Founding Partner
The Donovan Group
Superintendents are being asked to lead in increasingly complex environments. They are expected not only to manage operations, but also to build community trust, navigate disagreement, bring people together around a shared vision, and serve as civic leaders.
That kind of leadership requires intentional and strategic communication.
It requires the capacity to listen, engage, explain complex issues clearly, and build relationships over time. When superintendents and district leaders are consumed by the day-to-day mechanics of communication, they have less time and capacity for the leadership work only they can do.
Listening Is a Leadership Strategy
District leaders navigating challenging budgets, enrollment changes, staffing concerns, or strategic planning need to understand how their communities are experiencing those issues. Intentional listening can help leaders identify concerns, understand different perspectives, anticipate questions, and ensure district priorities reflect community needs.
That listening can take many forms, including surveys, focus groups, community conversations, and other forms of engagement. The value is not simply in collecting information. When done thoughtfully, the process itself can demonstrate that district leaders are interested in hearing from their communities and willing to consider what they hear.
The information gathered can then become a foundation for more meaningful communication and stronger decision making.
Creating Space for Leadership
Strong communications support can also create something that is increasingly difficult for school leaders to find: time.
With help managing communications surrounding major initiatives, community engagement efforts, operational challenges, or significant district decisions, superintendents can spend more time doing the work that depends on their direct leadership.
It lets them be more strategically involved in meeting with community members, engaging staff, building relationships with other community leaders, explaining consequential decisions, and articulating a vision for the future.
Building Trust Before It Is Needed
This capacity becomes especially important when a district faces a crisis.
Trust cannot be created after a crisis begins. It is built through the interactions that take place long before the moment of greatest pressure.
Districts build trust when leaders communicate consistently, listen to concerns, acknowledge difficult realities, explain decisions, and treat people with honesty and respect. Those habits build a foundation leaders can draw on when circumstances become challenging.
Crisis communication partnerships with school districts and statewide education organizations across the country have reinforced this principle: the communication work done during ordinary times can have extraordinary value when circumstances change quickly.
Communications as Leadership Infrastructure
The role of communication in leadership is ultimately bigger than newsletters, social media, websites, or news releases.
Strategic communications provide infrastructure for listening, engaging, explaining, and building trust.
That infrastructure can look different from district to district. Some may have robust internal communications teams. Others have a single communications professional balancing many responsibilities. Some rely on outside partners for specialized expertise or additional capacity. Increasingly, districts are finding value in combining internal leadership with external support when they need additional capacity.
There is no single model that works for every district.
What matters is ensuring that communications capacity supports, not competes with, the superintendent’s role as a leader.
For superintendents, that can mean spending less time managing the mechanics of communication and more time being present in their communities, listening to people, building relationships, navigating differences, and creating a shared sense of purpose around public education.
In a challenging environment for public schools, creating that capacity is not simply a communications strategy. It is a leadership strategy.
Joe Donovan is the founding partner of the Donovan Group, an award-winning school district communications, marketing, and public relations firm focused exclusively on public education. The Donovan Group provides 24/7 crisis communications services to MASA members free of charge. Learn more at https://www.mnasa.org/crisis-communications-services.
