It was 9:30 am on a Tuesday morning in Chicago, and Kory Kane was doing everything.

His dean was out. His case manager was out. A couple other admins were gone, so Kory was covering it all. This is the kind of day every principal knows, where the building keeps demanding things and your own to-do list sits untouched. You keep moving because that’s the job.

That was also the morning Kory got on a call and said something that changed the category of school leadership.

But we’ll get to that.

Kory is a principal of a public school in Chicago. He’s the kind of leader who shows up on calls, is active in the community, and does the day-to-day work. He’d gone through my Entry Plan Intensive about a year earlier, which is built around a deceptively simple question:

How do you prepare for the school year instead of just surviving it?

Most principals never get asked (or know how to answer) that question.

You earn your degree. Maybe a master’s, maybe a doctorate. You put in your time as a teacher, then as an assistant principal. One day, a superintendent hands you the keys and tells you, more or less: don’t mess this up.

That’s the onboarding.

After that, you’re on your own.

Kory had been there and knew what it was like to figure things out alone. To have a calendar full of other people’s crises and an empty block where your own personal development was supposed to squeeze in. He came into the Entry Plan Intensive hungry for a more structured way to start the school year. He was present, engaged, and doing the work. When the program ended, he joined our Ruckus Maker Mastermind community and kept going.

Inside the Mastermind, he got access to a tool called Digital Danny—an AI built on a decade’s worth of school leadership frameworks, coaching conversations, and six books. There was no training on how to use it and no step-by-step guide. It was just there, waiting to answer questions about personal development and managing the day-to-day responsibilities of a school leader.

Most principals tried it a few times and moved on.

Kory had 910 conversations with Digital Danny in his first 5 months.

(With a version of the tool that, frankly, wasn’t that good yet.)

Nobody told him to do that. Nobody set up a program around it or gave him a roadmap. He just recognized something useful and kept showing up for it, the same way he kept showing up for every other form of development he’d decided mattered.

On that Tuesday morning, I called him and asked a simple question: How would you describe Digital Danny to someone you respect?

He thought for a second.

“I’d say I view it more as a mentor. It’s almost like your self-mentor. Like a guide along the way where you’re still doing the work.”

A guide along the way, where you’re still doing the work.

That phrase landed hard because what Kory was describing was a posture. Every other personal development system passes the work to someone else—a coach tells you what to do, a personal development session delivers content to you, and a superintendent hands you a report. But what Kory had been practicing for the past year was different. He was driving his own development using everything available to him (Digital Danny, the coaching programs, books, and peer-to-peer conversations). He was in the driver’s seat, directing his career as a school leader.

On that call, Kory named something that many great school leaders have been doing for years:

Selfmentorship.

Selfmentorship is the decision to make your personal and career development your responsibility.

Kory’s path to Selfmentorship isn’t unusual among top school leaders.

• Scott Long was a principal who turned a Sticky Core Values project into something that rippled through his school’s science curriculum—and he’s now an assistant superintendent.

• Lynn Streets established the foundation for her district’s model middle school through the campus culture. She was then promoted to bring that kind of success for staff and students to a stagnant high school.

• Demetrius Ball rebuilt the cultural and academic experience at two different schools, challenged an English department to rethink what kids were reading, and created a student wellness center that changed how the building handled stress and conflict.

• Erika Bare led a top performing high school in Oregon before being promoted to Assistant Superintendent. She left her high-performing district for her first Superintendent position, tasked with turning around under-performing literacy district-wide. While leading these systems, she made time to co-author two amazing books on how educators can use conversations with students and faculty.

• Doc Chris Jones figured out how to host his seniors’ prom inside Gillette Stadium during COVID, when most schools had canceled everything. He has also earned a reputation for turning his critics into cheerleaders on campus by taking their criticism seriously and doing something about it. Among those accomplishments, he authored a book about improving the education experience for everyone. And once he found that his campus was losing two weeks of instructional time to midterms and finals, he gave that time back to students and faculty and engineered different ways for students to prove mastery of content knowledge.

None of these school leaders waited to be told how to do those things. They didn’t have a system handed to them. They applied what they knew, found what they didn’t, and built toward something bigger than what the rulebook offered.

That’s Selfmentorship.

It doesn’t require a specific tool, a coach, a program, or a perfect district.

You lead a campus and shape the culture that teachers walk into every morning. You make decisions that affect hundreds of kids. And the system’s answer to your development needs is a handful of coaching conversations a year.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are 91,900 public school principals in America. And a 2020 report published by the Learning Policy Institute found only 23% of elementary school principals have access to a coach or mentor—a number that drops to less than 10% in high-poverty districts.

This mini-book is for those who’ve decided that isn’t good enough.

In it, you’ll see how to close the gap between what the school leadership development system offers and what the top leaders need. Because the leaders who are doing the most interesting, most impactful work in schools have already figured out that they can’t wait for someone else to own their personal development. The system isn’t going to change fast enough for you.

You have to become your own best mentor.

This mini-book will show you how.

The Problem With Permission-Based Development

The academic system that trained you was never designed to develop you.

It was designed to train you in compliance, curriculum, and management. It was built to produce educators who could pass tests, earn credentials, and move through the pipeline. At each stage, someone told you what to read, what to demonstrate, and what box to check next. You got really good at that.

But when you were handed the school keys, the instruction manual disappeared.

To see why this is a problem, consider how principals are developed in this country.

As a teacher, someone supervised your instruction. As an assistant principal, someone evaluated your management. At every stage, development happened to you—delivered by someone above you, on their timeline, approved and funded by a system that decided what you needed and when.

So, one of two things happened when you became a principal.

If you were seen as a rising star (if someone looked at you and thought this one’s going places), you might have gotten a coach, a mentor, and a little extra investment from the district. You were chosen.

If you weren’t? Good luck.

That’s not a cynical read. That’s just how it works. The support goes to the people the system has already decided to bet on. Everybody else inherits a calendar full of other people’s problems and figures it out alone.

But as a principal, you make hundreds of decisions a day.

You manage buildings, budgets, and human beings. You shape the culture that every teacher and student walks into every morning. You absorb the stress that travels up from classrooms, down from the district, and sideways from parents.

The system’s answer to your growth needs is a handful of coaching conversations a year.

That’s not a support system. That’s a gap. And there’s a name for the system that produced it: Permission-based development.

Permission-Based Development is a system where your growth depends on someone else making it happen first.

Every form of Permission-Based Development requires someone else to act before you can grow.

Professional development requires someone to approve, fund, and schedule it. Coaching requires a coach to show up. A mentor relationship requires someone to assign it. Growth requires an external trigger.

As a result, you were conditioned (over years of education and credentialing) to wait for the next growth trigger to be handed to you. The system required it. When you got to the principalship, the instinct was still there—someone will give me what I need—even after the “someone” disappeared.

Play-It-Safe Principals accept Permission-Based Development.

They absorb the gap. They work harder inside the status quo system and wait for the district to offer something useful. When it doesn’t (and it usually doesn’t), they manage. They tell themselves they’re too busy anyway.

That last part is worth sitting with.

The Cost of Staying Stuck

In education, the “I’m so busy” badge is a sign of acceptance.

A lot of school leaders wear it with something that looks like pride. Look at everything on my plate. Look at how much I’m carrying. But busyness is not the same thing as impact, and deep down most leaders know that.

Permission-Based Development costs you a lot more than you realize:

• It costs you your boundaries. Most principals know the open-door policy speech. People over paperwork. It sounds like generosity. But if you read the invisible part of the sentence, you realize it says: the people on my campus matter more than my time, my family, and my own sense of why I got into this. An open door isn’t a policy. It’s a slow sentence against yourself.

• It costs you your leadership. When you’re running on empty and operating without your own development system, you default to management. You put out fires. You handle what’s in front of you. You get through the day. The vision work, culture-building, and long-horizon thinking that only you can do gets pushed aside for “later.”

• It costs you your curiosity. Leaders without a development practice tend to get brittle. They take a top-down approach because they stopped asking questions. The stance shifts from “How do I learn from my staff?” to “How do I get my staff to do what I want?” People feel that, and trust erodes.

• It costs you your future. The most painful cost is the most subtle one. You stop asking “Who am I becoming “and start asking “How do I get through the hour?” A year of that thinking feels like drift. A decade of that feels like a career that went somewhere other than where you meant to go.

None of this is inevitable. It’s just what happens when you accept the system’s version of your development as the only version available.

You Have a Choice

Here’s the doctrine, stated plainly:

Play-It-Safe Principals accept Permission-Based Development. Ruckus Makers do not and, therefore, learn the art and science of Selfmentorship.

Play-It-Safe Principals protect the status quo. They get better incrementally. When a hard situation comes up, there’s a handbook for it. (Turn to page 318 for how to handle the union problem.) The rules are the rules.

That’s not a judgment.

A Play-It-Safe Principal isn’t a bad person or even a bad leader.

They made a reasonable choice given what the system handed them. But when the system fails them, they accept it. That’s what reasonable people following a set of rules do.

A Ruckus Maker makes a different choice.

A Ruckus Maker is what the Better Leaders Better Schools community has always called the school leaders who are visitors from the future. They show us what education can be one day. They don’t have better luck, better districts, or better circumstances, but they’ve decided their development isn’t something that happens to them. It’s something they own.

The differentiator between Ruckus Makers vs. Play-It-Safe Principals is that one plays under someone else’s rules, and one authors their own game.

Ruckus Makers have no book to follow. What they’re trying to do on their campus is different enough that no manual was written for it. So they write their own. They develop the instincts, find the frameworks, build the relationships, and keep showing up for their own growth, just as they do for their students.

Ruckus Makers use Selfmentorship to develop themselves, and you can too.

The Art and Science of Selfmentorship

Selfmentorship is the practice of recognizing that you can develop yourself and then taking action to do so.

It isn’t a productivity hack or a morning routine or a five-step framework someone hands you at a conference. It’s a decision about who is responsible for your growth. The whole idea lives in that one shift. Once you make it—once you stop waiting for the system to develop you and start treating your own growth as your job—everything else follows.

How you spend your time. What you read. Who you talk to. What you build on your campus. It all flows from that one decision.

The decision is the practice.

A School Leader practicing Selfmentorship asks different questions.

Selfmentorship looks like a principal who comes back from a bad day, sits down, and asks: What worked today, what didn’t, and what will I do differently tomorrow? They don’t do this because someone told them to reflect. They do it because they decided that understanding their own patterns matters.

It looks like a leader who reads books outside of education and asks: What can I bring back to my campus from this? Not because the district assigned it, but because they know the echo chamber is real, and the best ideas for their campus might be hiding in a book about architecture, or psychology, or how great restaurants build culture.

It looks like Kory Kane having hundreds of conversations about his own leadership and asking: What does this situation require of me, and am I becoming that leader? He turned every hard decision, every high-stakes communication, and every moment of uncertainty into a point of growth. He decided a handful of coaching conversations a year wasn’t enough for the job he was trying to do.

The common thread isn’t the tool or the book or the number of conversations. It’s the question underneath all of it:

Who am I becoming, and is that who I want to be?

Play-It-Safe Principals never ask this question. They end the year relieved it’s over.

Ruckus Makers can’t stop asking it.

I know, because I’ve been asking this question for over 10 years. (It’s why Better Leaders Better Schools exists.) Back then, I was an assistant principal in Chicago—the third-largest school district in the nation. I had a good mentor in my principal. But he wasn’t always available, and the district wasn’t offering much else. What development existed went to the people who had already been identified as rising stars. Everybody else figured it out alone.

At first, I tried to solve my lack of development the obvious way.

I organized dinners for local school leaders so we had a place to get together, talk about the work, and try to improve. Traffic, life, and a busy calendar got in the way. The dinners didn’t last.

But the problem didn’t go away.

I’d gone to a conference called the Global Leadership Summit, and something the host said from the stage stuck with me: Everybody wins when a leader gets better. I looked at my own calendar after that and saw a blank where leadership development was supposed to be.

So, I had a choice:

1. I could throw a pity party about how nobody’s mentoring me, the district doesn’t care, and there’s no support for people like me.

2. Or I could take control.

Shortly after, I started a podcast. I’d interview people who knew more than me, do my learning in public, and close my own leadership gap one conversation at a time. Without knowing it, I was practicing Selfmentorship before it had a name.

The school leaders who practice Selfmentorship build a future that outlasts them.

They grow themselves and those around them.

For example, Gene Park used a framework called Sticky Core Values to help staff, students, and parents actually know (and own) what his school stood for. He didn’t use the laminated-poster version of values. He used language that the community helped shape. Staff, students, and parents knew the values. And when Gene started reworking his school’s intervention system so every student could get the support they needed, that same culture of shared ownership made the work possible.

Scott Long also did Sticky Core Values, and his science teachers built a whole unit around it. Students grew marigolds in class as a living expression of the school’s values. He went from assistant principal to principal to assistant superintendent, and the work he started on one campus kept rippling.

Demetrius Ball became a principal at a middle school, then a high school in Northern California. He looked at what kids in the English department were reading and pushed for a more diverse curriculum that reflected their experiences. He built a student wellness center so kids had somewhere to go when they were wound up and struggling, before discipline became the only option. When the superintendent visited, multiple teachers walked up to say he was the best principal they’d ever worked for. In 2025, he was named the Administrator of the Year for Region 6 in California.

Doc Chris Jones (Doc, for short) pulled off a socially distanced prom for his seniors at Gillette Stadium during COVID, when most schools had canceled everything. He’d also gotten rid of finals, not because finals are automatically wrong, but because he’d decided his campus needed to be more focused on learning in real time than on a single high-stakes test at the end of the year. He has since launched a podcast, become a national speaker, and published books. In 2022, he was named the Massachusetts School Counselors Association (MASCA) Administrator of the Year.

None of these leaders had a better system handed to them or were in perfect districts. What they had was a decision that their development was their responsibility. And that decision unlocked everything else.

Look closely at these leaders, and you’ll see the same traits:

• They are empathetic and generous with their staff and students. But they don’t come to campus with a fixed, top-down definition of what’s best for kids. That definition gets built with the community, and they hold people accountable to it together. That’s a subtle but important thing. Leaders who develop themselves tend to stay curious. They keep asking. They don’t arrive with all the answers.

• They aren’t hurried. There’s a difference between urgency and busyness, and the best Ruckus Makers know it. They’re productive and purposeful. They know the difference between handling what’s in front of them and leading into the future.

• They author their own game. Play-It-Safe Principals work inside someone else’s rules. The handbook and precedent exist. When a hard situation comes up, there’s a page to turn to. That system has knowledge, but it also has limits. Leaders who operate within those limits will only ever get what the system was designed to produce.

Ruckus Makers Do School Different, and there’s no manual for that. So they build their own, one decision, one conversation, and one year of growth at a time.

That’s Selfmentorship, and it starts with a decision you can make right now.

How to Develop a Selfmentorship Practice

Deciding that your development is your responsibility is the first move.

Once you make that decision, you face a second problem: Nobody ever showed you how to develop yourself. The system trained you to wait for external triggers. You’re rejecting that, but now what?

Selfmentorship isn’t self-improvement for its own sake. It isn’t a morning routine you white-knuckle through for two weeks and abandon. It’s a set of practices you build into the rhythm of your leadership, so growth stops being something you fit in when the calendar allows and becomes how you normally operate.

Here are five practices that Ruckus Makers use.

1. Look into the Accountability Mirror

Like most leaders, you already know your gaps.

The problem isn’t that you lack self-awareness. The problem is that naming what’s hard (out loud, to yourself) feels like failure. So, you stay vague. You tell yourself you’re working on it. You stay busy enough that you don’t have to sit with it.

The Accountability Mirror is simple:

What am I struggling with right now, and am I willing to say it clearly?

You don’t want to do this in a self-flagellating way, so don’t list everything wrong with you. Just get a clear-eyed look at where you are. One leader I work with, Justin King, went through this and landed on something that changed how he ran his whole week: I no longer see more hours as the solution. Once he named that gap, he started closing it. Justin’s first move ? He left at 5pm. Every day. The work wasn’t done, but he made a decision that presence at home mattered more than one more hour at school. His staff noticed. The culture shifted.

Selfmentorship is being honest about where you are right now.

2. Build a Daily Reflection Practice

A lot of school leaders are great at reflecting on everyone else. They debrief their teachers. They think about the student experience. They process hard conversations with staff.

How often do you debrief yourself?

A daily reflection practice is not navel-gazing. It’s the only way you start to see your own patterns. Over time, it becomes a personal playbook that’s specific to you, your campus, and your leadership.

For example, here’s what my daily reflection looks like:

In the morning, before the day takes over, I use Dan Sullivan’s D.O.S system to ask:

• What dangers must I look out for today?

• What opportunities must I capture?

• What strengths do I want to build on?

• What are my Big 3 things that matter today?

At the end of the day, I reflect on:

• What new thing did I do?

• What worked and what didn’t?

• What did I learn?

• What’s one thing I’ll do differently tomorrow?

Every week, I review my goals and ask:

• What progress did I make?

• Am I happy with that?

• What do I need to focus on next week?

Monthly, I zoom out:

• How am I doing on my leadership development?

• What do I need to keep growing?

• How will I get meaningful feedback?

I also keep an EPS Journal (Effort, Progress, Success) based on Dr. Nate Zinsser’s book The Confident Mind. The idea is simple: track what you’re putting in, what’s moving, and what’s working. Do that consistently, and you run on data about yourself.

Do this every month, and you build a personal playbook for your school.

Skip it, and every year feels like your first year.

3. Find Your Mirror People

A mentor is great, but you can’t wait to be assigned one.

Mirror People are the people in your life who know you well enough to tell you the truth, especially the hard truth. These aren’t yes people or the ones who tell you what you want to hear. They’re the ones who push back, who ask the question you were hoping nobody would ask, and who care more about your growth than your comfort.

When someone holds up a mirror and shows you where you need to change, you can’t run from that reality.

You build your Mirror People network the same way you build anything: intentionally.

You don’t wait for a district to assign you a coach. You go looking for people who are doing interesting work, having hard conversations, and growing in ways you want to. You reach out. You show up. You give as much as you take.

Personally, I started building my group of Mirror People when the local school leadership dinners didn’t work. I went digital and national by starting a podcast, creating a Mastermind, and having conversations with leaders across the country. Kory Kane built his group of Mirror People by showing up to every call, doing the work, and using every available resource (including Digital Danny as a thinking partner). The form your Mirror People take matters less than the decision to build it.

Don’t wait to be assigned a mentor. Build your mirrors.

4. Expand Your Inputs Beyond Education

The education echo chamber is real.

You stop getting new ideas when everyone you read, everyone you follow, and every conference you attend is talking about school leadership. You get variations on the same ideas. Your thinking narrows without you noticing.

That’s why the leaders in my Mastermind program intentionally don’t read education books. Because the leaders who grow the most tend to be the ones with the widest input. So, we read about psychology, architecture, restaurant culture, military strategy, and behavioral economics. We go to events outside of education. We surround ourselves with thinking that has nothing to do with schools, yet find that almost all of it applies.

Here are a few books we’ve read over the years:

• Essentialism by Greg McKeown: The disciplined pursuit of less. If you want to protect time for your own development, this is where to start.

• Deep Work by Cal Newport: How to do the kind of focused, high-value thinking that actually moves your campus forward, in a job designed to interrupt you constantly.

• The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle: What the best teams in the world do to build trust and shared purpose. Applies directly to every staff meeting you’ll ever run.

• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown: Courage, vulnerability, and what it takes to lead people through hard things without losing them.

• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz: A former FBI hostage negotiator on how to have high-stakes conversations. Every difficult parent meeting, non-renewal, and union conversation gets easier after this one.

• Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday: On slowing down enough to think clearly. The antidote to the culture of busy.

• The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath: Why certain experiences stick and others disappear. Useful for anyone trying to build a campus culture worth showing up for.

• Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke: How to make better decisions under uncertainty with incomplete information. Which is every decision you make as a principal.

• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: The one book on this list that will make you reconsider every complaint you’ve ever had about your job. And then make you better at it.

• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson: If you’re building a campus where every kid belongs, this belongs on your shelf.

• The Promises of Giants by John Amaechi: A book that challenges each reader to consider the responsibility and impact of leadership on an environment.

If you approach Selfmentorship this way, authors become mentors. Podcasters become thought partners. A book about how a hospital redesigned its culture can teach you more about your school’s personal development problem than most educational personal development ever will.

Get outside the education echo chamber, and your campus will feel the impact.

5. Design a System for Your Own Development

Without structure, personal development becomes random.

Random development is what you already have. A good book here, a great conversation there, a conference once in a while. None of it compounds because none of it connects.

A smart system makes Selfmentorship compound.

One tool I come back to is the Harada Method—a 9x9 grid with your super goal at the center, eight life pillars around it, and eight concrete supports under each pillar. You look at it every day to remember what matters to you, underneath all the noise. (You can get a free Harada Method template here.)

Pair that with a powerful question from the book The ONE Thing:

What’s the one thing I could do today that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?

Play-It-Safe Principals have a long list and feel like they’re losing every day because it never gets done. Ruckus Makers also have a long list, but they know their one big thing.

Start there, every day.

You are the chief opportunity and the chief bottleneck in your organization. Your school can only grow as much as you’re willing to grow. That’s actually good news because it means the lever is in your hands. You don’t need the district to schedule it. You don’t need a coach to show up. You don’t need the calendar to clear.

You just need to start.

Using AI as a Reflective Mirror

There’s one more tool worth naming as you begin Selfmentorship: AI.

AI won’t replace your Mirror People. It won’t replace the Mastermind or the books or the daily reflection practice. But for a lot of Ruckus Makers, it’s become the tool that ties everything else together because it’s available at 11 pm when a teacher just quit, and at 6 am when you’re trying to think through a hard conversation with a parent before the building opens, and every moment in between when you need a thinking partner and there’s nobody around.

Specifically, AI built for school leadership.

Kory Kane’s 910 conversations didn’t happen because he had a lot of free time. They happened because he found an AI tool that could meet him exactly where he was when he needed it, and help him think more clearly about whatever problem was in front of him.

When I asked him what the emotional outcome of a good session felt like, he didn’t say relief or confidence. He said momentum.

“It helps clear your mind. You’ve had all these thoughts and ideas, and now you have a direction. You can start making momentum with where you want to go next.”

That’s what a good thinking partner does, and it’s what AI can do for your Selfmentorship practice if you know how to use it.

As a school leader, you can use AI for 4 jobs:

1. Think it through. Something lands on your desk, and you’re not sure what path forward makes sense. You need to talk it out to weigh the options, surface what you might be missing, and get out of your own head. This is the coaching conversation you don’t always have access to. AI can hold that conversation with you at any hour, without judgment or an agenda.

2. Apply a tool or framework. Over a decade of working with school leaders, I’ve built a library of tools for culture, communication, and leadership development. The problem most leaders have isn’t that the tools don’t exist. It’s knowing which one fits the situation in front of them. Describe the problem, and a well-trained AI can pull the right framework and walk you through applying it.

3. Challenge the story. Sometimes you’re not stuck on a decision—you’re stuck in a perspective. You’ve decided how something is going, and you need someone to push back, ask the question you haven’t asked yourself, and show you the 30,000-foot view. A good AI tool will reframe the situation without telling you what to think.

4. Communicate it. You know what needs to be said, and the message is clear in your head. But this one matters (a teacher non-renewal, a hard parent conversation, a high-stakes message to staff), and you need it to land. AI can help you find the words and anticipate how it will be received before you reply.

Those four jobs are what Kory was hiring Digital Danny to do, even before the tool was trained to do them well. He figured it out himself by showing up and doing the work.

A note: If you want to go deeper on how to use AI as a Selfmentorship tool (with specific prompts, examples, and workflows), keep an eye out for the next mini-book.

The gap between what the school system offers and the development you need is massive.

Kory closed that gap by using every tool available to him. AI was one of those tools. As a school leader, it can be a significant one because it makes development work possible on days when your schedule is packed. Even a 5-minute thinking session with AI can help you work through a problem or teach you how to respond more clearly.

AI is a guide along the way, where you’re still doing the work.

You Can Transform From Permission-Based Development To Selfmentorship

One misconception keeps a lot of school leaders stuck.

They look at the Ruckus Makers—the ones doing transformational work on their campuses, growing their careers, building something that lasts—and they assume those leaders got lucky. Someone handed them the path. They were chosen, had the right district, or started with advantages that made the difference.

That’s not what happened.

Being a Ruckus Maker means having consistent, daily, radical ownership of your own development. Taken seriously over time, that kind of ownership creates its own luck. It opens doors. It builds the instincts, relationships, and reputation that make opportunity possible. But it starts with a decision, not a circumstance.

Nobody is coming to hand you the path.

Personally, I found this to be the most empowering mindset because it means you don’t have to wait. The leaders you admire didn’t wait. They decided their development was their responsibility and got to work.

You can make that decision right now.

• You can honestly look at your gaps instead of staying busy enough to avoid them.

• You can build a daily reflection habit that compounds into a personal playbook.

• You can find the Mirror People who will tell you the truth.

• You can expand your mind outside the education echo chamber.

• You can design a Selfmentorship system that makes your growth intentional instead of accidental.

• You can use every tool available to you (books, conversations, AI, and community) to become the leader your campus needs you to be.

You can practice the art and science of Selfmentorship.

The leaders who practice it end the year asking great questions, building toward something bigger, and ready to go again.

That’s the Ruckus Maker difference. You can create a campus experience worth showing up for—for your students, your staff, and yourself.

Don’t wait to be chosen.

Choose yourself.

– Danny, Chief Ruckus Maker

The Day I Met Scott Long

Scott Long was a second-year principal at Doherty Elementary in Michigan when he called me.

He wasn’t in crisis. His school wasn’t failing. His staff wasn’t revolting. By every traditional measure, things were fine.

Fine was the problem.

Scott had been listening to the podcast. He’d joined the Mastermind. He was the kind of leader who heard an idea and actually did something with it … which, if you’ve spent any time around school leaders, you know is rarer than it sounds.

He’d heard me teach something called Sticky Core Values, and it had lit him up. Not because his school was broken. Because he could see clearly what was missing.

“I talked to my wife about it,” he told me. “Her company has core values. I asked her to name them.”

She couldn’t.

Not one.

And she wasn’t checked out. She wasn’t disengaged. She was a high-performing professional at a company that cared enough to write the values down, design them into slides, and present them at all-hands meetings.

She still couldn’t name them.

Scott saw his school in that moment. And if he’s being honest, most of his staff probably couldn’t name those either.

That conversation started something that would eventually ripple through his entire building, show up in science classrooms, travel with his staff long after he’d moved on and get retold by a seven-year-old girl holding a marigold.

But we’ll get there.

First, let’s talk about the poster.

The Poster Nobody Reads

Walk into almost any school in America and you’ll find it.

Hanging in the main hallway, usually laminated, sometimes framed. Big enough to read from a distance. Probably designed in Canva by someone with good intentions and a free afternoon.

Integrity. Excellence. Respect. Courage. Innovation.

Or some version of those five words.

Nobody reads it.

Not really.

Not in the way that changes anything. Not in the way that helps a teacher decide how to handle a hard moment in a classroom, or helps a student understand why the adult in front of them is asking them to do something hard, or helps a new staff member understand who this school actually is.

The words just hang there.

And it’s not your fault.

That poster probably existed before you arrived. Those values were chosen by a committee, at a meeting, probably a decade ago, by people who meant well and then moved on. The system handed them to you the same way it handed you the keys and said don’t mess this up.

But here’s what I want you to sit with: those values could hang in any school in America.

Any. Single. School.

And because of that, they’re forgettable.

Courage? Sure. Integrity? Obviously. Respect? Every school in the country has that one. These are what Patrick Lencioni calls “permission to play” values — the minimum standard, the table stakes, the things we just assume about any halfway decent organization.

They’re not wrong. They’re just invisible.

Seth Godin has a concept called the Purple Cow. The idea is simple: when you’re driving through the countryside and you see cows, you don’t notice them. Brown and black spotted cows are everywhere. You’ve seen a thousand of them. Your brain filters them out.

But if you saw a purple cow?

You’d stop the car.

Traditional core values are brown cows. Nobody stops. Nobody looks. Nobody remembers.

Your school deserves a purple cow.

What Sticky Core Values Actually Are

Before I tell you what sticky core values are, let me tell you what they are not.

They are not a rebrand. You don’t fix a forgettable culture by hiring a designer and choosing better fonts.

They are not aspirational. This is the trap most leaders fall into. They write the values they wish their school lived by instead of the ones it already does. Aspirational values are what every school claims. They read like a mission statement that could belong to anyone.

And they are definitely not one word. One word gives you nothing to hold onto. One word is a bumper sticker. One word does not tell me how to handle the parent in my doorway at 7:30am.

Sticky core values are memorable phrases that tell the story of how your school operates at its best.

Five qualities make them work:

• Simple. Easy to say, easy to remember. If you can’t say it to a stressed-out teacher in the middle of a hard week and have it land, it’s not simple enough.

• Meaningful. There’s a story behind it. A real one. Something your community lived, something that happened here, something specific enough that it belongs to you.

• Behavior-driven. It tells people how to act. Not what to believe in the abstract — what to do when things get hard.

• Memorable. It doesn’t sound like every other school. It could not be copy-pasted into a different building and make the same sense.

• Reinforced constantly. It shows up in meetings, in recognition, in hard conversations, in the way you celebrate people. It’s not on a poster. It’s in the room.

That last one is worth slowing down on.

A sticky core value that only lives on the wall is just a better-looking poster. The stickiness doesn’t come from the phrase. It comes from the stories you tell about it, the rituals you build around it, and the consistency with which you bring it back.

But the stickiness starts somewhere specific.

It starts with a story.

The Story Is the Glue

Scott Long is a huge Rocky fan.

Almost to a fault, he’ll tell you.

When he started thinking about what a sticky core value might look like for Doherty Elementary, he kept coming back to one scene from the original Rocky. Mickey — Rocky’s gruff, demanding, deeply loving trainer — gives Rocky a pair of cufflinks that belonged to Rocky Marciano. He puts his arm around him. He pushes him harder than anyone ever has. He tells him he believes in him.

That relationship, between a mentor and someone willing to be pushed, was already alive at Doherty.

Scott had watched it.

In his first year as principal, before he had a name for what he was seeing, he noticed how the staff had each other’s backs. How they supported each other through hard things. How they showed up for each other the way Mickey showed up for Rocky.

So he gave it a name.

Rocky’s Cufflinks.

And then he did something most leaders wouldn’t do.

He brought it to his staff as an example (not as a decree). He put Rocky posters around the building. He asked people to guess what it meant. He created space for curiosity before he ever explained the idea.

And then he said: now you try.

What followed changed his school.

A teacher named Sophia — a musician who moonlighted as a performer doing Motown and classic rock — came up with R-E-S-P-E-C-T, connecting it to Aretha Franklin and to a night the staff had watched her perform and seen something extraordinary come out from under her voice. Everyone in that room had been there. Everyone remembered. The value already existed. She just gave it a name.

A teacher named Leah designed Find Your Marigold — the idea that marigolds grow and thrive no matter what surrounds them, and that the staff at Doherty could be that for each other and for their students. Resilient. Positive. A force.

Another teacher created All Hands In — a ritual and a value at once, with a call-and-response that ended every gathering: Who are we? Who are we? We are … we are … Doherty, go Dolphins.

Scott didn’t create those last three. He’s proud to tell you that.

And that’s the point.

The story is the glue.

Not the phrase itself. The story behind the phrase.

Rocky’s Cufflinks means something because people know the scene, know what Mickey meant to Rocky, and can see it in how their colleagues show up for each other. R-E-S-P-E-C-T means something because they were in that club that night watching Sophia perform and felt something they didn’t have words for yet. Find Your Marigold means something because Leah put her whole self into designing it.

Values that are handed down don’t work because they have no story.

Values that are built together stick because the story belongs to everyone.

Patrick Lencioni says your core values should be ones you’re willing to get in trouble for because you’re living them out that fully.

That’s the test.

But you can only pass that test if you can tell the story of why the value matters in the first place.

A handful of sentences. Something any staff member could tell a new hire in the first week. Something a student could explain to their parents at dinner.

That’s the standard.

How to Build Them Without Doing It Alone

Here’s where most leaders get stuck.

The idea sounds right. The examples land. And then they go back to their building and stare at a blank page wondering where to start.

Here’s the process Scott used, and it’s the one I’ve seen work most consistently.

You go first.

Don’t walk into the room empty-handed. Bring one to the table. Model what you’re asking for. Scott came in with Rocky’s Cufflinks already developed — the story, the meaning, the connection to what he’d observed in his school. He didn’t present it as here are your values. He presented it as here’s what one of these looks like. Now you try.

That’s different.

It gives people a template, not just a task. They can see the shape of the thing before they’re asked to build it.

One important note: hold it loosely. If Rocky’s Cufflinks hadn’t resonated, Scott would have let it go. You’re not presenting a done deal. You’re modeling a process. There’s a difference.

Go collaborative.

Small groups work best. Three to four people. Give them a starting point like your existing norms, your social contract, whatever language your school already uses to describe itself. Ask them to look at where you’re already exceptional. Not where you want to be. Where you already are.

Then ask for the story behind it.

“Where does that show up in our culture? Tell me a moment. Tell me a name. Tell me what it looked like.”

You’ll find the stories are already there. Your job is to excavate them, not invent them.

Let the community vote.

Draft phrases go back to the full staff. They read them, think about them, and choose the ones that hit hardest. This step matters more than most leaders realize. Authorship builds ownership, but so does choice.

When your staff selects the values they’ll live by, they’re not just following a leader’s direction. They’re making a commitment.

Give them legs.

This is where sticky core values come alive or die.

You need rituals. You need artifacts. You need ways to bring the values into the room on a regular basis.

Scott built a plaque where names get added when someone lives out a value. He started weekly check-ins where staff submitted shout-outs (up to 50 a week) naming a colleague and the value they’d lived. He collected them all and delivered them to inboxes every Monday morning. He put fat head logos outside classroom doors when someone was recognized.

He opened meetings with the values and closed with All Hands In.

He made the values the center of how his school celebrated, corrected, and recognized people.

That’s what reinforced constantly actually means. Not a slide in a back-to-school presentation. Not a poster in the hallway. The values showing up everywhere, all the time, until they’re so embedded in how the building operates that they don’t need you to exist.

The Long Game

Year One is exciting.

The values are new. People are fired up. There’s momentum in the building. You see it in how staff talks to each other and how students talk about their school.

Year Three is where most schools go back to the poster.

The energy fades. New staff come in and don’t know the stories. The values start to feel like old news. And slowly, without anyone deciding to let them go, they drift back into the wallpaper.

This is the challenge nobody warns you about.

And so, a reframe.

Your sticky core values are a curriculum. Teach them like one.

That means you don’t teach them once in August and assume people got it. You come back to them. Every year. Every month. Every week if you can.

Brené Brown has a move I love for this: three examples of what this looks like, three non-examples. Get your staff in a room and ask, Give me three times you’ve seen Rocky’s Cufflinks lived out this year. Give me three times we fell short. That conversation does more for culture than any keynote speaker ever will … unless you’re bringing me in :)

It materializes the value. It makes it real, specific, and honest.

You also don’t need a new school theme every August.

I see it every year on social media.

Principals asking each other what their theme is going to be, hunting for something fresh and clever and memorable. That’s the wrong question. Your school theme is your sticky core values. They don’t expire. They don’t need to be retired and replaced. They need to be lived more deeply.

The goal is not novelty. The goal is depth.

Once you have the strategy, your job as a leader is mostly to repeat it until you’re bored. And then keep repeating it, because by the time you’re bored, your community is just starting to really hear it.

Use them in hiring. When you’re bringing someone new into the building, the values aren’t just a slide in the onboarding deck. They’re a conversation. Does this person understand what Rocky’s Cufflinks means here? Can they tell me what it would look like in their classroom?

Use them in hard conversations. When a staff member falls short of the expectation, of the culture, of what the team deserves. The values give you language. This isn’t personal. This is about what we agreed to. This is about Rocky’s Cufflinks, and what we said that means here.

Use them in celebration. Not just big recognition moments. The small ones. The Monday shout-out email. The name on the plaque. The moment you stop someone in the hallway and say that was Find Your Marigold and I saw it and I want you to know I saw it.

Those moments compound. Over time, they become the culture.

What Scott Said Before He Left

A few years after our first conversation, I checked back in with Scott.

He’d been thinking about what would happen if he walked away from Doherty. If he got a different opportunity, moved to a different building, moved up.

He told me he was confident the culture would carry on.

Not because he was indispensable. Because he wasn’t.

The values didn’t live in him anymore. They lived in the building. They lived in the plaque on the wall and the fat heads outside the classroom doors and the Monday morning shout-outs and the way Sam Huge (the teacher who created All Hands In) stopped Scott at the end of a closing staff meeting as he was walking out the door.

They had a ritual: everyone pulls in close, hands in the center, call-and-response. Who are we? Who are we? We are … we are … Doherty, go Dolphins.

Sam wasn’t letting the meeting end without it. “You forgot our All Hands In,” she said. Sam remembered. Sam owned it. Sam would have been bothered if it didn’t happen.

That’s what you’re building toward.

Not a culture that depends on you being present. A culture that has a life of its own because the stories, the phrases, and the rituals belong to everyone.

Scott went on to become an assistant superintendent. The work he started at Doherty kept rippling. His science teachers built a unit around Find Your Marigold. Students grew actual marigolds in class as a living expression of what the school stood for.

One of those students was a second grade student we will call Kate.

Kate was leaving Doherty at the end of second grade, moving on to third grade at a different school. In her science class, they’d been growing marigolds. Every student had their own plant.

She decided to grow one for Scott.

She tended it every day. It grew bigger than any of the others. And on the last day of school, she walked into his office and handed it to him.

“Thanks for helping us all be marigolds,” she said.

She was seven years old.

She understood the value. She believed it. She lived it. She found a way to express it that nobody taught her.

That’s what a sticky core value does when it’s built right. It moves from the leader’s intention into the community’s identity. It moves from a phrase on a poster into a seven-year-old’s hands.

Your Move

Here’s where I want to leave you.

You don’t need perfect conditions to start this.

You don’t need a whole professional development day, a consulting firm, or your superintendent’s permission. You need one story — already happening at your school – that deserves a name.

One thing your school already does at its best that no other school does quite the same way. One moment of excellence that your community would recognize instantly if you held it up and said this. This is who we are.

Find that. Name it. Bring it to your staff and say here’s what one of these looks like. Now you try.

The rest follows.

Play-It-Safe Principals hang the poster and hope people absorb it somehow.

Ruckus Makers build something their community actually remembers, believes in, and lives out long after the leader who started it has moved on.

Your school is already full of purple cows.

Go find them.

👋 Welcome to Ruckus Makers. This mini-book is free for 30 days. Each month, we publish mini-books that help school leaders learn the art and science of Selfmentorship. Subscribers also get access to the Ruckus Maker Club, monthly live AMA with Danny, Coaching Notes, The Rewrite, and the full archive. Become a subscriber here.

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Create a Culture Where Teachers Thrive

In the book The Culture Code, author Daniel Coyle describes the key to Spurs coach Gregg Popovich’s success. Despite the intense competitive culture of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and his own reputation as a “bulldog,” Popovich has cultivated a team of selfless individuals who work together for the betterment of the group. 

His secret?

“‘A lot of coaches can yell or be nice, but what Pop does is different’ says assistant coach Chip Engelland. ‘He delivers two things over and over: He’ll tell you the truth with no bullshit, and then he’ll love you to death.’” (Coyle, pg. 52)

I love this quote because it perfectly captures not only what makes incredible basketball teams, but also what makes an incredible professional culture at schools. All of us have a deep, human need for these two components of connection: truth and love.

Two Reasons to Stay

When it comes down to it, truth and love are at the heart of why teachers stay. Most districts and schools start with the money, by increasing teachers’ salaries and offering bonuses or incentives. And that’s a good start. But regardless of whether compensation is within your control, compensation alone won’t be enough to make them stay.

It has to come from the culture you’ve created in your building. 

Interestingly, a 2023 McKinsey study of teacher retention confirmed that although compensation is one of the top reasons people leave—increased compensation is not a top reason that teachers choose to stay. 

No, the two reasons why people stay align with the two questions I always tell leaders their teachers are asking:

1. Am I doing a good job? Tell them the truth. 

2. Do I belong here? Show them love.

Let’s explore these.

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👋 Welcome to Ruckus Makers. This mini-book is free for 30 days. Each month, we publish mini-books that help school leaders learn the art and science of Selfmentorship. Subscribers also get access to the Ruckus Maker Club, monthly live AMA with Danny, Coaching Notes, The Rewrite, and the full archive. Become a subscriber here.

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Chapter 4. Invest in Growth Through Mentoring

In Chapter 3, you worked with your new teachers (and all of your teachers, if you hadn’t already!) to set meaningful goals for their growth—goals that actually stretch them, goals that they’re actually interested in meeting. 

Now, your job is to invest in their professional growth and give them autonomy and support to meet the goals in their plan.

We do this through mentoring.

Most districts include mentoring as part of their induction program. This is standard practice for new teachers, and for good reason. 

But if you’re thinking this is something you already have checked off your list, hold tight. Just as with onboarding, your mentoring program is worth taking another look at as an opportunity to provide support not just in your teachers’ first years, but throughout their career at your school. All teachers (and leaders) deserve high-quality mentoring from someone who takes a genuine interest in them and is there to help them grow and succeed. 

What we’re talking about here is building a culture of mentoring, where teachers can pursue their goals for professional growth within the context of a caring community of support. As the leader, you can set the foundation for this community of support with the ABCs of Powerful Professional Development.^Ⓡ

The ABCs of Powerful Professional Development^Ⓡ

In my 2022 book Mastermind, I introduced a new framework designed to intentionally integrate Authenticity, Belonging, and Challenge into teachers’ and leaders’ learning experiences. Amazing things happen when staff members feel like they can show up as themselves, are connected to colleagues, and are challenged to grow. Together, these three elements provide a powerful foundation for transforming your school’s culture.

What’s more is that using the ABCs as principles to ground all of your professional development ensures that all staff in the school have a common language and common expectations for the quality and culture of their own learning environment. 

Let’s explore each of the ABCs.

Authenticity

It’s important for your school to allow teachers to show up as themselves—to bring all of their unique strengths and passions to the table, and to be recognized for those valuable characteristics. This requires psychological safety, the first requirement for authenticity. 

Remember Amy and Rick from the introduction? As nice as Rick was to his teachers, he hadn’t been intentional about creating a place where his teachers felt safe enough to be honest with him about their needs—which is why they came to me instead. 

This is a common challenge for leaders, because you have to go above and beyond to invite the type of honesty that will transform your school. In the Ruckus Maker Mastermind™, there are several activities and norms we use to create psychological safety in our groups. I shared over a dozen ideas for cultivating psychological safety in my book Mastermind, but here are just a few of my favorites:

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👋 Welcome to Ruckus Makers. This mini-book is free for 30 days. Each month, we publish mini-books that help school leaders learn the art and science of Selfmentorship. Subscribers also get access to the Ruckus Maker Club, monthly live AMA with Danny, Coaching Notes, The Rewrite, and the full archive. Become a subscriber here.

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Set Teachers Up for Success With Onboarding 

For most schools, onboarding isn’t the highest priority. Usually, it’s relegated to the realms of HR and leaders spend their time thinking about other things they believe are more important. 

But you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to set your teachers up for success if you gloss over this impactful moment in a teacher’s career at your school.

Yes, teachers new to your school need to sign all of the policies, learn how the payroll systems work, and understand how to request time off. And most states have requirements or recommendations around induction you’ll need to honor as well. 

That’s not what I want to focus on here. 

Rather, I want to help you maximize the onboarding experience for new teachers so that they feel excited, energized, and prepared to jump into action on their first day. My goal is that every teacher feels empowered to contribute meaningfully right from the start.

So how do we do that? 

Design Your Onboarding Playbook

The most prepared schools have a playbook for their teachers’ success—and I’m not talking about the employee manual or handbook that everyone is given by HR!

No, this playbook is your new teachers’ deeper dive into understanding the culture of the school that they’re joining. It should cover all of the standard logistics and institutional knowledge they need to know: policies, procedures, processes, ethics code, and contact information. But it should go much deeper than that, too. 

To start, add a customized letter at the front of the playbook to tell your new hires exactly what strengths you saw in them from their interviews, and how you envision them fitting into the picture at your school. This is a powerful way to engage teachers and continue to build a strong relationship with them right from the get-go. In fact, consider sending them a small, personalized gift along with the playbook to reinforce your gratitude and excitement for them. 

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👋 Welcome to Ruckus Makers. This mini-book is free for 30 days. Each month, we publish mini-books that help school leaders learn the art and science of Selfmentorship. Subscribers also get access to the Ruckus Maker Club, monthly live AMA with Danny, Coaching Notes, The Rewrite, and the full archive. Become a subscriber here.

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Rethink Interviews to Make the Best Hire

I could tell as soon as a candidate walked in the door at our school in Texas whether they would be hired or not. It wasn’t because I have telepathic abilities and could read their minds to know if they have the right experience or skills. It wasn’t because I had secret, early access to their resume or cover letter during the interview process either.

No, unfortunately, it was way more basic than that.

It was all about how they dressed.

I knew that someone could get hired at my school if they were an alumni of the school, had attended Texas A&M, and wore Vineyard Vines. You had to look the part—both on paper and in person. And other than that, it didn’t matter how much someone could or couldn’t contribute to the health of our learning environment. I remember watching candidates with interesting ideas and novel perspectives and incredible experience interview for open positions, knowing that because they didn’t look the part, they would never get the job. It was incredibly frustrating for me.

At most districts, the biases and prejudices surrounding the interview process are not so extreme or obvious—but they still exist. 

Most of us pride ourselves on being able to read others, on being good judges of character. It’s hard not to trust the feeling we get in the pit of our stomach that someone will or will not be a good “culture fit” for our team.

The problem is that our intuition is not a reliable indicator of someone’s efficacy in the classroom or their future success in our district. Our intuition usually tells us to prefer someone who is just like us, whether or not we consciously realize it or not. This is how implicit bias works. 

At my previous school district, they suffered from the halo effect—a specific type of implicit bias in which the hiring team allows one overt, potentially superficial detail about a candidate (like the right “look,” right school background, etc.) cast a positive glow over everything about them and blind them to possible red flags. 

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👋 Welcome to Ruckus Makers. This mini-book is free for 30 days. Each month, we publish mini-books that help school leaders learn the art and science of Selfmentorship. Subscribers also get access to the Ruckus Maker Club, monthly live AMA with Danny, Coaching Notes, The Rewrite, and the full archive. Become a subscriber here.

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How This Book Can Help

This micro-book will teach you about the three principles of teacher retention and how you can rethink every step of your hiring and development process so that teachers (and everyone else at school!) can flourish.

• In Part 1, we’ll introduce the book and talk about how to attract the right team through your vision, create a teacher pipeline, and cultivate diversity on your team.

• In Part 2, we’ll bring the interview process under the microscope, since so much of a successful relationship depends on the expectations that are set at the beginning. (Note, this lesson works for life, too!) We will also discuss onboarding teachers and why the old ways we do “induction” need to change.

• In Part 4, we’ll talk about mentoring and coaching so that teachers continue to grow and feel challenged in the best possible ways.

• And finally, in Part 5, we’ll talk about how the three principles of retention can help us create a culture where teachers can thrive.

• You’ll also find a set of reflection questions to help you apply the three principles consistently in every step of the process. 

We can’t stop teachers leaving the profession. Some teachers aren’t meant to be in education—and that’s ok. We can wish them godspeed and good fortune wherever they go. But we’re here to find the ones who want to stay, the ones looking for reasons to stay, and give them a hope they can hold onto.

Introduction

I had never received an email like Amy’s before.

It was the night before our Ruckus Maker Mastermind™ event, and I was excited to welcome several of the school leaders I had been coaching for two in-depth days of mentoring and community. But Amy’s email stopped me in my tracks.

Amy’s principal, Rick, was a leader in the Ruckus Maker Mastermind™. Two years earlier, I had spoken at their district about leadership best practices, and I had told the staff that if they ever had any concerns about Rick, to call me, text me, or email me, and I would try to help.

Now here Amy was, cashing in on my offer. On behalf of several of the teachers at Rick’s school, Amy was writing me as a last ditch effort, hoping that I could help them resolve what they felt was the key problem at their school: Rick didn’t have teachers’ backs when it came to conflicts with parents. Things had gotten so bad that several teachers were ready to walk.

“We know he will be meeting with you,” Amy wrote, “so wanted to share with you in hopes of being able to address this or bring it up. We want growth… Otherwise he may start losing good staff members.” 

Wow. When you make an offer like I had at Amy’s school, you hope people will take you up, but you don’t really expect people will. I’m so glad Amy did.

You can probably think of at least one or two (or ten) teachers like Amy and her colleagues. According to new research from McKinsey & Company, there are roughly 900,000 teachers (about one-third of the teaching force) planning to leave (McKinsey, 2023). Maybe you were one of these teachers as well: depleted, demoralized, and unconvinced that things would ever change. 

The truth is, every teacher—and every leader for that matter—wants to believe that they’re doing meaningful work, and that their efforts are worthwhile. 

That’s why people give up hope, isn’t it? Because they’re convinced that nothing will change. 

But that’s where they’re wrong.

Because now, these teachers have you. 

You’ve probably heard the old saying that “People don’t quit jobs; they quit bad bosses.” The reverse is also true: People don’t stay for the job; they stay for the people on their team. They stay because they have support and a leader who believes in them.

But to be that kind of boss, we have to understand what’s driving our teachers away in the first place. 

Teachers Are Suffering

I knew I had to talk to Rick during our mastermind event—and it wasn’t going to be easy. I decided to frame the conversation using a strategy I had learned from one of my podcast guests.

“Rick, this might be a bit uncomfortable and awkward,” I started, “but I want to have a difficult conversation with you, and I think you’re big enough to handle it, and you’re going to grow as a result. Are you open to it?” 

“Yes,” Rick answered, a little cautiously. “I trust you, Danny.” 

I told him about Amy’s email, keeping her name anonymous. I told him that several of his teachers were ready to quit if we didn’t address their concerns about his lack of support when it came to parent interactions.

Rick was taken aback, and understandably hurt. And yet—the news wasn’t a total surprise, either. This problem had been a recurring issue throughout his leadership at this school and at previous schools. We talked through it. There were parts of the story that his teachers were unaware of.

But the fact remained, and Rick absorbed it: His teachers were suffering. 

Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas write, “Preretirement attrition, due to school staffing decisions, life changes, or dissatisfactions with teaching, accounts for about two-thirds of all attrition,” meaning that most teachers are leaving well before their retirement dates. Why? 

Teacher attrition isn’t really the problem here; it’s a symptom that something much deeper is happening. Although it looks like teachers are leaving voluntarily and some leaders may even be tempted to blame them, the reality is they’re being forced out. Teacher attrition is a sign of teacher suffering. 

In fact, I find the definition of “attrition” to be a helpful reminder here:

“The process of reducing the strength or effectiveness of someone or something through sustained attack or pressure.”

Again, if you’ve ever thought about leaving yourself, then you understand this feeling perfectly. Who wants to live like that?

So the question is: how do teachers feel they are being attacked? Where is the pressure coming from? Here are a few sources.

Stress

Stress is a constant problem in teachers’ lives. Ever since the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was passed in 2002—over 20 years ago!—the increased emphasis on standardized testing and harsh accountability measures has meant one thing: more pressure on teachers. Throw in a pandemic, where all of us were left floundering and wondering how to continue the already difficult job of serving students, and it’s a wonder there are any teachers left at all.

To make matters worse, NCLB was passed because of a concern that the U.S.’s education system (and therefore its kids) was no longer able to compete with other countries. All of that added pressure, though, hasn’t seemed to have the desired effect. As of the most recent scores on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the USA still ranks mid-tier at #22, behind countries like China, Singapore, Estonia, Japan, and South Korea in the top five slots. 

Workload Overwhelm

Teaching is a demanding profession, with long hours often required for lesson planning, grading, and professional development—not to mention managing the learning management systems, learning new technologies, responding to parents and proactively keeping parents informed, and taking care of other administrative duties. Plus, many teachers are being asked to pull extra weight: to chaperone dances, coach a sport, mentor others, supervise study hall or detention, and a dozen other obligations.

All of these tasks are well-intentioned, but if everything falls back on our teachers—especially if they don’t have proper compensation for them—then we’re setting ourselves up for failure.

Lack of Support

As stressful as the job is, there’s no doubt that some leaders make it immeasurably worse. They do that most often through benign neglect: by being so wrapped up in their own lives and stressors that they fail to hear and take action on the cries for help from their staff. In Rick’s case, he had failed to communicate the full picture with his team, assuming that they would just trust that he had their best interests at heart. He was a nice guy, he always told his team how proud he was of them—and yet, in this one area, he had been blind to how his actions were affecting others.

Occasionally leaders make it worse through more nefarious means—scandals, deliberate acts of sabotage, failing to show up with integrity and decency—but thankfully that is by far the exception than the rule.

Lack of Compensation

McKinsey & Company (2023) cites inadequate compensation as a top reason that teachers leave. There are many incredibly talented educators in our workforce. They could have any number of higher-paying jobs, and they know it! 

It’s not that they’re money-hungry—after all, they got into education knowing that this profession has a bad track record of turning out multi-millionaires. They’re here for the right reasons, just like you are. It’s just that all of us deserve to be able to comfortably provide for ourselves and our families, and in many places, teaching does not allow for that. And the previous problems take away whatever meaning and purpose might have convinced some teachers to stay despite the poor funding. 

Charged Political Environment

Many teachers are understandably frustrated at moves happening at levels higher than you or I can control—book bans, curriculum changes, restrictions on what they can or cannot say in the classroom and how they are expected to meet students’ needs. Increasingly, teachers are asked to be in the painful position of having to act against their conscience, which creates a tense, toxic environment that no one should have to work in. 

It’s time that we recognize teacher attrition as the cry for help that it is.

And when teachers suffer, all of us suffer. 

Three Principles of Teacher Retention

Together, Rick and I made a game plan for how he would communicate with his team and work to support them better with parent interactions. 

We also realized that Rick isn’t a mind reader—none of us are!—so the communication would have to be two-sided. Rick couldn’t offer his teachers better support if he didn’t know what that looked like. Amy and the other teachers would have to be brave and vulnerable to tell him what they needed.

At their next PD meeting, Rick thanked his staff for their honesty and for having the guts to seek to fix the problem before leaving.

He promised them that prior to meetings with parents, he would ask the teachers involved what it would feel like to be supported during that interaction. Together, they would pre-game the meeting to make sure they were on the same page about what they wanted the desired outcome to be. 

Then, after the meeting, Rick would ask the teachers, “Did you feel supported? Where could I have improved?” 

This type of leadership takes vulnerability. It goes against everything most of us have been taught about what leadership should look like. 

The forces at play causing teachers’ suffering are difficult to change. Decades of societal and legal forces have shaped education into a system that creates and sustains this suffering. Every system is perfectly designed for the results you see—and this is no different. As many educators know, it’s crazy hard to change this system. 

And yet we know it needs to change. We’ll just have to fight harder to change it.

Math educator Peter Liljedahl says, “How do we change a system? Number one is when you try to change the system, the system will defend itself because you have all these forces that have now reached the stable point. …the way you affect change is you have to overwhelm the system. You either have to apply a single force or multiple forces in a way that overwhelms the stability of the system. So the system has to restabilize into a new form.” (Young, 2023)

This is what we’re attempting to do here—and what we know works. If we can apply three new powerful forces, or principles, to this system, then maybe we can change it.

These principles are:

1. Be innovative: Remember, our current system is self-reinforcing. To stop it from continuing the way it has been, you’ll have to be willing to rethink every part of your hiring, training, and developing processes. 

2. Be proactive: If we don’t take initiative to make changes, then nothing will change. An object at rest wants to stay at rest. We’ve got to proactively look for the places where we can shake things up.

3. Be intentional: You can’t just break down what isn’t working; we also have to rebuild the system intentionally so that it’s designed to encourage teacher thriving. 

When we use these principles to rethink the way we attract, interview, onboard, coach and grow, and support teachers, the result is a place where teachers want to stay.

Rick put these principles into action with his team, and I’m proud to say that Amy and the other teachers have stayed. They wanted growth, and they got it. 

What’s more—Amy decided to reveal herself to Rick and talk to him personally about what had been going on. Together, they’re working on improving their communication so that the teachers at their school feel supported.

Chapter 1. Attract Top Talent

In order to keep teachers, you have to bring in talented  teachers in the first place. 

It’s not that we’re trying to weed out the “bad” teachers or the teachers who “don’t have what it takes.” This isn’t about putting any aspiring teachers down. Rather, like trying to find a missing puzzle piece, we want to find teachers who will fit perfectly into the vision for what we’re trying to create.

And the beautiful thing is that when everyone feels like they belong, when everyone knows exactly how they’re contributing—they’re more likely to want to stay. 

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Chapter 4. Lead Your Remarkable School

When my friend, Joe Clausi, moved across the country for his first principalship, he had no idea that the charter school he would be leading was failing. The school itself was only two years old, but it was already struggling. The only charter school in the district, it had been founded to focus on career and technical education, offering classes in construction, engineering, and architecture—all careers that made sense for the local community.

When Joe arrived, he learned that the school wasn’t even accredited and had acquired a negative reputation. It had become the school where kids were sent after being expelled or suspended from other schools in the area.

For the first year, Joe focused on making several immediate, necessary changes to turn the school around. He let many of the former staff go and hired new staff, overhauled their block scheduling, and changed the grading system. In his second year, the school applied for accreditation. During the review committee’s visit, the committee chair pulled Joe aside and praised him for all the progress they had made.

“But,” the chair added, “You don’t have a long-term vision for the school. I’m going to challenge you now, and when we come back in five years, that is what we need to see.” He told Joe that they needed to have a clearer vision of their ideal student, a profile of a graduate, and more rigor.

Joe realized the chair was right. They had been working so hard just to put out the proverbial fires, but they had no overall vision or direction for improving the school beyond that. They were still an afterthought in the community, despite having improved.

After that meeting, Joe got his team together to talk about their strengths. What could they do to up the level of rigor and offer a truly unique and exemplary learning experience?

They first considered providing Advanced Placement (AP) classes. But they quickly realized that most other schools in the area offered the same thing; they didn’t want to fit the mold of every other school. Instead, they looked for another option that would lean into their unique focus on vocational and technical education.

One teacher suggested they look into the International Baccalaureate® Career-Related Programme. The whole team was excited to see that it offered a rigorous curriculum and fit perfectly with their hope to provide relevant, real-world experiences for their students. Plus, no other school in the entire state was doing this program. They would be the first.

As they began the two-year authorization process, Joe realized that the teachers would have to collaborate more in order to achieve their goal, so he gave every teacher a collaboration period to work with each other. They built relationships with businesses in the community so that students could apprentice with professionals and graduate with real-world experience. They added classes in computer science, design, and robotics—years before this became a trend. Their scores in the core disciplines improved, along with their reputation in the community. Over time, the school became a place where students wanted to be.

When Joe talked to the committee chair again, he shared what they had done. The chair nodded his head and said, “That’s it. You’ve got it.”

Have you ever been in a situation like Joe’s? Have you ever felt so overwhelmed by all of the challenges in front of you that you couldn’t think about what to have for dinner tonight, let alone a long-term vision for your school’s success?

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day planning. That’s why you need to retreat to regain perspective and discover where you need to go next.

In this chapter, we’ll help you create a vision as inspiring and empowering as the one Joe and his team created.

Reflect: Visualize Your Remarkable School

Imagine it’s three years from today. You’re walking around your school with a notebook in your hand. And while you’re walking through your school, I want you to capture everything that you see and everything that you hear. Capture everything that you can experience with your senses and write it down in your journal or in the space below.

Remember, go crazy with it! Dream big. Don’t censor yourself or worry about what others will think. Right now, no one else is here. This is your vision for your Remarkable School. Don’t create an upper limit where none exists.

Remarkable School Vision List

Now that you’ve got a general vision for your Remarkable School, let’s get more explicit and dream about the details with the Remarkable School Vision List. Just like we built our Dream 100 List around a number of categories, we’ll do the same thing for our Remarkable School.

Most schools don’t think about vision with an eye toward the specifics. Most schools create a “vision statement” that’s usually too vague and general to be truly meaningful and useful.

The mistake here is that school administrators think a generic vision sounds right but it couldn’t be more wrong. By not taking a position, by not getting specific, by trying to please everyone, you’re setting yourself up for a mediocre vision at best. The value is in getting more specific and defining your expectations. It’s via specificity that you can actually start to see a path toward your Remarkable School.

You don’t have to fill out all of the reflections right now, but do take some time to read through them and envision what changes you’d want to see in your school for each category. These are the categories that I start with for dreaming up my Remarkable School Vision, but you might think of more. Feel free to expand and add as many categories as you need. This is your vision, after all!

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Chapter 2. Dream Up Your Remarkable Life

There’s a book I love called The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly (2015), a business parable that tells the story of a fictional company called Admiral Janitorial Services. At Admiral, custodians work for a number of different companies cleaning offices, workspaces, bathrooms, and so on. The job literally stinks.

Well, Admiral finds it hard to get workers to show up. And instead of trying to understand the reasons why, what does the leadership team at Admiral do? They blame the workers; they assume that the people they’ve hired lack a work ethic and don’t care about doing a good job. (Have you heard this anywhere else before?)

Eventually, after the problem continues, the leaders start to get curious about it. They start investigating and discover pretty quickly that it’s not that their workers are lazy or careless. The problem is actually that most of them live far from the job sites and they don’t have access to public transportation.

Once the leaders identify the actual problem, they finally start coming up with real solutions. First, Admiral invests in a fleet of vans and buses and goes to the workers’ communities to drive them to work every day. For a while, that solves the problem—but it introduces a new, unexpected problem. The workers are finding new work at other companies.

At first, the leadership team at Admiral assumes once again that they are lazy or that the work is too hard. Finally, one of the leadership team introduces a radical idea: Because everybody wakes up each morning with some kind of dream inside themselves, what would happen if we knew the dreams and desires, the hopes and aspirations of all of our workers? Better yet, what would happen if we helped make those dreams come true? What if we invested radically in improving their lives?

With that idea, they create a new position at the company called the Dream Manager. The Dream Manager’s sole job is to sit down with the workers at Admiral, come up with a list of their dreams and aspirations, and figure out what it would take for those dreams to come true.

One woman the Dream Manager talks to wants to buy her first home, so he helps her create a plan to save the money for a down payment and increase her credit score. When she buys her house, she shares her joy and gratitude for the Dream Manager’s help with her coworkers and friends.

Interest in the company grows as more and more employees’ dreams come true thanks to the help of the leadership team. They are happy and engaged at work, and they deliver a superior customer experience than their competitors. Other janitorial companies find their workers leaving to go join Admiral, and Admiral suddenly finds it has more contracts for work than it knows what to do with.

In education today, there’s a similar retention problem—and it’s not just because of the money. It’s also because of the stress. The expectations and burdens you carry are probably not what you thought you were signing up for when you decided to become a teacher. In other words, your dreams aren’t being fulfilled.

The good news is that you have the power and agency to change your situation. You can be your own Dream Manager. And while you should care about your team’s dreams as well—that’s the whole point of the book—the first person you have to worry about is yourself.

In Chapter 1 of my book Build Leadership Momentum: How to Create the Perfect Principal Entry Plan, we wrote about bringing your best self to school and taking care of your physical and mental needs. Ruckus Makers know that you can’t pour from an empty cup, and you have to put on your oxygen mask first before you can help others.

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Introduction: Rowing In the Same Direction

One summer, Sarah Van Brimmer was hired as a literacy coach at a Title I school in Florida. The school was officially failing—it had an F rating from the state. Its ELA proficiency was under 30 percent, its literacy and math scores were low, and it had high turnover amongst staff. In fact, Sarah was one of over a dozen new staff members who would be starting that fall. She and her new colleagues were nervous about all of the challenges they’d be facing.

Sarah’s leaders, though, were determined to rise above the challenges. The principal and assistant principal decided to host a retreat for the entire staff to build connections between all of these talented teachers.

They came together to do fun team-building activities and discussed the book, Engaging Students With Poverty in Mind: Practical Strategies for Raising Achievement by Dr. Eric Jensen, taking turns in groups to present on different sections. They talked through the values they wanted to exhibit as a team and what their collective vision for the school would be.

“[I had a] freeing moment [by the end of the retreat] where I knew I made the right choice,” Sarah said. “I was so nervous going into this new unknown, but meeting everyone there and seeing the vision and values we were committing ourselves to made me feel like this is the place for me. It made me feel like I found my tribe, my group of people who had a common vision in mind for public education. That stuck with me as a leader.”

What Sarah’s leaders knew was that something remarkable happens when you have a vision.

As educators, we face massive challenges every day. And it’s easy, in the midst of those challenges, to lose sight of our collective purpose. It’s easy for our staff to get caught up in silos, everyone doing their best in their own classroom but ultimately failing to make progress as a team.

You know what this feels like.

It feels like you’re coexisting, working around each other but not with each other. You realize you haven’t had a personal conversation with the teacher down the hall in at least a month and you never followed up to ask them how their mom’s surgery went. Weeks go by before you remember to text a friend back. At home, marriage and parenting happens in the margins as you speed back and forth between your various obligations.

It happens. We’re all busy. But at some point, we have to stop and make sure we’re still rowing in the same direction.

What happens when the people in a boat try to row in different directions?

They stay in the same place.

They get stuck.

Sarah’s leaders were wise to take action before that happened. With their careful planning and facilitation, the retreat worked to bring everyone together in a shared sense of collective efficacy.

You can do the same thing for your school. No matter what challenges you face, as a leader, it’s up to you to get everyone on the boat rowing in the same direction. You can do that by creating a Remarkable Vision.

The Remarkable Vision Formula

A Remarkable Vision sets a destination so compelling that everyone wants to row together to get there. It’s a vision worthy of everyone’s attention. It’s striking and memorable, able to be remarked upon. It gets people talking.

A Remarkable Vision starts with you, the leader. You’re the Ruckus Maker! It’s your job to dream up what’s possible, define expectations, and hold everyone accountable. This book will help you do all of that.

It begins with a focus on your own aspirations and goals because, before you can lead others toward a Remarkable Vision, it’s important to first understand where you are now as an individual and where you want to be. But it can’t stop there.

This isn’t about insisting on your priorities or your way of doing things. It’s not about pulling everyone along with you; that’s just rowing against the tide. No, a Remarkable Vision has buy-in. It’s built in collaboration with the people you care about and serve.

So the next step is to take a closer look at your family and how a Remarkable Vision can help you to be your best self at home. I believe an effective leader is someone with work-life balance who prioritizes family relationships above work ones.

Only then, after your personal and family life has received fair attention, will you move on to envisioning the school of your dreams. And that’s the key to a Remarkable Vision: it’s customized to you—to your life, your family—and to your school.

I can’t tell you what your vision should look like because I don’t know your dreams, hopes, circumstances, challenges, and endeavors for yourself, your family, and your team. Instead, I’m going to help you discover your vision through a five-step process I call the Remarkable Vision Formula.

In order to create a Remarkable Vision, you need to:

1. Retreat.

2. Visualize the future.

3. Define expectations.

4. Seek feedback.

5. Implement the vision.

We’ll talk more about this process in Chapter 1 and then apply it to three important areas in Chapters 2–4: your personal life, your family, and your school. Finally, in Chapter 5, we’ll talk about Remarkable Execution: What does it look like to make your vision a reality every day?

Once you’ve created and implemented your Remarkable Vision, you’ll start to notice some incredible changes right away. As other leaders have found, you’ll see that:

✔ You feel excited and energized to show up each day.

✔ You’re able to set the right boundaries around your work and life.

✔ You won’t hesitate to fix things in your life that need fixing.

✔ Your family will be healthier and happier when you show up as your best self for them.

✔ At school, you’ll see your team collaborating and helping to meet each other’s needs.

✔ You’ll notice consistent progress towards your goals—both your individual life and family goals, and your collective school goals.

✔ You’ll attract the right people who want to be part of that vision.

How cool would that be?

Get Away

I designed this book as a guided retreat because, as you’ll see in Chapter 1, retreating makes it possible for us to create. My hope is that you’ll take it with you somewhere special, somewhere that makes you happy, somewhere you can dream. Each chapter will help you reflect on your life and design your own Remarkable Vision.

One of my favorite places to go, and where I’ve started to take other leaders to retreat, is Taos, New Mexico. Whether by myself or with other leaders, I go on hikes, eat incredible New Mexican cuisine, and spend time journaling by myself in a place where I can’t be distracted by my dog, Alba, or by my normal routines and responsibilities. Retreating gives me the mental and physical relief I need to dream up new ways that I can serve leaders better. And I’ve seen it work wonders for the leaders I work with, too.

Sarah had been inspired and motivated by the collective vision her school’s staff had discussed at their retreat, but they still faced significant challenges, and making progress on that vision was exhausting for Sarah. While coaching her, I could see how discouraged and burnt out she was becoming. We decided that we would pause our coaching sessions over the summer so that she could take a break and travel.

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