Article: The Leadership Moment: How States Are Building the Teams That Deliver Results
State educational agencies (SEAs) are facing a leadership moment unlike any in recent memory.
The complexity of today’s education landscape—workforce shortages, AI disruption, shifting policy environments, and rising public expectations—demands leaders who are adaptive, data literate, people centered, and capable of driving results in high-pressure, high-visibility environments.
State departments of education across the Southwestern United States are heeding this call. With customized support from the Southwest Comprehensive Center (Southwest CC), agencies this year are investing in leadership development—the new infrastructure—as the foundation that will enable every other reform to succeed.
Leadership as the New Infrastructure: How States Are Preparing for What’s Next
A 2025 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report on public-service leadership notes that modern public agencies must be responsive, capable, and value driven, emphasizing that leadership—not structure—is the differentiator in high-performing systems.
SEA leaders know this firsthand. The question is no longer whether SEAs need to invest in leadership—it’s how.
What Top Leadership Trends Across Sectors Mean for SEAs
“Leadership development is undergoing a transformation across industries,” reports Laura Jurgensen, a former Kansas State Department of Education assistant director who is now the Southwest CC’s Operational Excellence portfolio lead. “We are honored to support states in the Southwest as they actively explore human development trends and create design approaches that reflect their state’s unique public education realities.”
Research shows that, across sectors, modern leadership development trends include:
1. Human-centric leadership
Organizations are investing in leaders who model empathy, clarity, and psychological safety—especially in high-pressure, high-stakes environments, according to Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends Report.
2. Effective hybrid and distributed team management
Gallup polling of full-time, hybrid employees reveals both advantages and challenges with hybrid work arrangements. For SEAs—where teams are often geographically dispersed—building cohesion, culture, communication, clarity, and connection across distance is mission critical, Jurgensen adds.
3. Agility and adaptation
LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report describes the importance of individual and organization agility, ensuring workplaces are set up for success. Jurgensen notes that for SEAs, this approach includes rapidly adjusting to policy and technology shifts, iterating on implementation, and quickly and effectively responding quickly to district needs.
4. Continuous leadership development, not episodic
The Partnership for Public Service identifies continuous learning as a core subcompetency for effective leadership. For states, this means designing trainings for the long term.
Given these trends, SEAs are developing their own core leadership development pathways. Let’s take a look.
How SEAs Are Strengthening Leadership and Management Capacity
To build out the leadership force that the future requires, states across the Southwest are taking the following approaches, with technical assistance from the Southwest CC.
New Mexico is cultivating midlevel leaders to drive implementation.
New Mexico, a state undergoing dramatic educational reforms, plans to support its midlevel directors, the leaders who translate policy into practice, with targeted leadership development. In partnership with the Southwest CC, in April, the New Mexico Public Education Department launched a 6-month, cohort-based leadership program for directors, program managers, and department heads combining:
- Executive coaching
- Peer learning
- Applied practice
To emphasize skill building in cross-bureau coordination, implementation pressure, and fast-changing priorities, the program is designed to address real-time leadership challenges, with participants applying new skills directly to complex projects and pressing demands in their own divisions.
New Mexico seeks to build legislative analytic capacity.
New Mexico’s Legislative Education Study Committee (LESC) serves as the Legislature’s nonpartisan research and analysis engine for public education. Since 1965, LESC has driven New Mexico’s education policy forward by providing research grounded in evidence, data, community voice, and partnerships with key stakeholders. LESC staff, with support from the Southwest CC, is working this year to build analytic capacity and research workflow consistency across its teams. This effort entails:
- A monthly analytic community of practice
- Shared routines and tools
- Targeted problem-of-practice support
Southwest CC continues to focus on supporting SEAs in strengthening partnerships with intermediaries.
Regional educational agency leaders play a pivotal role, among other things, in ensuring that state resources, guidance, and technical assistance reach districts and schools.
“They are essential partners in strengthening instructional quality, supporting educators, and improving outcomes for students across the region,” adds Jurgensen.
Such leaders, in any state, Jurgensen reports, need to be able to quickly and coherently align:
- Strategy
- People
- Data
- Implementation
- Accountability
The Southwest CC Advisory Board recently confirmed this sentiment, noting that the Southwest CC has a major opportunity to broadly help SEAs align leadership expectations across regional intermediary partners to transparently strengthen system-level leadership capacity.
I have found it really beneficial to see how Comprehensive Centers operationalize SEA vision down to the ESC [Education Service Center] level, and how we are then able to understand that work, and cascade that vision, down to LEAs [local educational agencies].
SEAs: Building the Leadership Infrastructure the Future Requires
Comprehensive Center partnerships are enabling states to quickly and efficiently build the leadership and management capacity needed to deliver what parents most want: quality schools in every community.