Voiceless Collegiality: When Getting Along Gets in the Way of School Leadership

By: Andy Szeto

A team leader asks a simple question during a leadership team meeting: Who will take the lead on this initiative?

“I can help.”

“I can assist.”

“If you need me, I can see if I can help.”

In organizational teams, you hear variations of these responses all the time. They sound supportive, signal willingness, and feel collegial. But listen closely: no one actually answers the question.

What follows is not a lack of response, but a form of silence. The language shifts away from ownership and toward assistance, from leading to helping, from accountability to availability. In that moment, the team is not simply avoiding responsibility. It is avoiding the risk that comes with stepping forward, taking a position, and potentially disrupting the balance of the group. No one wants to overstep or appear less collegial than the rest of the leadership team.

As a result, leadership goes unnamed. On the surface, the team appears aligned and supportive, yet initiatives stall, decisions slow, and accountability becomes unclear. Over time, this pattern weakens momentum and diffuses ownership across the school. When everyone is helping, no one is leading.

This is voiceless collegiality.

London Business School professor Randall S. Peterson describes voiceless collegiality as a condition where teams maintain harmony by avoiding disagreement and withholding dissent. While Peterson wrote about this dynamic in organizational settings, the concept applies powerfully to school leadership teams.

The issue is not collegiality itself. Strong school leadership teams require trust, respect, and positive working relationships. The problem emerges when collegiality becomes narrowly defined as agreement, politeness, and the avoidance of tension.

What begins as a desire to be supportive can slowly evolve into organizational silence. In these environments, school leaders choose not to speak, not because they lack ideas, but because candor carries relational and professional risk.

In many schools, leaders eventually learn an unspoken lesson: the more experienced you become, the more carefully you choose when to speak honestly. The issue is not that people lack opinions. It is that they understand the cost of expressing them. Over time, silence becomes less about passivity and more about self-preservation. In some leadership cultures, truth becomes expensive.

In school leadership teams, this dynamic is easy to miss because everything appears functional. Meetings run smoothly. Conversations feel positive. Data is reviewed. But the real signal is not what is said. It is what remains unsaid, and more importantly, why it remains unsaid.

These patterns of silence often emerge in predictable ways across leadership teams. They shape how schools discuss instruction, distribute ownership, and sustain accountability. Naming them is the first step toward changing them.

Type 1: Structural Silence in the Name of Collegiality

Definition: Structural silence occurs when team processes are designed to preserve order and efficiency, prioritizing smooth meetings over substantive engagement. Collegiality is expressed as attentiveness and compliance rather than contribution.

Example: Many leadership meetings are built around announcements and updates. Information is shared, but not interrogated, and questioning or pushback is neither expected nor encouraged. In these spaces, being collegial often means listening attentively rather than challenging ideas.

This is where the familiar phrase, “this meeting could’ve been an email,” becomes more than a complaint. It is a diagnosis. The meeting was never designed to generate thinking.

As a result, important questions go unasked. Leaders do not pause to clarify priorities, examine implications, or identify gaps between decisions and implementation. Without substantive dialogue, expectations become interpreted differently across departments and classrooms.

Over time, this creates weakened instructional coherence across the school. Staff members leave meetings informed, but not necessarily aligned. Inconsistency emerges not from resistance, but from the absence of meaningful collective sensemaking.

Type 2: Instructional Silence to Preserve Collegiality

Definition: Instructional silence occurs when school leadership teams avoid direct examination of teaching and learning practices in order to preserve relationships. Collegiality is maintained by keeping conversations about instruction indirect, even when stronger instructional clarity or critique is needed.

Example: School leadership teams often review student work, walkthrough data, or assessment results and identify patterns in student performance. Conversations frequently center on what students are struggling with and what additional supports might help them succeed.

What remains unspoken, however, is whether instructional practice itself may be contributing to those outcomes. Raising concerns about weak task design, inconsistent rigor, low cognitive demand, unclear expectations, or ineffective instructional strategies can feel deeply personal, particularly among colleagues who work closely together.

As a result, conversations shift toward safer topics such as interventions, pacing, resources, or student motivation rather than examining the quality and consistency of instruction itself.

This is instructional silence in practice. Schools become more comfortable analyzing student struggles than calibrating adult practice. Over time, instructional inconsistencies remain unaddressed, expectations vary across classrooms, and uneven learning experiences persist for students.

Type 3: Accountability Silence to Maintain Collegiality

Definition: Accountability silence occurs when school leadership teams avoid clarity around ownership, follow-through, and implementation in order to preserve harmony. Collegiality is expressed through encouragement and general agreement, even when specificity and accountability are required.

Example: After discussing school priorities or reviewing improvement plans, leadership teams often leave meetings with broad commitments but limited clarity around ownership. Initiatives are discussed, next steps are mentioned, and everyone appears aligned, yet responsibility for execution remains diffuse.

Leaders may hesitate to press colleagues directly on missed deadlines, incomplete implementation, inconsistent follow-through, or lack of progress because doing so can feel confrontational or overly directive.

As a result, implementation becomes uneven. Action items are revisited inconsistently, timelines lose urgency, and important initiatives depend more on individual initiative than on shared accountability structures. Teams leave meetings feeling supported, but not necessarily clearer about expectations, responsibilities, or measures of success.

This is accountability silence in practice. The leadership team maintains surface-level alignment, but unclear ownership and inconsistent follow-through weaken implementation and slow organizational improvement.

Moving Forward: Redefining Collegiality in School Leadership Teams

If school leadership teams want to avoid the trap of voiceless collegiality, a few shifts may help.

First, leadership teams can redefine collegiality to include contribution, not just agreement. Healthy teams should create space for questions, dissent, clarification, and constructive pushback, particularly when decisions affect teaching and learning.

Second, teams can normalize direct conversations about instructional practice. Student data discussions should move beyond identifying student struggles and toward examining how instruction, expectations, and systems may be contributing to those outcomes. Improvement becomes difficult when instructional conversations remain indirect.

Third, leadership teams can strengthen accountability by increasing clarity around ownership and follow-through. Meetings should end with clearly defined responsibilities, timelines, and structures for revisiting commitments. Without intentional follow-up, even strong ideas lose momentum.

Finally, leadership teams can recognize that productive tension is not the opposite of collegiality. In strong schools, trust is not built by avoiding difficult conversations, but by engaging in them with professionalism, clarity, and a shared commitment to students.

Voiceless collegiality is not simply a team dynamic. In school leadership teams, it becomes an organizational liability.

When collegiality is defined primarily as agreement and relational ease, difficult conversations about instruction, ownership, and accountability become harder to sustain. Over time, schools lose clarity, coherence, and momentum.

Strong leadership teams do not avoid tension. They create conditions where disagreement, questioning, and direct feedback can occur professionally and productively in service of students.

If student outcomes are the goal, then voice, clarity, and accountability cannot remain optional.

Andy Szeto is an education leadership professor and school leader, and he serves as President of A3 of CSA. He is the author of Leading Before the Title and writes and presents on instructional leadership, AI in education, and professional development, and teaches graduate courses in leadership and instructional improvement.