grow their practice in tangible ways. With the right feedback, everyone not only knows how close or far away they are from achieving your vision, living out your mission, and aligning their practice to your school’s core values, they also know exactly what they need to do to close that gap.

Once teachers see the gap for themselves, they can choose to adjust their practice so that they become more and more aligned to your vision. And, when you are clear about what the best next step is for them to close the gap between where they are and your vision, mission, and core values, they can develop the right skills and become even more effective at achieving your vision.

Right Way

The next step is to ensure they are doing it the right way. This is not about micromanaging every aspect of their practice. Not only is that unsustainable but it’s also shortsighted and will significantly limit your ability to achieve your goals long term. Instead, using the right support practices can help every one of your teachers grow their expertise and ability to reach all students.

When I say the right support, I am not talking about traditional teacher support practices such as one-size-fits-all professional development (PD), highly scripted workshops, or scattershot coaching once a teacher begins to struggle. I am talking about something I call 3D Support that is Differentiated, Developmental, and Deliberate.

Differentiated Support means that you support teachers based on what they need most at the time. All too often, we give teachers generic support regardless of where they are in their current practice. Differentiated support looks first to understand where a teacher is in their practice and determines their primary need. Then it offers support designed directly to meet that need. For example, if a teacher is struggling because they are missing something in their practice, differentiated support identifies the missing piece and helps that teacher acquire that skill. If on the other hand, a teacher is struggling because they are applying a technique incorrectly, differentiated support would focus not on helping the teacher acquire a new skill but helping that teacher refine their existing skills to make them more effective. When you give teachers the support they need in the way that they need it, your support is more likely to take hold and positively impact a teacher’s practice.

Developmental Support means that you support teachers to get to the next level. Unfortunately, we sometimes expect our support efforts to take a teacher from ineffective to master teacher in one PD session. We would never do this to students and yet our PD practices, performance plans, and even the way we were trained to coach teachers are often based on the assumption that the path to masterful teaching is linear and swift. If you want teachers to make tangible progress, it’s important to map out the pathway from ineffective to mastery including the various milestones along the way. Then, design your support programs to move teachers from one milestone to the next until they reach mastery. Doing so will help teachers make tangible progress and ultimately get teachers to mastery faster.

Deliberate Support means that you are intentional about moving teachers toward mastery. I’ve written previously about creating a teacher dashboard to help you deliberately support teachers and help them make consistent progress toward your goals. Having a plan that keeps teachers making steady progress means you can create true alignment and sustain it over time.

3D Support means you can ensure teachers are doing the right work the right way and growing their practice to become even more effective in the work that matters most to the success of your school.

Right Reasons

Our traditional leadership training would argue that if teachers are doing the right work the right way, that is enough. In fact, most traditional leadership practices are designed to achieve this end. But, if they are not doing that work for the right reasons, you have compliance, not true alignment.

To move beyond compliance, you need everyone engaged in the right work because they want to do it, and it is meaningful to them. Otherwise, you will spend all your time trying to keep people motivated, battling low staff morale, and feeling as if you are single-handedly keeping the work moving forward.

The best way to ensure everyone is doing the right work for the right reasons is to nurture and build a healthy culture. I’m not talking about buying everyone a school logo sweatshirt or handing out gift cards (although those things are always nice). I’m talking about intentionally building a culture that reinforces your collective “why.” How do you do that?

Helping teachers understand what the right work is right now gives them clarity and focus.

First, you must understand what culture is. Culture is our organizational habits and the stories we tell about them. Your organizational habits are everything from how you celebrate milestones like birthdays and retirements, to how you tend to talk about students, to how you conduct staff meetings. Often, you don’t even notice these organizational habits, but they all work together to shape your culture.

While your organizational habits are important, it’s the stories you tell about these habits that truly shape your culture. Your habits are what you do, but your stories give your habits meaning. These stories are the lens through which your staff interprets every action and every decision, and they are ultimately what will determine whether they remain aligned with and committed to your vision.

For instance, let’s imagine that two schools have the same organizational habit in that teachers have common planning periods and plan collaboratively. In School A, everyone tells themselves that collaborative planning allows them to work together to ensure that all students are successful. In School B, everyone tells themselves that the reason they have to plan collaboratively is so that the administration can control and monitor their work.

Same organizational habit. Totally different stories. And, as a result, two totally different cultures. One culture is healthy and growing. One culture is toxic.

You see, when negative narratives take hold, they can poison even the most well-intentioned organizational habits. The prevailing narrative shapes how your staff perceives challenges, interprets changes, and approaches daily work.

If you want your teachers to continue to do the right work, the right way, for the right reasons, you must be intentional about crafting and reinforcing the right narratives. You can do that by connecting your organizational habits and everyday practices to your school’s broader vision, regularly articulating the “why” behind initiatives, and actively reframing challenges through the lens of your school’s vision, mission, and core values. That way, your staff internalizes those narratives and sees themselves as vital partners in the work rather than merely compliant participants.

Systemic Accountability

The last step to true staff alignment is to ensure that your teachers remain engaged in the work even when you are not checking. The way you accomplish this is through systemic accountability.

Unfortunately, accountability is often seen as a dirty word in education. It conjures up the idea of endless data meetings, shaming people over their bad numbers, setting (and often not hitting) new goals, and spending your days chasing, checking, and correcting teachers to make sure they do their jobs.

But that’s not what true accountability is. True accountability means that teachers do their work in a way that is consistent with your vision, mission, and core values all the time. That doesn’t mean you expect every teacher to conform to a cookie-cutter way of teaching. It simply means creating a system that sets teachers up for success while also giving them room to do so in a way that honors their teaching styles so they will consistently succeed on their own.

Onboarding staff to the new system and embedding it into the culture solidify both accountability and alignment. Teachers are given the time, clarity, and support to internalize expectations and thus begin to take more and more ownership of their work and responsibility for results.

As the new system becomes part of the school’s daily operations, teachers naturally begin to hold themselves and each other accountable, not just to tasks, but to the shared vision and mission those tasks are designed to achieve. This approach shifts accountability from something that is leader-driven and compliance-based to something that is woven into the daily habits, conversations, and identity of the school. It’s no longer something you enforce; it’s just how things are done.

Building True Staff Alignment

All too often, leaders try to achieve staff alignment by fixing individuals instead of fixing the system. If multiple people are misaligned, it’s not a people problem; it’s a system problem and you need a system to fix it.

Feedback helps teachers understand exactly what’s expected and how to grow. Support ensures they have the resources, guidance, and encouragement to meet those expectations in a way that works for them, so they grow consistently year after year. Accountability reinforces follow through, helping teachers take ownership of their commitments and stay on track without constant oversight. Finally, when these elements are embedded into the school’s culture, they create an environment where doing the right work becomes the norm, not the exception.

Taken together, these elements ensure teachers aren’t just complying; they’re truly aligned to your vision, mission, and core values and consistently do the right work, the right way, for the right reasons—even when no one is watching.

Robyn R. Jackson, PhD, is the founder of Buildership University. A former teacher, instructional coach, and school administrator, she helps principals achieve success for 100% of their students with the people and resources they already have. She will speak at UNITED in July.