School district leaders are grappling with significant teacher shortages, a precarious fiscal landscape, and the daily realities of leading in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA*) world.
Couple these factors with high rates of absenteeism, teacher burnout, emotional detachment and chronic stress (Mercurio, 2025) it’s no wonder that districts easily lose sight of the proactive and non-financial initiatives at their disposal.
While some districts use recognition ceremonies and create valiant attempts to foster a sense of belonging to help educators feel warm and welcomed, employees still feel an overwhelming sense of loneliness, isolation and burnout. Ironically, employees can feel a sense of belonging yet not feel noticed, affirmed, and needed, all cornerstones of mattering (Mercurio, 2025).
Despite districts’ best efforts, how employees feel about work remains underwhelming, and at times, tragic.
For example, when people feel as if they don’t matter to their leaders, a host of issues emerge, as reported in numerous studies. Sixty percent of employees in one study alleged that they are emotionally detached at work; 85% of the global workforce in another study state they are disengaged.
In a survey of 2,500 workers, one in five said they labor in toxic cultures. Finally, another study found that employees who feel unsupported by their leaders operate at just 70% of their true capacity (Mercurio, 2025).
Feeling valued, adding value
While the current climate of the workplace can feel heavy and bleak, it’s important to remember that every district possesses the untapped potential to shape their own story. Now more than ever we need to heed the call from clarion voices promoting leadership practices rooted in lifegiving and meaningful frameworks.
One such voice is Zach Mercurio, whose book The Power of Mattering: How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance (2025) has become a touchstone for our district this year.
According to Mercurio, mattering can be defined as the experience of feeling significant to the people around you, with two factors that induce it: feeling valued by the people around us and adding value to the people around us.
We feel valued by the people around us when we are understood by those around us, while we experience adding value when we see the difference we make in the lives around us.
When we feel valued in the workplace, people report “a higher sense of self-worth, are more confident, and develop healthier relationships. As a result, they’re more motivated and grittier, and experience greater well-being in life and at work” (Mercurio, 2025).
Digging deeper, Mercurio describes a host of strategies nested under the three main domains of mattering with an acronym named the NAN Model:
- Noticing: Seeing and hearing others
- Affirming: Showing people how their unique gifts make a difference
- Needing: Showing people how they’re relied upon and indispensable
Noticing, for example, begins with the courage to confront our own limited and sometimes biased perceptions of others by deeply reflecting on specific prompts. For example, asking ourselves, “How am I truly seeing this person? What stories or qualities might I be overlooking?”
Mercurio continues to urge us to reflect by naming five positive traits about someone we might otherwise take for granted or view in a negative light.
While the exercise may seem simple, the impact is profound. Each time we reframe how we view another person, we create the opportunity to notice another human.
Over time, these moments accumulate, gradually reshaping the culture of a school into one that is life-giving, resilient and deeply human.
Reimagining how we lead
Here in Katonah-Lewisboro, under the leadership of Superintendent Dr. Raymond Blanch, we spent much of last year engaging with our community in a stakeholder campaign to really get clear on what matters most to us as a district.
Out of that work came Vision 2030: Empowering All, a shared roadmap built around six guiding pillars. Among those six, belonging and well-being emerged, identified as essential to who we are and who we want to be. With the strong support of our board, we’ve committed ourselves to carrying this vision forward. Together.
As an extension of the vision, our administrative team has begun to explore the concept of mattering and how it can be woven into our daily workplace lives. In our recent discussions and team meetings, we have highlighted the powerful role leaders play in meeting the fundamental human need for mattering.
Every conversation, every decision and every moment of attention becomes an opportunity to shape the culture we aspire to build and to move us closer to the community we envision.
Toward the book’s conclusion, Mercurio quotes CEO Bob Chapman, who completely turned around his business after realizing the power and potential of mattering not only the bottom line, but also on the health and wellbeing of his employees:
“This is how we heal our brokenness: sending people home as better spouses, parents, children, friends, and citizens of their communities.”
As we concluded our first session with the administrative team, we returned to that charge.
We asked ourselves what it would mean to lead in ways that send people home more whole, more grounded and more valued for the work they do.
It calls for nothing less than a fundamental reimagining of how we lead and interact.
*VUCA is an official term coined by the US Army War College to describe the state of the world following the Cold War.
