13 Warning Signs Your School Leadership Team Is Dysfunctional

Your school leadership team meets every week. The agenda gets covered. Nobody argues. And yet, nothing in your school is actually improving.

If that sounds familiar, you are probably dealing with a dysfunctional leadership team, and the cost to your school, your staff, and your students is far higher than most principals realise.

Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which has now sold more than three million copies worldwide, identified the foundational patterns that make any team fail: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. These dysfunctions do not discriminate by sector. They show up in corporate boardrooms, nonprofit boards, and school leadership teams with equal consistency. But schools have a unique vulnerability that makes team dysfunction especially damaging. Unlike most organisations, a dysfunctional school leadership team does not just affect the bottom line. It directly affects children's education, teacher wellbeing, and community trust.

Research bears this out. RAND Corporation data shows principal turnover reached 18 percent nationally, with 35 percent of principals having been at their schools for less than two years. The Wing Institute reports that principal leadership is a key determinant of teacher retention, and that schools with effective principals have significantly lower teacher turnover. When the leadership team does not function well, the principal burns out faster, teachers leave sooner, and students pay the price.

I work with school leadership teams around the world as a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and the author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally). Whether it is a principal and their leadership team, a head of school and department heads, or a superintendent and their cabinet, the patterns of dysfunction are remarkably consistent. Here are the 13 warning signs to watch for, what causes each one, and what to do about it. If any of these hit close to home, reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org and let us talk about what is really going on with your team.

1. Your Leadership Meetings Feel Like Information Dumps

This is usually the first sign something is broken. The meeting follows a predictable pattern: each member gives an update on their area, the principal shares announcements, and everyone leaves. There is no debate, no strategic discussion, and no decisions that require genuine input from the team.

Patrick Lencioni distinguishes between three types of meetings: administrative, tactical, and strategic. Most school leadership teams collapse all three into one weekly meeting, which means the urgent always crowds out the important. You end up discussing bus schedules and playground rosters when you should be debating curriculum strategy or addressing a toxic culture forming in a particular year level.

The real cost shows up in what never gets discussed. Strategic questions about school direction, honest conversations about underperforming staff, and difficult decisions about resource allocation all get pushed to "next meeting" indefinitely. Meanwhile, teachers sense that the leadership team is not actually leading.

What to do about it: Separate your meeting types. Designate one meeting per month as strategic only, with no operational updates allowed. Use that meeting to tackle the one or two issues that will have the biggest impact on your school. For more on restructuring how your team meets, read 29 Simple Strategies on How to Improve Team Dynamics.

2. Decisions Get Made in Meetings but Undermined in Staffrooms

The leadership team agrees on a new approach to behaviour management, assessment, or parent communication. Everyone nods. The meeting ends. And within days, one or two members of the team are quietly telling their departments something different. "I know what we agreed, but just keep doing what you were doing." Or worse, they say nothing at all and simply do not implement the decision.

This is one of the clearest indicators that your team's agreement is manufactured rather than genuine. Lencioni calls it a lack of commitment, and it sits directly above fear of conflict in his model. When people do not feel safe to disagree in the meeting, they will disagree outside of it. In schools, this creates inconsistency that is immediately visible to staff and students.

What to do about it: At the end of every significant decision, go around the table and ask each person specifically what their concerns are. Not whether they agree, but what they are worried about. Address those concerns openly before closing the discussion. Then end with a clear statement: "This is what we have decided, and this is the message we are all taking back to our teams." If your team needs help building the skills to have these conversations, email me at jonno@consultclarity.org.

3. The Principal Makes All the Real Decisions

In many school leadership teams, the principal does not just lead the team. They are the team. Deputy principals, heads of school, and department heads attend meetings and contribute to discussion, but everyone knows the principal will make the final call on anything significant. The team functions as an advisory group rather than a decision-making body.

This pattern often develops because the principal genuinely cares about outcomes and does not trust the team to make decisions of sufficient quality. It can also develop because past team members made poor decisions, and the principal learned to keep control. But the result is always the same: the team stops trying. Members disengage because their input does not meaningfully influence outcomes. High-capacity leaders on the team become frustrated and start looking for roles elsewhere.

What to do about it: Start by identifying two or three decisions per term that you will genuinely delegate to the team. Not decisions you have already made, but real decisions where you will accept the team's conclusion even if it differs from your preference. This builds the muscle of genuine shared leadership and signals to the team that their contribution matters.

4. Nobody Talks About the Elephant in the Room

Every school has them. The teacher who has been underperforming for years. The department head who is brilliant at their subject but terrible with people. The curriculum initiative that everyone knows is failing but nobody will say it. The parent complaint process that is broken. The budget allocation that no longer makes sense.

In dysfunctional school leadership teams, these topics are known by everyone but discussed by no one. Team members talk about them in corridors, in car parks, and over coffee, but never in the meeting where something could actually be done. A CPP Global study found that 85 percent of employees experience some degree of workplace conflict, yet 76 percent default to avoidance as their primary conflict management style. In school leadership teams, avoidance is practically an art form.

What to do about it: As the principal, identify the one topic your team has been avoiding the longest. Bring it up directly. Not aggressively, but honestly: "I think there is something we have been skirting around, and I want to put it on the table." This single act of courage often unlocks conversations the team has been waiting months or years to have. If you want to go deeper on navigating those conversations, my book Step Up or Step Out is specifically about the difficult conversations leaders avoid. Over 10,000 copies have been sold globally, and the reason it resonates is that every leader has at least one conversation they know they need to have but keep putting off. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org if you want to explore what that conversation might look like for your team.

5. Good Teachers Keep Leaving and Nobody Asks Why

Research from the Wing Institute is unambiguous: principal leadership is a key determinant of teacher retention. Schools with effective principals and healthy leadership teams retain their best teachers at significantly higher rates. When good teachers leave, they rarely cite the real reason. They say "I wanted a change" or "It was closer to home." The actual reason is often that they stopped believing the leadership team was capable of honest conversation and meaningful improvement.

The RAND Corporation found that teacher turnover reached 10 percent nationally, rising to 12 to 14 percent in high-poverty and urban settings. What these statistics do not capture is the compounding effect: when one strong teacher leaves, it affects the morale of those who remain. A toxic cycle develops where dysfunction at the leadership level drives teacher departure, which creates more workload and frustration for remaining staff, which drives more departures.

What to do about it: Conduct genuine exit conversations with departing teachers. Ask them specifically about leadership team dynamics, meeting quality, whether they felt their honest input was welcome, and whether they saw the leadership team actively addressing known problems. If you start hearing patterns, you have your diagnosis. If you are losing good people and suspect leadership team dysfunction is a factor, email me at jonno@consultclarity.org and let us talk about what is really going on.

6. The Team Has Never Discussed How They Work Together

School leadership teams spend enormous amounts of time discussing curriculum, timetabling, budgets, student welfare, and operational logistics. They spend almost no time discussing how they function as a team. They have never talked about how they make decisions, how they handle disagreement, what their individual communication styles are, or where each person contributes their best work.

This is one of the most reliable indicators of a team that is operational rather than strategic. The team manages the school but does not lead it. As Lencioni puts it, the first step to becoming a cohesive team is building vulnerability-based trust, which requires people to share enough about themselves that the team can understand how each person operates.

What to do about it: Invest in a facilitated session where the team explores how they are wired. The Working Genius assessment takes ten minutes to complete and gives immediate, practical insight into why certain types of work energise some people and drain others. When a team maps their geniuses, competencies, and frustrations, misunderstandings dissolve and empathy grows. I am a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and I run these sessions for schools around the world. If you want to understand what this looks like in practice, read The Six Types of Working Genius Book Summary or 100 Proven Tips for Working Genius in the Workplace.

7. New Leaders on the Team Go Quiet Within Months

A new deputy principal or head of department joins the team full of energy and ideas. Within a few months, they have learned the unwritten rules: do not challenge the principal's thinking, do not raise concerns about other members' areas, do not suggest anything that might create more work for the team. They go quiet, and the team interprets this as them "settling in."

What actually happened is that the team's culture socialised them into compliance. This is a powerful indicator of deep-rooted dysfunction because it shows that the team's norms actively suppress the perspectives that would help it improve. New members are the canary in the coal mine. Their early impressions of the team are usually the most accurate diagnosis you will get.

What to do about it: After a new member has been on the team for three months, have a private conversation with them. Ask them what they expected versus what they found. Ask them what topics seem off-limits. Ask them what the team does well and what it avoids. And most importantly, act on what they tell you. If new members learn that their feedback is welcomed but ignored, they will stop offering it.

8. The Team Avoids Holding Each Other Accountable

The deputy principal consistently misses deadlines on the assessment schedule. A head of department runs meetings that their staff describe as demoralising. A senior leader fails to follow through on agreed actions from the leadership meeting. And nobody says anything.

In school leadership teams, accountability avoidance is often disguised as respect. "That is their area, not mine." "It is the principal's job to address that, not mine." But genuine teams hold each other accountable because they care about the collective outcome more than individual comfort. Lencioni places avoidance of accountability as the fourth dysfunction, and it can only exist when the first three, absence of trust, fear of conflict, and lack of commitment, are also present.

What to do about it: Establish a simple rhythm of public accountability. At the end of each leadership meeting, each member states their top three commitments for the coming period. At the start of the next meeting, each member reports on progress. This is not micromanagement. It is a team discipline that creates mutual accountability. For the full breakdown on building accountability as part of team health, read 183 Tips to Build Your Team: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Summary. If your team struggles with accountability and you want an external perspective, email me at jonno@consultclarity.org.

9. PD Days and Staff Meetings Are Dreaded Rather Than Valued

When the leadership team itself is not functioning well, the quality of what it delivers to the broader staff will reflect that dysfunction. Professional development days that feel disconnected from real classroom needs. Staff meetings that are one-directional information downloads. Strategic planning days that produce beautiful documents nobody refers to again.

The TeachThought research on failing schools lists the absence of staff collaboration mechanisms, disorganised staff meetings, and primary reliance on email over face-to-face communication as warning signs. These are not random operational failures. They are symptoms of a leadership team that has not done the hard work of aligning around what matters.

What to do about it: Before your next PD day, have the leadership team answer one question honestly: "If we were a teacher at this school, would we find this valuable?" If the answer is no, redesign it. The most impactful PD I have seen in schools is when the leadership team facilitates genuinely interactive sessions that address the specific challenges teachers are actually facing, not generic topics chosen because they looked good on the annual plan.

10. The Team Confuses Being Busy with Being Effective

School leadership teams work incredibly hard. The hours are long, the demands are relentless, and the emotional weight of leading a school is significant. But busyness is not the same as effectiveness. A dysfunctional team can be exhausted and still failing to move the school forward on the things that matter most.

This often manifests as the team spending 80 percent of its time on operational tasks, the 20 percent that could be delegated, and 20 percent of its time on strategic work, the 80 percent that only the leadership team can do. When you invert the ratio, the school stalls. Teachers sense it. They see leaders who are constantly busy but never available, always in meetings but never leading change.

What to do about it: Track where your leadership team's time actually goes for two weeks. Categorise every meeting and task as operational, tactical, or strategic. You will almost certainly find the balance is wrong. Then have an honest conversation about what the team should stop doing, delegate, or restructure to free time for the work that only the leadership team can do. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org if your team wants to have this conversation with external facilitation.

11. Individual Departments Operate as Silos

The mathematics department has no idea what the English department is doing with student data. The wellbeing team makes decisions that affect classroom teachers without consulting them. Year level coordinators plan independently of curriculum leaders. Each leader runs their area well in isolation, but there is no coherent whole.

In schools, silos form naturally because of the way schools are structured: departments, year levels, campuses, and specialisations all create natural boundaries. The leadership team's primary job is to bridge those boundaries and create alignment. When the team itself is dysfunctional, it cannot do this work, and the school fragments into a collection of independent fiefdoms.

What to do about it: Create at least one regular forum where cross-functional collaboration is required, not optional. This could be a fortnightly meeting where two department heads present a shared challenge and the team works on it together. The goal is to break the pattern where leaders only advocate for their own area and start building collective ownership of school-wide outcomes.

12. The Team Has Never Had a Genuine Offsite

Most school leadership teams have been on retreats or planning days. But very few have had a genuine offsite focused on team health. A real team offsite is not a strategic planning day with a nice lunch. It is a facilitated session where the team examines its own dynamics: how it builds trust, engages in conflict, makes commitments, holds each other accountable, and focuses on results.

Research from Dr. Robert Brinkerhoff suggests that only about 15 percent of leaders translate training into lasting habits. The reason so many school offsites fail to produce lasting change is not that the content is wrong. It is that the team's underlying dynamics are never addressed. You can plan the best strategy in the world, but if the team cannot have honest conversations, hold each other accountable, or commit genuinely to decisions, the strategy will die within weeks.

What to do about it: Book a facilitated team health session that focuses specifically on how the team works together, not what the school needs to do. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team framework gives you a diagnostic tool. Working Genius gives you a language for understanding how each person contributes. DISC helps you understand communication and conflict styles. I facilitate all of these for schools and find the combination of Working Genius plus Five Dysfunctions gives leadership teams the most complete picture. For a practical guide to making offsites count, read 13 Warning Signs Your Leadership Offsite Will Fail. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss what would work for your team.

13. You Are Reading This and Recognising Your Own Team

This is the most important sign of all. If you have read through these 13 warning signs and found yourself nodding along to more than a few, the dysfunction is real. And the most common response to recognising dysfunction is to do nothing, to hope it improves on its own, to wait for the right moment, to tell yourself it is not that bad.

It does not improve on its own. Leadership team dysfunction in schools is self-reinforcing. The longer it persists, the deeper it embeds. New members get socialised into dysfunctional norms. Good teachers leave. The principal absorbs more and more of the leadership burden. And students receive a less effective education than they deserve.

What to do about it: Stop treating team health as a nice-to-have and start treating it as a core leadership responsibility. You would not ignore a broken curriculum or a failing safeguarding process. Do not ignore a broken leadership team.

What to Do Next

If you recognised your team in several of these warning signs, here is where I would start.

Step one: Be honest with yourself about which signs apply to your team. Rate each one on a scale of one to ten. The signs that make you most uncomfortable are probably the ones that need the most attention.

Step two: Pick the single sign that is causing the most damage right now. Not all thirteen. One. Address it directly with your team. Name what you are seeing and invite the team to discuss it openly.

Step three: Consider bringing in an external facilitator for a team session. Not because you cannot lead your own team, but because you are part of the system. A principal cannot both facilitate and participate in a conversation about team dynamics they are embedded in. An outside perspective changes the dynamic entirely.

I work with school leadership teams, corporate leadership groups, and boards to facilitate exactly these kinds of conversations. Whether you need a Working Genius session to understand how your team is wired, a team health diagnostic using the Five Dysfunctions framework, or a facilitated offsite to address the elephants in the room, I can help.

I am the author of Step Up or Step Out, which has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and I host The Leadership Conversations Podcast with more than 230 episodes and listeners in over 150 countries. My Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference achieved a 93.75 percent satisfaction rating. I have worked with schools including Heathdale Christian College, Kingswood College, and school leadership teams across Australia, the UK, the US, Singapore, Canada, India, and beyond.

If your school leadership team is stuck and you want to do something about it, email me at jonno@consultclarity.org. The conversation you need to have with your team is usually the one everyone has been avoiding the longest.

FAQ

What causes school leadership team dysfunction?

The root causes mirror what Lencioni identifies in any team: a lack of vulnerability-based trust, fear of conflict, lack of genuine commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to collective results. In schools, these are compounded by the unique pressures of the education sector: rapid principal turnover (18 percent nationally according to RAND data), high emotional demands, chronic time pressure, and a culture that often equates politeness with professionalism. Many principals also report that conflict management was not part of their leadership training.

How do you fix a dysfunctional school leadership team?

Start with trust. Lencioni's personal histories exercise, where team members share formative experiences from their background, is a simple and effective starting point. Then create structures for healthy debate: separate meeting types, ask for concerns explicitly, reward pushback, and ensure decisions are genuinely committed to rather than passively accepted. Tools like Working Genius and DISC help teams understand their differences without personalising conflict. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, I help school leadership teams build these skills practically. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your team.

How much does school leadership dysfunction cost?

The costs are significant though harder to quantify than in the corporate world. Teacher turnover costs school districts between $10,000 and $30,000 per departing teacher when you account for recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity. RAND data shows teacher turnover rose to 10 percent nationally, and principal turnover reached 18 percent. Schools with dysfunctional leadership teams experience higher rates of both. Beyond financial costs, the impact on student outcomes, staff morale, and community trust is substantial.

Can a single PD day fix leadership team dysfunction?

Usually not. Research from Dr. Robert Brinkerhoff suggests that only about 15 percent of leaders translate training into lasting habits. A single session can create awareness and build initial momentum, but lasting change requires ongoing rhythms: regular team health check-ins, structured debate in meetings, and consistent follow-through. Treating team health as a one-off event rather than an ongoing discipline is one reason so many school leadership teams revert to old patterns. If your team has tried a workshop and nothing stuck, email jonno@consultclarity.org and let us talk about a different approach.

What is the difference between a dysfunctional team and a team going through a rough patch?

Every team has difficult seasons. The difference is whether the team has the capacity to talk about what is happening. A team going through a rough patch can name the challenges, debate possible responses, and commit to a path forward. A dysfunctional team cannot have those conversations. The issues persist month after month, the same problems recur, and the team's default response is avoidance rather than engagement. If the rough patch has lasted more than a term and nobody has addressed it directly, it is probably dysfunction.

What tools help school leadership teams improve?

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team assessment measures where your team sits on trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. The Working Genius assessment reveals where your team has gaps in the actual work cycle and why certain team members may be frustrated or disengaged. DISC workshops help teams understand communication and conflict styles. StrengthsFinder sessions help individuals understand their natural talents. I facilitate all of these and find the combination of Working Genius plus Five Dysfunctions gives school leadership teams the most complete picture. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss which approach fits your team.

NEXT READ: 10 Warning Signs Your Executive Team Is Dysfunctional (And What to Do About It)

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who works with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75 percent satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements.

To book Jonno for your next school leadership team offsite, workshop, or keynote, email jonno@consultclarity.org.