This spring, my closet told me a story. It started months ago when I decided to try something different. At the beginning of the season, I turned every hanger in my closet backwards. Over the next few months, whenever I wore something, I turned the hanger the right way. Slowly, the closet began showing a pattern. Some clothes were worn often, while others just hung there quietly, untouched. By the time spring arrived, the closet was ready to tell the truth. So one Saturday morning, I opened the door, turned on some music, and started the process. Not the quick kind of cleaning where you move a few things around and call it done. I mean the sort where everything comes out.
When I clean out a closet, my hair is usually piled up on top of my head, and I’m wearing easy clothes so I can try things on quickly. There are bins nearby. A donation box and a trash bag is waiting for the things that have quietly outlived their usefulness. If a hanger was still turned the wrong way, I stopped and asked myself a simple question. Should I keep this? Sometimes the answer was easy. Other times, I pulled the shirt down and tried it on just to be sure. If it fits and I love it, it stays. If it doesn’t fit or I know I’m not going to wear it, out it goes. I’ve learned not to keep things around, hoping they might work again someday. Closets fill up quickly when decisions are made on the basis of someday.
Before long, there were piles everywhere. The keep pile here and the donation pile over there. The trash bag is waiting nearby. For a little while, the room actually looked worse than when I started, but that’s how real cleaning works. Before things can become organized again, everything has to be pulled out and examined.
Standing there in the middle of the piles, I realized something. Closets fill up quietly over time, not because we intend for them to, but because we stop noticing what’s hanging there. In much the same way, leadership practices accumulate. We keep old routines and systems without always realizing why. Leadership can work in a similar way to closets. Just as we accumulate clothes we no longer need, we often hold on to leadership practices out of habit rather than usefulness.
As spring arrives, many schools begin preparing needs assessments and thinking about next year’s school improvement plan. On paper, the process sounds simple. Review the data, identify priorities, and write the plan. But sometimes what we call reflection looks more like rearranging the closet than actually cleaning it.
A few words get updated in the old plan.
A strategy is renamed and placed as if it’s new. Last year’s plan quietly becomes the starting point again.
What rarely happens is the equivalent of turning the hangers around in leadership asking hard questions about which practices are actually serving the organization and which are simply taking up space.
A real needs assessment requires leaders to lay the evidence out in front of them. We don’t need to look at each data set in silos. We need to explore connections between them. How do attendance trends connect with literacy levels? What does classroom instruction reveal about subgroup performance? What do lesson plans reveal about the student work? Do our teachers have the content knowledge? When all of that is visible at once, it can feel messy. Some things confirm what we hoped to see. Others show patterns we may have missed along the way. Clarity rarely comes from what we hide. It comes from what we are willing to examine.
Just as a closet can’t be deliberately organized without pulling out, examining, and questioning existing items, an organization’s work can’t be intentionally organized without pulling out, examining, and questioning existing leadership practices. Once everything is visible, leaders face the same decision I do when I hold a shirt in my hands. Does this still serve us? If the answer is no, it doesn’t belong in the work moving forward. Because if we put everything back exactly the way it was, we shouldn’t expect next year to look much different than this one.
Spring cleaning always leaves my closet feeling less heavy. The clothes that remain are the things I actually wear and fit not just me, but the life I’m living right now. Leadership needs that same kind of honesty and willingness to let go of what no longer serves, keeping only what really fits the organization’s current needs.
Let this April be the month you intentionally open the door, examine what actually contributes to your goals, and make thoughtful decisions about what will move your work forward. Commit to bold actions that will shape a better year ahead.
Sometimes the work requires a little courage, and occasionally, a trash bag.
Take the initial step toward real improvement: turn those hangers around, face what is truly there, and take action based on what you find.
Coaching Questions
- What systems or practices might we be holding onto simply because they have always been there?
- If we examined our work as closely as we examine our data, what might we decide to release before writing the next plan?
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