Why Your Coaching Is Not Sticking (Free Leadership Diagnostic Guide)
You have had the conversation three times now. You were clear. You gave examples. You followed up in writing. And the behavior still has not changed.
Most school leaders respond to that by coaching harder. More check-ins, more modeling, more feedback. Sometimes it works. Often it does not, and you are left wondering whether the problem is the person, the plan, or you.
Dr. Mechiel Rozas has a better first question. On episode 56 of the CheckBox Pro Series, she shared the simple frameworks she used across a decades-long career that took her from bilingual teacher to superintendent. Two of them stopped me, because they both do the same quiet thing. They make you diagnose before you spend.
That is why we built the free Leadership Diagnostic Guide you can download below.
The first question: know, able, or willing?
When a behavior is not changing, Dr. Rozas starts with three circles.
Do I know what I need to do? The person may not actually understand the expectation. It was said in a staff meeting in August, or it was implied but never named, or it was clear to you and fuzzy to everyone else.
Am I able to do what I know I need to do? They understand the expectation and cannot meet it. Maybe the skill is not there yet. Maybe the schedule does not allow it. Maybe the tool they need does not exist or does not work.
Am I willing to do what I need to do? They understand it, they could do it, and they are choosing not to.
The answer is often a combination. Someone can know the expectation, be partly able, and be quietly unwilling all at once. The circles overlap on purpose.
Why this changes what you do next
Here is the part worth sitting with. Know and able are coaching problems. Willing is not.
If someone does not know, you clarify. If someone is not able, you build capacity or remove the barrier. Both of those respond well to coaching, encouraging, and support, and both are places where a leader’s time pays off.
If someone is unwilling, more coaching will not move them. That is a different conversation, and it usually needs to be a direct one about expectations and fit. Many of us spend months coaching a willingness problem because coaching feels kinder than the conversation we are avoiding.
Naming the circle first tells you whether you are looking at a support conversation or an accountability conversation. It also protects your energy, because you stop pouring coaching hours into a problem that coaching was never going to solve.
Try it on one person this week. Before your next follow-up, ask yourself which circle you are actually in. If you are not sure, that is useful information too, and it probably means you start by asking them.
The second question: are you solving the problem or funding it?
The second framework in the guide scales the same thinking up to the whole organization.
Dr. Rozas describes a vicious cycle that most of us can recognize. A problem shows up. Someone finds a solution. The solution costs money. You buy it. For a while things look better, and then the same problem resurfaces, so you go looking for the next solution. The cycle spins, the budget shrinks, and nothing underneath it has actually changed.
The virtuous cycle runs in a different order. You start with core beliefs, the things your school actually holds to be true about students and learning. Those beliefs drive your practices, the way adults do the work day to day. Your practices then determine your resources, which is to say what you buy and what you staff. And your resources reinforce the beliefs you started with.
The difference is where the cycle starts. One starts with a problem and a purchase. The other starts with a belief and a practice, and lets the purchase follow.
What this looks like in a budget meeting
This is not an argument against spending money. It is an argument for knowing what you are buying.
Before the next purchase, ask which belief it serves and which practice it supports. If you can answer both quickly, you are in the virtuous cycle and the money is doing real work. If the honest answer is that the problem was loud and this was available, you are probably about to fund the same problem again next year.
The same question works for programs you have already bought. Pull up the three largest line items in your budget and try to name the belief and the practice behind each one. It is a quick exercise, and it is often uncomfortable in a productive way.
Two frameworks
Both tools do the same thing at different scales.
Change Circles asks you to diagnose a person before you spend coaching time. The vicious and virtuous cycles ask you to diagnose an organization before you spend money. In both cases, the instinct is to act fast, and in both cases the faster path is to slow down for one question first.
That is also what makes them usable. Neither one requires a retreat, a consultant, or a new initiative. They fit in the ninety seconds before you walk into a conversation or a budget meeting.
Sustainable leadership is built on better questions
At CheckBox Pro, our goal is to make leading a school a more sustainable career. A large share of leader exhaustion is not the volume of work. It is the volume of work spent on the wrong diagnosis. Coaching someone who was never unwilling to begin with. Buying the fourth version of a fix for a problem you have not named.
Dr. Rozas sustained a career in this work for decades, and when you listen to her, the throughline is not stamina. It is clarity, and the discipline to slow down for one question before acting.
You can listen to the full conversation, Lessons from a Lifetime in Education, wherever you get your podcasts.
Download the free Leadership Diagnostic Guide
The Leadership Diagnostic Guide puts both frameworks on a single page you can print, post by your desk, or bring to a leadership team meeting. It includes the Change Circles model for coaching conversations and the vicious and virtuous cycle for organizational decisions.
Download it, then pick one person and one line item and run each through the right framework this week.
