I worked at Parknasilla Hotel in Kerry every summer from 13 to 18. At 13, my job was glasses and trays: polish these until there was no thumbprint, carry that, and learn which table to clear first so you were never in a waiter's way. Nobody used the word "empowered." They told me which responsibilities were mine, which glasses fitted on a tray, and exactly what was expected of me.
By my fifth summer, I was assistant food and beverage manager, and what was mine was the whole floor: which waiter went to which section, who could be trusted with the big table on a wedding night, and who needed watching once the bar opened. At both ages, somebody told me exactly where my responsibility stopped. That precision, more than the promotion, taught me something about leadership.
One morning in the Pygmalion, the hotel dining room, one customer (a great tipper) told me over coffee that the difference between chaos and leadership is whether people know what happens next. I have thought about it in every school since.
Most schools fail that test with the kindest word in the language. We use "empowered" to mean anything from "please carry out this decision well” to “please decide what we should do,” and we rarely say which.
Where It Goes Wrong
Misalignment often begins when people leave a meeting with different understandings of what they have agreed to do. A team spends six weeks redesigning how the school reports to parents and returns with something better than the original. The Head of School had only wanted the wording tidied up and the same three grades retained. Both sides believed they were working toward the same goal, but the Head heard "execute" and the team heard "decide." Only at the final meeting does either side discover the misunderstanding. Six weeks are gone, along with much of the goodwill.
Then we blame the people. The team overstepped, or failed to step up, and trust begins to erode on both sides. I have done it. Most Heads have.
Four Jobs, Not One
Richard Hackman, who spent his career studying teams at Harvard, offered a useful way to break down the work being delegated. He identified four jobs that can be handed over one at a time:
Hand over only the first and you have what he called a manager-led team. Add the second and the team is self-managing. Add the third and it is self-designing. Hand over all four and it is self-governing.
The four are not a ladder that every team should climb. The skill is picking the right one for the task. In a school, it looks like this.
Doing the work. Parent–teacher conferences next month: The dates, the format and the ten-minute slots are set, and teachers run them well. Nobody is asked to redesign anything. Making that clear is a kindness: no one spends a weekend improving something that was never theirs to change.
Monitoring and managing it. A Grade 4 team teaching a unit on water: The unit and its outcomes are fixed, but the team watches its own assessment data and adjusts the pacing, regroups the children, and swaps a task that isn't landing, without asking permission. Leadership looks at the results at the end, not the lesson plans each week.
Designing it. The parent report: Leadership keeps the purpose, that parents should understand where their child is and what comes next, and hands over the design: the format, who writes which part, how often, and what the school stops doing to make time for it. This is the job the team in my example thought it had. The Head needs to clarify that before the six weeks begin, not after.
Setting the direction. A working group asked what homework in primary school is for, with the authority to decide that it is for reading and nothing else, and to change policy accordingly. Schools hand this job over rarely, and they should, because it is the one that is hardest to take back. When you do, say so in exactly those words.
Before the Work Begins
The repair takes 10 minutes, and it happens before anyone starts. I use three questions and write the answers on one page.
Which of the four jobs is this? Say it out loud. "Run this well, and check with me before the shape of it changes" is different from "This is yours, including deciding what it is for."
What can the team decide alone, what must it decide after consulting, and what stays with leadership? Draw three columns: Decide, Consult, and Hold. For the parent report, the format, comment bank, and timeline go under Decide. The grading scale goes under Consult because it affects the rest of the school. Anything involving cost, legal requirements, or safeguarding goes under Hold. The page takes about 10 minutes to create and can save six weeks of wasted work.
What happens if we disagree? Teams rarely ask this, but almost always need to know the answer. If the Head can overrule anything at the end, the team is in the first or second job, whatever anyone has called it. It’s better to establish that at the start.
Once those boundaries are clear, agree on when you will check in on progress. Then put a date on it, and keep it. Delegation without a check-in date is abandonment; however, a check-in every two days is not delegation at all.
In an International School
All of this is harder in an international school because the same sentence lands in different ears. "You're empowered to lead this" means one thing to a teacher trained in a system where you wait to be told, and another to a teacher from a system where you are expected to run with it and report back. Neither is wrong. They have learned different defaults, and each will read the other's behavior as a fault: one as passivity, the other as presumption.
Even "consult" splits. To some colleagues it means we will hear your view and then decide. To others it means you will hear ours and then decide. A staff from twelve countries can agree to "consult" and mean opposite things.
So I stop relying on the word and start relying on the page. At induction, I ask new staff a simple question: In your last school, who decided how parent reports were written? The answers range from "the Head, and we were given the template" to "each of us, and nobody checked." That one question reveals which assumptions new staff bring with them. The Decide, Consult, Hold page then becomes part of how every project starts, making expectations explicit rather than leaving them to cultural assumptions. Over time, the page becomes part of the school's own culture of authority.
Decentralized and Still Accountable
Call it decentralized leadership. It does not mean everyone owning everything, which is chaos with a nicer name. It means the four jobs are handed out deliberately and written where people can see them. Direction stays near the center, with someone who has to answer for it. Monitoring and design go to the people closest to the work. Doing the work belongs to everyone.
The worry is always accountability: if I hand it over, who answers for it? The answer is the person or team who holds it, provided three things were clear at the start. There is a named owner. There is a review date. And there is an agreed sign of success set before the work begins, not discovered afterwards. Accountability then means answering for the result and the reasoning, not for obedience to a method the leader would have chosen. A team that met the purpose by a route I would not have taken has done its job.
The Head's role changes with it. The Head stops being the bottleneck the building queues behind and becomes the person who draws the map and redraws it as the school changes, moving a decision from Hold to Consult when a team has earned greater authority, and back again when it hasn't.
A team burned by an undefined "empowered" does not conclude that it misjudged the scope. It concludes that sticking its neck out is a mistake, and stops. That is the case for dropping the word and assigning authority deliberately and explicitly. Empowerment is a feeling you give someone. A map is something you can hand a new teacher on their first morning so they know what happens next.
David William Sheehan is the founding Head of School at PSG World School in Coimbatore, India. A writer and educator from Kerry, Ireland, he has led and built schools across Southeast Asia, and writes on institutions, leadership, and the systems that shape how people learn.
