One of the most impossible questions a school administrator can ponder is surely: How can administrators lead strategic change from inside their school without exhausting their political capital, especially when they’ve spent years embedded in the structure of the school? The June 27, 2023, episode of the Impossible Questions Podcast, sponsored by the Enrollment Management Association (EMA), addressed this question with guest Victoria Muradi.
Victoria serves as director of strategic initiatives at the K-12 Durham Academy (DA) in North Carolina and a member of the EMA board of trustees. She previously worked in enrollment, admissions, and financial aid leadership positions at DA, Smith College, and the University of Virginia. At DA, Victoria spearheaded the move from an admissions mindset to a well-developed enrollment model. This effort included strategizing optimum school size and figuring out the costs to families that go beyond their tuition payments.
Change from Within
Victoria dove right into the conversation, saying, “Change is best made from within.” In her case, as for so many people, change occurred when COVID-19 derailed the previous plans. DA had been considering hiring outside consultants to direct a new strategic planning project. As the school moved back to pre-pandemic conditions and Victoria shifted her role from enrollment to strategy, leaders were able to view the project with fresh perspective. “Instead of looking out,” Victoria summarized, “could we try to figure out from within?”
The school leveraged its own intellectual and experiential capital and centered the process on community-based problem-solving. Based on the skillsets she developed managing enrollment issues, Victoria and the admin team spent the first year of the project listening to teachers and other stakeholders. They established teams of teachers to focus on a variety of problems with varying lengths of permanency at DA. One at a time, each team worked on a specific goal the school needed to accomplish.
The school based its long-term approach on the Stanford Model of design thinking, which focuses on empathy as the first step in any successful, human-centered design. Victoria wanted to know what it felt like to walk in the shoes of her school’s teachers. She zeroed in on their challenges and concerns, working to foster a growth mindset and to scale what worked and abandon what didn’t. Her efforts, she explained, wouldn’t have had the momentum they did if the school had simply followed directions from its board in accordance with some out-of-the-box template designed to produce a new strategic plan every five years or so.
Victoria called this painstaking work “the most fulfilling of my career.”
Expanding Individual and Institutional Capacity
How did Victoria know she wanted to move from a comfortable enrollment management position into strategy and institutional research? By the time she made that decision, in 2021, she’d already had the same role for 14 years. She had accomplished what she’d wanted to for the school. She’d spearheaded successful efforts to increase enrollment and started diversifying the student body to reflect all the people in Durham.
Victoria knew she wanted to stay at DA while broadening her skills and interests beyond the enrollment office. So, she collaborated with her head of school to identify how a new role could support the school, and how she could fill in existing gaps. She ended up “workshopping” her new job description with administrators, who’d already identified some key areas they wanted to build into the strategic plan: institutional research and parent relations.
Many of her resulting responsibilities include visualizing data and determining how to use it to support institutional research. She also engages in large-scale planning and representing the school in the community, particularly with prospective families.
The skills, contacts, and trust that Victoria built over her decade and a half in enrollment have helped her in this regard. Instead of having to rely on positional authority, she went into her new role as someone with transferable knowledge and a strong in-school support network that allowed her to establish credibility and become a capacity-builder from the beginning.
Connecting with the Community
Victoria keeps a running Google doc listing her goals and shares it regularly with the head of the school. They end up co-creating the goals, one of which is that she is visible to the school community, in board meetings, during parent conversations, and at student events. This way, her constituents can approach her with concerns and insights at any time, and she’s better able to share out the strategic vision.
One of the things the podcast hosts especially wanted to know was: how does she manage up in her relationship with her board? In her previous position, she presented a report once a year. Now, her work is constantly evolving, so she provides frequent updates and gets more feedback.
She’s now better able to present front-line staff concerns, as when she emphasized the teachers’ insistence that DA needed to provide more learning support to its students. She took the opportunity to explain what other schools were doing to lead in this regard, and to outline the short- and long-term opportunities. In other words, she’s learned the possibilities inherent in her job as a connector.
How to Become Change Leaders
Victoria’s advice to schools wanting to make genuine progress on strategic initiatives? “Invest in the process.” The best way to do that is to invest in people—the “brilliant, dedicated educators and staffers” already on the team. Give them the time, resources, and budget to be able to innovate and solve problems that go beyond their ordinary day-to-day duties.
She additionally shared advice for those who want to make the same type of career pivot she did. People coming from admissions/enrollment already have many of the skills needed for a strategy or research-focused position: deep relationships, community knowledge, and a problem-solver's mindset.
She also advises people to inform their head of school that they are seeking growth within an institution that fosters “human thriving and development” and to ask for help. Those who don’t have a seat at the table for board conversations can ask how they might obtain one. In addition, she advises people to ask what issues at their school they can help work on, and to be candid about their desire to grow as a professional and contribute to the mission of the school.
Listen to the entire episode at the EMA’s website or on Apple Podcasts to learn more about Victoria’s work, her data dashboards, and how her experiences echo and intersect with that of the podcast’s hosts.
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