My Office Had Four Wheels, and It Made Me a Better Leader
Uncorking leadership, learning, and the conversations that move schools forward.
At some point in my school leadership career, I acquired a rolling desk.
Not a standing desk. Not one of those fancy treadmill desks.
A literal desk on wheels.
Picture a small cart loaded with a laptop, student data, notebooks, pens, chargers, coffee, and approximately 47 other things I had decided were essential to educating children.
And me pushing it through the hallways in heels.
Eventually, people could hear me coming.
Click. Click. Click. Rumble. Rumble. Rumble.
The only problem was that apparently a rolling desk sounds remarkably similar to a rolling trash can.
So there were moments when staff heard wheels coming down the hallway and had to determine:
Coveted supply delivery?
Much needed trash can?
Favorite Chief Academic Officer?
The heels usually gave me away.
And thus, Heels & Wheels was born. Shout out to my Chief of Staff for coining the term.
Ridiculous? A little. Total vibe? Absolutely.
But that rolling desk became one of my most useful leadership tools because it kept me where the work was happening.
My Open-Door Policy Lost the Door
Leaders love to say, “I have an open-door policy.”
That’s great. But people still have to come through the door.
My rolling desk changed the equation. I went to them.
I could park outside a classroom and answer emails between observations. Roll into a coaching conversation. Look at student work with a teacher. Catch a principal for three minutes instead of scheduling another 30-minute meeting. Talk to a student in the hallway. Notice that a routine we’d spent 45 minutes discussing in a leadership meeting was absolutely not happening in real life.
That last one is particularly helpful.
Because schools have two realities.
There is the school we discuss in meetings.
And there is the school happening in the hallway at 10:17 on a Wednesday.
Strong leaders need access to both.
Presence Is Data
After The Coaching Cascade, I promised we’d talk about feedback next.
I lied. We’ll get there.
Before we talk about giving better feedback, we need to talk about being close enough to the work to know what feedback to give.
Presence is data.
Not the kind you can conditional-format, which pains me a little.
It’s the information you gather because you were there.
You notice the teacher whose new routine is finally clicking.
You hear a coach use language from your last one-on-one.
You see the student who is supposedly “always disengaged” absolutely light up during science.
You notice that the intervention schedule that looks beautiful on paper creates an impossible transition for six-year-olds.
You hear the same frustration three times from three different people and realize you may have a system problem, not three people complaining.
You catch the win nobody thought to put in the weekly report.
As a reminder: None of that replaces formal data.
It gives formal data context. Pair data with people.
Sometimes you need the spreadsheet. Sometimes you need the hallway. Usually, you need both.
There Is a Difference Between Being Present and Hovering
Now, a warning.
Rolling around your school all day does not automatically make you an effective leader.
You can absolutely become a micromanager on wheels.
Nobody needs that.
Presence isn’t:
“Gotcha. I saw that.”
It isn’t lurking outside classrooms like an instructional hall monitor.
And it definitely isn’t inserting yourself into every problem because you happened to roll past it.
Presence should create calm, clarity, connection, and better decisions.
People should not see you coming and suddenly start hiding things.
Although, again, with the trash-can confusion, some hiding may have occurred for unrelated reasons.
The goal is to become familiar enough that your presence isn’t an event. You’re simply part of the environment. That’s when you start seeing the school as it actually is.
Proximity Changes the Questions You Ask
There is another reason this matters.
The farther leaders move from classrooms, the easier it becomes to ask questions that make perfect sense from a conference room and absolutely no sense to the people doing the work.
Being close changes your questions.
Instead of:
“Why aren’t teachers implementing this?”
You might ask:
“What is making this hard to implement?”
Instead of:
“Why isn’t the coach following through?”
You might realize:
“We’ve given this coach four competing priorities.”
Instead of:
“Why aren’t students responding?”
You might notice:
“The intervention we designed isn’t actually connected to what they’re learning during Tier I.”
Proximity doesn’t lower expectations. It improves diagnosis. And better diagnosis leads to better leadership decisions.
Get Out of the Comfy Chair
In The Coaching Cascade, I wrote that every adult should be able to trace their work to student outcomes.
There’s another part of that responsibility for those of us who lead leaders.
We have to stay close enough to know whether the arrows are actually connecting.
You cannot coach coaches exclusively from their reports.
You cannot coach principals exclusively from their one-on-ones.
You cannot understand instruction exclusively from assessment results.
And you cannot lead a school system exclusively from the comfy chair with the snack basket.
At some point, you have to go see. Not because you don’t trust people. Because you are responsible for understanding the conditions in which you’re asking them to succeed.
Final Sip
I don’t think the rolling desk made me a better leader because it made me more visible.
It made me better because it made the work more visible to me.
That’s different. It brought me closer to students. Closer to teachers. Closer to coaches.
Closer to the gap between the system we designed and the system people were actually experiencing.
And sometimes it brought me dangerously close to being mistaken for a trashcan.
Leadership keeps you humble.
So here’s this week’s Edutipsy challenge:
Look at your calendar.
How much of your week is spent talking about the work versus being where the work happens?
Find 30 minutes. Leave your office. Don’t schedule a meeting. Don’t bring a giant observation rubric. Go see. Listen. Ask a question. Notice something.
And if you really want to commit…
Get yourself a rolling desk. Just wear distinctive shoes. Feel the wind in your hair as you fly down the hall.
Wheels move me. Heels give me away. Presence keeps me connected. I feel a tattoo coming on.