From ME to WE:
From isolation to interdependence: how superintendents can lead with strength by sharing the weight.
The Weight We Carry
By Friday, I need somewhere to set down everything I have carried all week. Usually, I find it outside. I walk, I sit, I listen, and my mind and body begin to settle. That weekly ritual began as a way to recover. Over time, it has become the place where I do some of my clearest thinking about the hardest part of this job: how lonely it can be.
Every superintendent knows the shape of that loneliness. Some decisions rest with you alone. You hold personnel matters, legal questions, and budget realities you cannot discuss with the people you work beside. You answer to a board, carry responsibility for every school, and remain visible to an entire community. Staff, families, and trustees each need something from you, and few of them can see the whole picture you are trying to hold. The work depends on relationships, yet the role can set you apart from the very people you lead.
Early in my tenure as superintendent, I began to recognize the isolation that can come with the role. I am still relatively new to the superintendency, and with more than 30 years in public education, I can see that some of this loneliness is inherent in the position. But much of it is also rooted in what we have been taught leadership should look like, particularly the expectation that leaders must carry the weight of their responsibilities alone.
The Myth of the Heroic Leader
Our profession has long organized leadership around the individual: my school, my team, my results, my leadership. We search for the visionary principal and the transformational superintendent. We celebrate the leader who turns an organization around on the strength of personal vision and stamina. Then we act surprised when those same leaders feel isolated, exhausted, or burned out trying to solve problems far too complex for any one person. Burnout may not be only about how much we ask leaders to carry. It may also be about how often we ask them to carry it alone.
My doctoral research examined how White women superintendents navigate race, gender, privilege, power, and leadership as they work to transform students' educational experiences. Studying the stories of 10 women superintendents and reflecting on my own pushed me to question the model of the singular, heroic leader. I have come to believe that sustaining this work is less about carrying less and more about carrying it differently: building relationships and structures that let knowledge, effort, and leadership move among people rather than collect in one person.
I call that shift moving from ME to WE. It does not erase the responsibility that belongs to the superintendent. It changes how I hold it.
Responsibility Is Not the Same as Isolation
The most useful distinction I have learned is between responsibility and isolation. They often feel like the same thing. They are not.
Responsibility is real. When a decision is mine, I make it, and I own the outcome. Isolation is what happens when I also assume I must have every answer, gather every piece of information, and carry every worry myself. That second burden is optional, and it rarely produces better decisions.
One of the ways I have come to understand this distinction is through my weekend ritual of spending time in nature. After a week filled with decisions, conversations, and the constant demands of leading a school district, being outdoors gives me the space to slow down, reflect, and reconnect with myself. Walking among the trees reminds me that strength does not have to mean standing alone. I often find myself thinking about the redwoods. They rise above the forest and appear to stand independently, yet beneath the surface, their roots intertwine with those of the trees around them. Their strength comes not from isolation, but from connection. What looks like independence is actually sustained by an entire community.
That image has stayed with me as I navigate the superintendency. I may sit at the top of an organizational chart, but my ability to lead well depends on teachers, principals, staff, students, families, and trustees who know what I do not know and see what I cannot see. Like the redwoods, our strength as leaders comes from the relationships and connections that sustain us.
In practice, this has changed how I approach decisions. I am learning to separate what I must decide myself from what I can think through with others before making a decision. Even when confidentiality limits what I can share, I can almost always seek perspective on the underlying question. Before moving forward, I ask myself three things: Who is closest to the experience? Whose perspective is missing? What will this decision make possible for students?
Those questions pull me out of my own head and back into relationship with others. And each weekend, when I return to nature, I am reminded that leadership, like a forest, is strongest when we recognize how deeply connected we are to one another.
The final call may still be mine. The thinking, and the weight of leadership, do not have to be.
Letting Leadership Move
Leading from WE also means I do not always need to lead from the front. Migrating birds offer a useful image. In a flock, no single bird stays at the point. Leading takes the most energy, so the birds rotate, and each benefits from the lift the others create. Sometimes, my role is to set direction or make the difficult call. Other times, it is to recognize that someone else holds the knowledge the moment requires and make room for that person to lead.
This became concrete when we launched leadership learning walks and school data conversations across our district. Principals, assistant principals, and district leaders visit classrooms together, guided by curiosity rather than evaluation. We go to understand what it feels like to be a student and to teach, particularly as teachers implement a new literacy curriculum. On our first walk of the year, we saw students discuss rich texts, build vocabulary, and connect ideas. We also saw teachers managing real complexity as they learned new materials and decided when to follow the curriculum closely and when to adapt.
Afterward, teachers and leaders studied literacy data from the start of the year together. The most useful insight did not live in a spreadsheet. It emerged as teachers compared what they saw, asked questions, and identified what individual students needed next. They reached shared conclusions and took shared responsibility for what came next.
My role was not to deliver the fastest answer. It was to create the conditions for the people closest to students to share what they knew, connect that knowledge across schools, and turn it into action. I still held responsibility for the quality of the work and for following through. But I was not holding it alone, and I felt the difference. Like a flock of birds moving together, leadership requires knowing when to take the lead and hold the front, and when to make space for others to step forward. The strength of the flock comes from its ability to shift, adapt, and trust one another along the way. I am learning that the same is true of leadership. I do not always need to be at the front for us to move forward together.
Building a WE Beyond the District
Some of what a superintendent carries cannot be shared inside the organization at all. That is why every superintendent needs a WE beyond the district: people who understand the role and can hold a confidence without a stake in the outcome.
For me, that circle includes fellow superintendents, specifically women I can call when a decision keeps me up at night; mentors who walked this path before me; and colleagues from my doctoral program who help me see leadership with fresh eyes. These relationships are not a luxury. They are part of how I stay steady and effective for students. I have also learned to protect the practices that restore me, including those weekend walks, rather than treating them as the first thing to give up when a week gets hard.
WE Must Also Be Just
There is also a danger in assuming that working together automatically leads to more equitable outcomes. Connection matters, but connection alone does not create justice. Even in a thriving forest, not every tree has equal access to sunlight, water, or nutrients. The same is true in our schools and organizations. A collaborative team can still leave voices unheard. A unified board can still make decisions that reinforce inequities. And even leaders with the best intentions can unintentionally perpetuate the very systems they are working to change.
This is especially important for those of us who are newer to the superintendency and for leaders who may not see many people who share their identities or experiences in positions of power. Representation matters. I want to see more women educators, particularly women who have historically been excluded from leadership, in positions where they can shape decisions and influence change. But I am also learning that reaching the top of a hierarchy does not necessarily change how that hierarchy operates. Breaking through the ceiling cannot be the final goal. We also have a responsibility to reach back, open doors, share what we have learned, and create pathways so that those who follow us do not have to navigate leadership alone.
This is why the WE I believe in must be more than a commitment to collaboration. It must also be a commitment to examining power, challenging inequities, and making sure that belonging is something people experience, not simply something we talk about. We have to keep asking ourselves: Who is at the table? Whose voices are missing? Whose knowledge and experiences shape our decisions? Who is carrying the work that often goes unseen? And most importantly, how are our decisions improving the experiences and outcomes of students, especially those who have been least well served by our systems?
Shared leadership is not simply about distributing responsibility or making the work feel less lonely. It is about using our collective knowledge, relationships, and influence to create something better than any one of us could create alone. The true measure of educational leadership is not how connected we feel as adults, but whether those connections help every child feel a sense of belonging, experience success, and have the opportunity to thrive.
Distinct, Not Separate
The superintendency will always include moments that are mine alone to carry. I no longer expect that to change. What has changed is how I understand everything else. I no longer mistake isolation for strength, and I no longer see seeking perspective as weakness. Responsibility held with others is not responsibility diminished.
On my weekend walks, I see this everywhere: redwoods sustained by what lies beneath them, rivers that gather strength from what flows into them, and birds that take turns at the front so the whole flock keeps moving. Nature does not depend on any one part standing alone. It thrives through relationship.
That is what WE means to me. We can be distinct without being separate. Our students do not experience our individual intentions. They experience what we build together, and none of us has to build it alone.
