Most first-year principal advice focuses on what to do. This post is about what not to do — specifically the mistakes that are so common they have become structural features of the first-year experience, and that almost no one names directly until after they have already cost someone something significant. These are not small tactical…
Most principals say they want teachers to feel valued. Far fewer have asked themselves honestly: what does my staff actually experience in their interactions with me? Not what I intend them to experience. Not what I believe I am communicating. What they actually receive. There is a significant gap in most schools between the principal…
The first 90 days of a principal’s tenure at a new school are not a honeymoon period. They are a data-gathering period — for you and for every person in that building. Your staff is not waiting to see what you do. They are watching what you do not do. What you let slide. What…
They are not the same thing. And the difference between them matters more to the health of your school than almost any other distinction in leadership. Respect, in the context of school leadership, is often the result of authority and competence. People respect the principal who runs tight meetings, who knows the data, who makes…
The people in your building have been disappointed before. They have watched a leader come in with language about transformation and leave three years later having transformed nothing except their own career trajectory. They have been told that things were going to be different. They have believed it and been wrong. Some of them are…
Most conversations about legacy in school leadership are quietly, subtly about the principal. The leader who built the program. The principal who turned it around. The name attached to the initiative that outlasted the tenure. Legacy, in the way it is typically talked about, is a monument to a person. That kind of legacy is…
Most principals do not wake up in the morning and consciously decide to lead from fear. Fear-based leadership does not announce itself. It arrives gradually, in the accumulation of small decisions made under pressure — decisions that, taken one at a time, seem reasonable, but that collectively add up to a leadership posture organized around…
The leadership literature has spent years talking about authentic leadership as if it were primarily about being warm and relatable — sharing enough personal stories to seem human, expressing enough vulnerability to seem approachable. That version of authenticity is manageable. It is strategic. And it is not what I mean. Leading with your whole self…