The 20% of Leadership Work That Actually Changes a School

Every principal I know works hard. The problem is that hard work alone does not guarantee you are spending time on the work that matters most. You can run all day, solve a dozen problems, answer the urgent emails, handle the parent concern, cover the duty gap, and still leave the building wondering why you never got to the leadership work you meant to do.

The difficult part of school leadership is that almost everything feels important while it is happening. Schools are busy, emotional, people-centered places. Problems rarely arrive one at a time. But over the years, both as a principal and now through coaching school leaders, I have become more convinced that one of the biggest differences between effective principals and overwhelmed principals is how they spend their time.

Not everything deserves principal-level attention.

Some leadership actions create a much greater impact on a campus than others, and principals who learn to protect time for that work tend to lead healthier schools with stronger instruction, better systems, and more sustainable leadership practices.

The Pareto Principle and Why It Matters for Principals

The idea often referred to as the 80/20 Rule or the Pareto Principle dates back to the work of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in the late 1800s. Pareto observed that a relatively small number of causes often produced a large percentage of outcomes. Over time, that concept has been applied to business, productivity, leadership, and organizational effectiveness.

Brian Tracy discusses this principle in Eat That Frog, explaining that roughly 20% of our activities tend to account for 80% of our results. He also points out that people often procrastinate on the small number of tasks that would make the biggest difference while staying busy with lower-value work.

That observation applies directly to school leadership.

When I think about the principals who create meaningful growth on their campuses, they are rarely the ones trying to personally handle every task in the building. Instead, they are deeply focused on a smaller set of leadership priorities that consistently move teaching and learning forward.

They spend time in classrooms. They strengthen PLCs. They coach teachers and leadership teams. They pay attention to systems that either support or frustrate staff. They protect the culture of the building. They hire carefully and address personnel concerns directly when needed. They stay connected to instruction instead of getting buried exclusively in management tasks.

Those responsibilities may not always feel as urgent as the hundred smaller interruptions that happen throughout the day, but they are far more important to the long-term success of a school.

Busy Is Not the Same Thing as Effective

One of the easiest traps for principals to fall into is mistaking activity for impact.

A principal can be moving nonstop all day and still spend very little time on the work that actually improves outcomes for students and teachers. I have seen leaders become so consumed with managing daily operations that they slowly drift away from instructional leadership altogether. Without realizing it, they become managers of constant urgency rather than leaders of meaningful improvement.

Part of the challenge is that lower-level tasks often provide quicker closure. It feels satisfying to answer emails, clear small issues off your list, or solve a problem immediately sitting in front of you. Brian Tracy writes about this tendency in Eat That Frog, warning that people often default to easier, low-value work while avoiding the harder tasks that create the greatest results.

Principals experience this constantly.

The work that matters most is often the work that requires the greatest mental and emotional energy. Coaching a struggling teacher, analyzing instructional trends, planning meaningful professional learning, or redesigning a broken system takes far more focus than responding to another email. Those tasks are also easier to postpone because they do not usually create immediate pressure in the same way operational problems do.

Unfortunately, schools rarely improve through reactive leadership. At some point, principals have to intentionally decide which work deserves the best part of their time and attention.

The Work Only the Principal Can Do

After my first year as an elementary principal, my administrative assistant, Terri Butler, told me about a training she thought we needed to attend together. Terri was wise, experienced, and understood how schools really function. She'd been the right hand to more than one effective principal when I was lucky enough to get hired as the principal of her school. When she made a recommendation, I listened.

That training was The Breakthrough Coach, led by its founder and CEO, Malachi Pancoast. It became one of the most impactful trainings I ever attended as a principal.

The line that stayed with me was simple: “As the principal, you should only be doing work only you can do.”

That hit me hard because so much of my day was filled with things I could do, but probably should not have been doing. Principals can cover duty, answer every parent email, solve scheduling issues, and jump in every time someone has a question. But just because the principal can do something does not mean the principal should be the one doing it.

That is where many leaders get stuck. They are dependable, responsive, and willing to help, but over time they become the bottleneck.

Delegation is not dumping work on others. It is building capacity, creating clear systems, and allowing the school to function without every decision running through the principal’s office.

That frees the principal to focus on the work that truly requires their leadership: instructional direction, teacher development, culture, strategic decisions, and the long-term health of the school.

Some of the Most Important Work Is Also the Hardest

One thing I have noticed over the years is that the highest-value leadership work is often emotionally demanding. It requires sustained attention, difficult conversations, thoughtful decision-making, and long-term consistency.

It is much easier to stay busy with manageable tasks than it is to address a struggling team dynamic, give honest feedback to a teacher, or lead meaningful instructional change across a campus.

The irony is that principals usually already know which work matters most. If you ask a school leader what actions would create the greatest impact on their campus, they can usually answer very quickly. The challenge is not identifying the work. The challenge is protecting time for it in an environment filled with competing demands.

That is why calendar management matters so much in school leadership.

If instructional leadership is truly a priority, then walkthroughs, coaching conversations, PLC support, and time in classrooms cannot simply happen “if there is time.” They have to be intentionally protected because something else will always try to take that time away.

Why This Matters in My Coaching Work

This idea sits underneath much of the coaching and leadership development work I do with principals. Many school leaders are overwhelmed not because they lack skill or commitment, but because they are spending too much time on low-impact work and not enough time on the leadership actions that actually move a campus forward.

Part of becoming a more effective principal is learning how to consistently ask:

• What work creates the greatest impact on this campus?

• What responsibilities truly require my leadership?

• What can be delegated, streamlined, or handled differently?

• What keeps pulling me away from instructional leadership?

This is why summer planning matters so much.

One of the most important pieces of work I do with leadership teams each summer is helping them build a strategic leadership action plan for the year ahead. This is not the campus improvement plan. It is the leadership team’s working plan for how they will actually lead the work required to reach the larger campus goals.

The plan names the most important leadership actions, who is responsible for each piece, what the timeline looks like, and how the team will measure progress along the way.

That kind of planning protects time before the year starts pulling everyone in different directions. It gives the principal and leadership team a practical way to stay anchored to the work that matters most, even when the daily demands of school leadership get loud.

That is where the 80/20 principle becomes more than a productivity idea. For school leaders, it becomes a way to lead with greater discipline, focus, and follow-through.

Because the goal is not to just get more done.

The goal is to make sure the right work is getting done, and that the right people are leading it.

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If your leadership team is looking for support in creating a focused strategic leadership action plan for next school year, summer is the ideal time to do that work before the pace of the school year takes over again.

I partner with campus leadership teams each summer to help principals identify the highest-impact leadership priorities, clarify roles and responsibilities, build realistic timelines, and create systems for monitoring progress throughout the year.

My summer planning days are beginning to fill quickly. If you would like to talk about leadership team coaching or strategic planning support for your campus, feel free to reach out to me directly at jodie@principallead.com.