What I Learned From the Teachers Who Left Because of How I Led — Before I Learned to Lead Better

I am going to tell you something that most educators in my position do not say publicly, because saying it requires the kind of honesty that professional culture does not reward.

There were teachers who left buildings I led because of how I led.

Not all of them. Not even most of them. But some. And I knew it when they left, and I filed it in the part of my experience that I was not yet ready to examine, and I moved forward and upward — because that is what we do.

Until I stopped moving forward long enough to look back.

The leaders we become are built partly from the things we got right and partly from the things we got wrong. The ones who only account for the first list are not as good as they think they are.

What I Got Wrong Early

Early in my administrative career, I led like someone who had learned the theory of school leadership without yet having enough of the practice to know the difference between holding a standard and holding a person.

I was direct — which is generally a strength — but in those early years I was direct in a way that did not always make room for the complexity of what the person on the other side of the conversation was carrying. I communicated expectations clearly, but I had not yet fully learned how to communicate them in a way that maintained the human dignity of the person receiving them.

I moved fast. I believed in what I was building. And I did not always give the people around me enough time to understand what we were building or why it was worth following.

What the Teachers Who Left Taught Me

One of them, before she left, said something to me that I think about still. She said: ‘I believe in everything you are trying to do. I do not believe you see me.’

She was right. I saw the work. I saw the students. I saw the vision. I did not always see the person — their life outside the school, the history they brought into the classroom, the thing that was making the job harder than usual that year.

The principals who lose good teachers are not always the ones who are doing the wrong things. Sometimes they are the ones doing the right things in the wrong way — with the right standards and the wrong relationship.

What I Do Differently Now

I slow down in ways that used to feel like inefficiency. I ask the question before I make the observation. I check in as a person before I check in as a supervisor. I name what I see — not just what needs to change, but what is working, what is hard, what I notice.

I am still direct. I still hold standards. I still have the hard conversations. But I have them as someone who sees the full person I am having them with — not just the professional performance I am evaluating.

That shift did not come from a leadership program. It came from the teachers who left. I owed them the honest accounting. This is part of it.