How to Think Long-Term When Everything's on Fire

Your budget just got cut. Three teachers have just handed in their notice and parents are complaining about that new timetable. And at the same time, someone has just asked you about your five-year strategic plan. Today, we're going to talk about how to keep thinking long-term when short-term is absolutely kicking you in the...

Hey, everyone, I'm Shane Leaning. Welcome to Education Leaders, the chat-topping leadership podcast for school leaders just like you. As an organizational coach, I've helped thousands of leaders worldwide lead with greater confidence, make better decisions, and create winning teams. And on this show, we explore the strategies that are going to help you achieve your goals and transform your leadership.

This episode is supported by the International Center for Coaching and Education and the International Curriculum Association. Stay tuned to learn more. Now, I have lost count, honestly, of how many times I've had this conversation with leaders. We'll spend weeks together working on long-term vision.

That's usually what I do, where their department or their school needs to be in three years, for example, what cultural shifts need to happen, how to build genuine collaboration, not just compliance in their schools. You know, really, really good work, the kind that actually moves schools forward. And then something hits pretty much every time, a budget cut, a staff resignation, that there was a parent complaint, urgent changes from senior leadership, and suddenly I get emails saying, and I've had these saying, Shane, I really can't think about three years from now because I don't really know how I'm going to get through next week. And I get it.

I think we all get it because this is what school leadership actually feels like most of the time. Now, here's what usually happens when those short-term crises hit, right? You abandon everything else. Long-term planning, that gets pushed to, usually you say, it's when things are going to calm down, right?

And strategic thinking, that feels like there's luxury and you really can't afford that right now. So you go into firefighting mode, right? You deal with what's urgent and you hope you can get back to that important stuff later. But the problem is, things never really calm down.

There is always another crisis, I promise you. There'll be another cut, another staffing issue, another complaint, another urgent request. So what happens? Well, you stay in firefighting mode.

And weeks, they turn into months, months turn into years. Seriously, I've been there. And suddenly you're three years down the line wondering why has nothing actually changed? And I see this constantly.

Leaders who are incredibly busy, but not actually moving forward. Exhausted from constant crisis management and yet really frustrated because they're not building anything lasting. The sad thing is, is that there's something that no one wants to hear and this isn't just about being overwhelmed. It's actually about making a choice.

A choice to let your short-term urgency dictate everything. Now, before anyone gets defensive, I'm not saying crisis aren't real. They definitely are. Budget cuts real, right?

Staff resigns, that's real. Parent complaints, they're real. And you can't ignore them. But you can also let them become your entire existence.

Because when you do, you lose the ability to actually lead. You become reactive. You get blown around by whatever's happening this week. That was something that was introduced to me by old boss Stacey Wallace.

She talked about this whirlwind that's pulling us off the path and we have to keep coming back to the path. So the question isn't whether you deal with crisis. Of course you do. The question actually is whether you let these crises stop you thinking long-term.

Let me tell you what happens if you actually abandon long-term thinking. First, you're gonna make short-term decisions that create long-term problems. There is always long-term thinking whether you like it or not. So if you hire whoever's available quickly rather than finding the right person.

Firstly, you make short-term decisions that create long-term problems. For example, you hire whoever's available quickly maybe rather than finding that right person. Or you cut the PD budget because it's easier than other cuts. Or you change the reporting system to please parents without thinking about the workload.

Each decision feels justified in the moment, doesn't it? But the thing is they compound as suddenly you're dealing with high turnover, maybe poor staff development, burnt out teachers. You've created new crises by your response to the old crises. This becomes your culture.

Because secondly, after that your team loses confidence. They'll watch you as a leader lurching from crisis to crisis and they will see very quickly that there's no coherent direction just reaction after reaction. And that is demoralizing. People want to work where they're going somewhere.

Even if that journey's hard. And third, really importantly you're gonna burn out too because crisis management is really exhausting. It never ends. And without some sense of progress towards something bigger it becomes really soul destroying too.

I've watched this happen to brilliant leaders. I've had it happen to me too. Where someone starts out passionate, purposeful. Three years later you're feeling cynical, you're exhausted.

And it's nothing to do with your ability. It's because you've lost sight with what you were trying to build along the way. Now there's actually some really fascinating research on this. So FCLT Global, they did a study in Harvard Law School's corporate governance forum.

And they found something really interesting. When they surveyed financial executives, so we're not in education, financial executives, 80% said they would cut discretionary spending on things like research, development, hiring if it meant meeting short-term earnings targets. Think about that. Eight out of 10 leaders would turn down investments that would pay long-term just to hit this quarter's numbers.

This is thinking about what's better short-term even if it hurts the long-term. And this is not just a corporate problem, this is a real human problem. The pressure of the immediate of now overwhelms everything else. But what's really interesting is that the same research looked at what happened when organizations resist the pressure.

In fact, McKinsey did a big study in 2017. They tracked hundreds of companies over quite a long time and they compared firms that maintained long-term focus against those that didn't. The long-term companies, well guess what? They actually grew 50%.

Huge difference. The data is really clear, long-term thinking works but it's hard, especially when you are under pressure. So the leaders that I've worked with who are doing this well and ignoring those immediate problems, that would be stupid. What they're doing is they're still dealing with recruitment, they're still figuring out budgets, they're still dealing with those requests but they're not abandoning everything else.

They ask a few different questions. If recruitment becomes urgent, they're not just gonna fill slots. They're gonna say, what kind of teachers fit the culture we're building? What interview questions are gonna tell us if they're right?

That immediate need becomes a bit of an opportunity to build towards something that's bigger. Or maybe let's say budgets have been cut. Great leaders don't panic. They might ask, okay, this is a constraint.

How does it push us towards practices we should be doing anyway, maybe? Or how do we build peer learning instead of relying on expensive courses? That limitation, you see, it can end up becoming like a catalyst really for the culture that they're actually wanting in the schools. Same with when parents have complaints, they might ask, well, what response aligns with our assessment priorities that we're doing?

Or how do we communicate in a way that helps families to support learning? So let's use this as an opportunity to clarify. There's a pattern between all three of these. Every crisis gets handled but it gets handled through the lens of long-term priorities.

Not instead of long-term. It doesn't magically solve everything. The crises are hard but we've still got some direction even in chaos. This episode is supported by the International Center for Coaching in Education.

And I am actually on their current cohort. I don't recommend anything I don't believe in and I am genuinely excited to be strengthening my coaching practice this year. The ILM Level 7 Certificate in Executive Coaching is built specifically for senior leaders in international schools. It's fully online, really practical and honestly, learning alongside other school leaders who get the context we work in as being brilliant.

If coaching is something you want to develop properly, not just dabbling, head to theicce.org or click the link in the show notes and listeners to this podcast get an exclusive 5% discount using the code SHANE5. That's SHANE5. This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association.

The ICA have been around for 30 years now championing quality, unlocking potential and improving learning in international schools. And what I really love is that right at their core is the model for improving learning. This is a model focused on the learning experience and they have got tons of great curriculum materials, PD resources and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours. If you're interested, head to internationalcurriculum.com.

Right, so this is what you came for the practical bit. So how do you maintain your long-term thinking when that short term is really kicking it, right? Three anchors. I think there's three things that should ground you when everything's chaotic.

Firstly, anchor one is your non-negotiables. You need three to five things that don't change. It doesn't matter when crises hit, they stay. What are they?

Do you know what they are? Maybe it's collaborative culture, that doesn't change. Maybe it's your middle leadership development, that doesn't change. Maybe it's your sustainable assessment practices, that doesn't change.

It doesn't matter what it is, but it does matter that you know what matters most in your context. Everything else conflicts. Those three to five things can't. So when a crisis hits, you first ask, how does that decision affect my non-negotiables?

If it undermines them, you find another way. If it supports them, even slightly, you really lean into that. What we're trying to do here is we're not trying to be rigid, but we're trying to have real clarity. When you are under pressure, decision making gets really hard.

We talked about this a few episodes ago. Your cognitive load goes up, and having clear non-negotiables reduces that load because you're not reinventing your values every time something goes wrong. So write yours down, literally, three to five things. Pin them somewhere visible, not your office wall where nobody sees them, somewhere you actually look, your desk, your diary, your phone wallpaper.

If that works for you, put them somewhere. Anchor two is a weekly question. Every week, same question. Doesn't matter how chaotic things are, you ask it.

And this is the question. What's one thing I can do this week that moves us towards long-term priorities? One thing, not 10. Not a comprehensive plan, not a big development plan.

One thing, maybe it's a 15-minute conversation with a team member about their development. Maybe it's reviewing some of your recruitment questions. Maybe it's observing a lesson to understand collaborative practices, if that's your goal. Small, achievable, connected to what matters.

This is about momentum. Oftentimes, the busyness will hit us and you will just throw it away because you can't focus on it. What you do is with one thing a week, one question a week, you're maintaining forward motion. Each step is preventing you getting stuck.

And yes, some weeks of crisis is so intense you can't even do one thing, and that's life. But most weeks you can. And those small actions, I promise you, they compound. They will remind you that you're not just firefighting, you are building something.

Try one thing a week. An anchor three is a monthly review. Once a month, you're gonna step back. It doesn't need to be long, maybe half an hour, but you're gonna ask yourself three questions.

What long-term progress happened this month? Even accidentally, that's okay. Sometimes crises actually force change that align with your priorities. You need to notice that, you need to celebrate it, you need to build on it.

Also, what short-term decisions might create long-term problems? And this is your honesty check. You're gonna be making decisions under pressure, fair enough. But now you need to ask, will this come back to bite me?

And if yes, how am I gonna mitigate that? And the third question is, what's one adjustment I can make next month to better balance the urgent and important? Not a complete overhaul, one adjustment. Maybe you're gonna protect half an hour on a Friday morning for strategic thinking.

Maybe you involve your team more in crisis decisions so that they understand those long-term priorities. Or maybe you have to say no to one of the regular meetings that doesn't serve your non-negotiables. The point of this monthly review isn't to beat yourself up, it's to actually just to learn to adjust, maintain perspective. Now, I wanna acknowledge something.

This approach is hard. It's not complicated as such, but it is hard because short-term crises feel more urgent. Well, they are more urgent in some ways. Someone's waiting for an answer, a parent's upset, deadline's looming, we get it.

Long-term priorities don't create that same pressure. They never will. Nobody's gonna chase you about your culture building. No parents emailing about leadership development in your school.

And your line manager's probably not asking about your strategic progress this week. So it can become easy to deprioritize, right? Even natural. We're all wired to respond to immediate threats.

That's just evolution, it's kept us alive. But it really does make us rubbish at strategy, at actually building something that lasts, at leading rather than just managing, right? There's something else worth knowing that the Boston consulting group, they did some research on organizational change and they found that 75% of change fails. That's three quarters of change.

Not because the ideas were bad and not even because people didn't work hard, but because when things got difficult, the organization's reverted to short-term thinking. The pressure of the moment overwhelmed the plan for the future and that change just collapsed. This is the real danger. Not that you're gonna make one bad decision under pressure because we all do.

The danger is that your short-term thinking becomes your default. That you stop even trying to think strategically. The other reason this is hard? Well, it requires discipline, not motivation, discipline.

Doing the thing even when you don't feel like it. Asking that weekly question, even when you're exhausted. Doing the monthly review even when you're busy. Now, nobody's gonna be able to give you this discipline, not me, not course, not even a book.

You've got to decide it matters enough. And honestly, some people decide it doesn't. They accept that leadership is gonna be constant firefighting and that's their choice. It's not what I'd make, but it's valid.

But if you're still listening, I am guessing you want something different. I am guessing you wanna build something lasting even within that chaos. So here's what I want you to remember from this episode. Those crises, they're not gonna go away.

They're part of leadership, they're a part of school, they're a part of life. Waiting for calm before you think long-term is gonna be waiting forever, I'm telling you. But you don't also have to choose between handling the crises and thinking strategically. You can do both, not perfectly, but adequately.

Think about those three anchors, non-negotiables that guide decisions, weekly questions to really maintain your momentum and a monthly review that builds your learning. Start with one, the weekly question is probably the easiest, I'd say. Every Friday, maybe, ask yourself, what's one thing I can do next week that's gonna move us towards those long-term priorities? Do that for a month, then maybe add on the non-negotiables.

Get clear on what doesn't change and then add the monthly review, small steps. And they are small steps, but they compound. And they're gonna keep you grounded when everything's chaotic and they're gonna remind you that you're leading, not managing. And if you want a bit of support and clear in the clutter, of course, join me.

I'm launching my education leaders intensive in January. 10 weeks, working on exactly these kind of leadership fundamentals and making them systematic. Building your capacity to lead strategically, even in a crisis. You can find the links in the show notes, go check them out.

Whether you join or not is the principle that matters. Don't let short-term chaos steal your long-term thinking. You can hold both and you have to hold both. Otherwise, you're gonna wake up three years from now wondering, why am I still firefighting?

Education Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning. Thanks to the show editor, Pete McGill, production assistant, Skylar Rose-Sturman, and for the original music by Guillerme Silva. And thank you so, so much for tuning in today. If we don't speak before, I'll see you here next week.

If you're interested in the work of the International Center for Coaching in Education or the International curriculum Association, check out the links in the show notes.