Say It; So People Can Act On It

Hi, Educational Leaders! September is here, and with it comes the real start of the school year in most remaining school districts, when the first-week energy begins to settle, and the daily rhythm of classrooms, meetings, and planning sessions kicks in. 

Today's edition focuses on some of the groundwork happening in our schools right now, particularly the everyday habits that can determine whether the goals we set at the beginning of the year actually make their way into the work.

One of those habits sounds incredibly simple: say what you mean clearly enough that people know what to do with it. 

Why Saying It Clearly and Saying It Often Actually Changes Behavior

There's a reason coaches repeat the same cue throughout practice instead of saying it once and assuming everyone will remember it. In any organization, people are more likely to act on an expectation when they hear it in clear, concrete, and consistent language. Repetition in this sense isn't about nagging. It's about making the message familiar enough that people don't have to stop and interpret it every time they need to decide.

This is especially important in schools because leaders often have a very different relationship with a goal than the people responsible for carrying it out. A leadership team may have spent weeks looking at the data, debating priorities, refining language, and deciding exactly where the school needs to go. By the time the goal reaches teachers and staff, the people who developed it may already know it inside and out. Everyone else is just beginning to make sense of it.

That is why saying something once is rarely enough. A priority becomes useful when people hear it consistently enough to understand what it means, why it matters, and what it requires of them.

This brings us to OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, the goal-setting piece of Educentric's School Breakthrough Flight Plan. An Objective gives the team a destination, while the Key Results provide specific, measurable evidence of whether the team is making progress toward it. This is one place where the language we choose matters enormously, because eventually someone has to take what is written in the plan and turn it into action.

The Problem With Vague Goals

Consider a goal like "improve student engagement." It sounds worthwhile, and few educators would disagree with it. The problem appears when we hand that statement to the people expected to carry it out. What counts as improvement? Which students are we talking about? What should change in practice? Most importantly, how will the team know whether anything actually improved?

Vague language can sound ambitious on paper while quietly handing the hardest part of the job, figuring out what the goal actually means, to the people responsible for executing it. 

Clarity doesn't necessarily mean writing more. It means choosing words that remove unnecessary interpretation. Compare "improve student engagement" with "increase weekly reading intervention minutes for Tier 2 students from 60 to 90 by the end of the second quarter." The second statement gives a teacher, instructional coach, and principal a shared understanding of what is expected and what they should be looking for.

The goal should not require a second meeting just to explain the first meeting.

Tying It Back to the North Star Metric

Our North Star Metric only works as a compass when the work underneath it points in the same direction. When Key Results are written with enough precision, teams should be able to trace a visible line between what they are doing today, the result they expect to see next, and the larger outcome they are ultimately working toward.

When that connection is vague, priorities can become surprisingly easy to lose. The urgent issue of the week begins competing with the important work of the year, and before long, teams can be very busy without being entirely sure whether all that activity is moving the school closer to its North Star.

One simple way to test an OKR is to read a Key Result to someone who wasn't in the room when it was written. If that person understands what is being measured and by when, the language is probably doing its job. If the immediate response is "compared to what?" or "measured how?", the Key Result may still need another pass.

A Quick Habit Worth Building

Before locking in an OKR this quarter, give it one final read from the perspective of the person who will actually have to use it. Does it name a clear result? Is there a way to measure it? Is there a deadline? And could someone who wasn't part of the planning conversation understand what success looks like without needing additional explanation?

That last question may be the most useful one. We sometimes write goals with all the context of the conversations that came before them, forgetting that everyone else wasn't in those conversations. If a Key Result only makes sense after someone explains what it means, it probably isn't ready to leave the room yet.

A few extra minutes spent sharpening the language during planning can save weeks of different interpretations once the work begins.

Clarity Is a Form of Respect

There is a larger leadership lesson underneath all of this. When we ask people to own an important result, we should give them enough clarity to know what success looks like without requiring them to constantly come back and ask what we meant.

That doesn't require a longer memo, another presentation, or more meetings. Often, it requires the opposite: fewer words, better chosen, and repeated consistently enough that everyone understands where the school is going and how their work contributes to getting there.

If people cannot act on what we said, we probably haven't said it clearly enough yet.