Why what worked before can quietly sabotage what's next.
My first year as an assistant principal was also my new principal's first year leading a campus. We had both been assigned to a school of twelve hundred students. She came from a school of roughly three hundred, the kind of size where a small, family-style culture works naturally, almost by default, where everyone genuinely does know everyone else's name.
I remember our first few staff meetings together, watching her lead with real warmth, real personal investment in individual staff members, the kind of leadership that would have thrived beautifully on her old campus. On ours, four times the size, that same approach began producing effects she clearly did not anticipate and struggled, visibly, to understand.
She kept trying to bring that same small-school approach to our much larger campus, and it backfired nearly every time. It was not that she did not care about our students and staff. She clearly did, deeply. It was that the dynamics of a school four times the size required a fundamentally different structure, and she was unwilling, or perhaps simply unable in that first year, to adjust her instincts accordingly.
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I want to describe one specific incident that captured the pattern clearly. She decided, early that year, to personally handle a particular category of parent concerns herself, the way she always had at her previous campus, believing that personal attention from the principal was what parents needed most. On a campus of three hundred, that had likely been true, and manageable. On our campus of twelve hundred, the volume alone made it unsustainable within weeks.
I watched her calendar fill entirely with those meetings, watched other priorities slide because there was no time left for them, watched her arrive earlier and stay later trying to keep pace with a volume her previous system had simply never needed to handle. She did not adjust the system. She just worked harder inside a structure that could not scale, the way many capable leaders do when the problem in front of them does not resemble any problem their previous instincts were built to solve.
Every small-school move she attempted on our mega campus created more chaos, not less. Our administrative team spent that entire year exhausted, trying to fit what had once worked beautifully into a shape it was never built for. I remember the specific fatigue of that year, not just my own hours, but the diffuse, campus-wide strain of an entire team trying to operate inside a mismatch between structure and scale that no one above us seemed fully willing to name out loud.
I do not say this to criticize her without compassion. I understand the instinct completely, because I have caught myself doing the same thing in different seasons of my own leadership since. What worked at one scale becomes a comfortable, trusted playbook, and comfortable, trusted playbooks are genuinely hard to set down, even when the evidence keeps saying they no longer fit. There is a particular kind of denial that protects a leader's confidence in exactly the tools that once made her successful, and that denial does not lift easily, even under mounting evidence.
Leadership instincts that built real success at one scale can quietly sabotage the next one, precisely because they worked so well before that no one thinks to question them.
The danger is rarely a leader clinging to something that never worked. It is a leader clinging to something that worked beautifully once, in a different context, and mistaking its past success for permanent relevance, applying it with increasing effort as the results get worse, rather than stepping back to question whether the tool itself still fits the size of the problem in front of her.
I watched her eventually adjust, gradually, over the following two years, building delegation structures she had never needed before, learning to trust systems over personal presence in ways that did not come naturally to her instincts. It was not a fast transition. I think it required her to grieve, in some sense, the version of leadership that had always worked for her before, the one where her personal warmth alone had been sufficient to hold an entire school together.
If you find yourself applying the same solution to a problem that keeps producing worse results each time, the question worth asking is not whether the solution is good. It probably is, somewhere. The real question is whether the room you are standing in now is actually the room that solution was built for, or whether you are simply working harder inside a mismatch that no amount of additional effort will actually resolve.
I did not fully appreciate, at the time, how much courage that transition actually required of her. It is one thing to adopt a new strategy when your old one was clearly failing. It is a much harder, quieter kind of courage to set down a strategy that built your entire reputation, that people still praised you for, simply because the room around it had changed size. Watching her do that slowly, imperfectly, over those two years taught me more about adaptive leadership than any single success I witnessed from her ever did.
I have thought about her often in my own career since, particularly in moments where something that once worked for me has started producing diminishing returns. I try to ask myself the question I watched her eventually learn to ask herself, whether I am solving the problem in front of me or simply repeating the solution that solved a different problem, in a different room, at a different scale, some years ago. It is a harder question to sit with honestly than it sounds, especially when the old solution still carries the emotional weight of everything it once built for you.
By the time she and I both moved on from that campus, years later, she had built something genuinely different from what she arrived with, a leadership approach suited to the size of the room she was actually standing in, not the one she had trained in originally. I do not know if she ever fully articulated that shift to herself the way I have articulated it here. I only know I watched it happen, slowly, imperfectly, and it changed how I think about my own leadership instincts every time I catch myself reaching for a familiar tool without first checking whether the room in front of me still calls for it.
Scale changes almost everything about leadership except the character underneath it. What worked in the small room and what works in the large one will rarely be identical, and the leaders who last are the ones willing to keep asking which is which, long after their instincts have already answered with confidence.
-- Dr. Rhonda
The Next Step: If a leadership approach that once worked beautifully for you has started producing more strain than results, take The Close the Leadership Gap Diagnostic™. It is built to help you see whether the problem is your effort or the scale you are now trying to lead at.
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