At education companies, top executives and their director-level managers agree on a few things — including that emerging leaders need opportunities to develop in order to thrive in more senior roles.
There’s one thing they tend not to agree on: Whether rising managers have the skills to succeed in those roles.
Those are some of the core findings of a new survey of education company officials released in a new survey by the Ed-tech Leadership Collective.
According to the Leadership Collective’s survey, now in its third year, C-suite officials and those managing departments both say that communication, strategic leadership, team leadership, problem-solving, and the ability to collaborate and influence peers are critical for those looking to make the jump into higher-level positions.
But while 63 percent of department heads and functional leaders surveyed say they are confident they are ready for advancement, only 27 percent of C-level executives say they have sufficient leadership depth to fill a seat on their executive team.
Executives and non-executive leaders are “focused on the right skills, and they’re focused on the right things, but we’re still seeing this gap in terms of what the result is,” said Collin Earnst, founder and managing partner of the Leadership Collective, a member organization that provides accelerator programs and advising services for education company leaders.
The survey was conducted in December 2024 and asked 124 respondents about their experiences in leadership roles at companies that provide products and services related to teaching and learning in the U.S. K–12 market.
Both C-level and non-executive leaders also agree that top leaders aren’t investing in the mentoring required to bring high-potential leaders up to expectations for advancement, with 76 percent of C-level executives and 65 percent of non-executive leaders saying so in the survey.
Women Leaders Report Less Support
Out of the pool of respondents, who work in roles ranging from the C-suite to managers, 67 percent identified as female, and 20 percent identified as being from a historically marginalized population.
The data offer a window into the role that women play in K-12 organizations, and how their participation in leadership roles compares with men. The survey found the percentage of women respondents is similar across C-level, department heads, and functional levels, and that women represent 39 percent of all C-level respondents, compared to 41 percent of men.
The result is we’re not giving all our employees equitable support.
Collin Earnst, founder, managing partner, Ed-tech Leadership Collective.
The largest gap between males and females in executive roles is in the CEO position. Male C-suite respondents are more than three times as likely to be in the CEO role as female C-suite respondents are.
One of the potentials reasons for this gap, Earnst said, could be tied to the fact 28 percent of women who responded to the survey also say they have not received any career guidance or support, compared to just 11 percent of male respondents.
Often that guidance and support comes in the form of regular feedback, Earnst said, which is another area where women respondents stood out as experiencing different leadership challenges from their male colleagues.
Women report receiving less feedback overall, with 24 percent of women saying they get that support monthly, compared to 46 percent of male respondents.
Only 41 percent of women who responded to the survey say the feedback they receive from their manager is helpful, compared to more than 8 in 10 men (82 percent) who say the same.
Studies, including one completed by Stanford University in 2021 and another from Colorado State and Washington State universities in 2024, show that women across industries often receive feedback from their male peers that’s influenced by some kind of bias, whether it’s bias around women’s receptivity to feedback or their assertiveness, making it more difficult for them to advance in their careers.
“The result is we’re not giving all our employees equitable support,” Earnst said. “Our data clearly support that.”
He said it’s important the top executives at education companies be intentional about creating leadership teams that have a diversity of perspective, background, thought, and communication style.
“If we just listen to those voices and promote them and give them the opportunities, we’re sort of changing the organization, because diverse teams are more productive and more innovative,” Earnst said.
He recommends executives identify clear pathways, projects, and objectives for high-potential leaders, and make it clear to their peers that they’re taking the lead.
“That needs to happen in order to shrink this gap in terms of what companies feel about programs to support historically marginalized groups,” he said.
Investor-Backed Companies Face Big Concerns, Layoffs
The survey suggestions that investor-backed companies may experience particular weaknesses when it come to leadership depth and training.
More than half of all respondents to the Leadership Collective’s survey work at an organization that is either private equity-backed (38 percent) or venture capital-backed (28 percent), while 15 percent work at a nonprofit and 28 percent are at a privately held company.
Only 11 percent of C-level executives at investor-backed companies say they have sufficient leadership depth to fill a seat on their executive team, compared to 33 respondents at privately held companies and nonprofits who say the same.
Investor-backed companies are also much more likely to have conducted layoffs in the past year, the survey found.
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Sixty percent of companies with private equity or venture support say their employer initiated a round of staff reductions in 2024, compared to 32 percent of privately held companies and 18 percent of nonprofits in the K-12 space.
Investor-backed companies are typically operating on tighter margins as they prep for mergers and acquisitions that might prompt those type of cutbacks, Earnst said.
Anecdotally, Earnst said nonprofits and privately held companies operate more conservatively overall, which may result in less of a need for layoffs. They have also been setting more realistic growth targets, he said.
About half of all respondents, 47 percent, say their organization saw layoffs in the prior year — a slight decrease from last year, when 54 percent of those surveyed had experienced staff reductions. Just 27 percent say their organizations saw layoffs in both 2023 and 2024.
A majority of the respondents whose organizations went through staff reductions, 62 percent, say they were asked to take on a larger scope of responsibility as a result, pointing to an issue Earnst sees frequently where companies reduce their staff, but not the focus of their products and services.
“What I’m still surprised and concerned about is how few companies have narrowed the scope of what they do. So many of them seem to be saying ‘We’re going to do more with less.’ Where else in your life can you get more out of the same?”
That’s often where burnout comes into play. Eighty-three percent of respondents say that they are at moderate to high risk of burnout, and 41 percent say they are at high risk.
While that figure is lower than last year, when 48 percent of respondents said they were at high risk of burnout, department and functional leaders are more likely to report being at that high level of risk (47 percent) compared to just 25 percent of C-level executives who say the same.
Earnst recommends that to address burnout and the skills gap seen in the survey results, department-level managers take a step he sees frequently in the leadership collective: proactively search for resources that could help support their future career goals, and then bring those resources to executive leadership with a plan to begin using them.
Doing so can help ease the burden on C-suite executives’ time to provide leadership development support, and make it more likely the manager will be able to secure support for their career growth efforts.
“When those director-level [leaders] can push and be specific about what they’re looking for, it helps their case,” Earnst said.