Chapter 2. Justice

Fairness, service, fellowship, goodness, kindness, integrity

“Therefore I would have brave and high-spirited men, also good and simple, friends of truth, remote from guile—traits of character which belong to the very heart of justice” Cicero (1887, Book 1.19).

Danny

Stay Humble

“To escape imperialization—that indelible stain. It happens. Make sure you remain straightforward, upright, reverent, serious, unadorned, an ally of justice, pious, kind, affectionate, and doing your duty with a will. Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you.” Marcus Aurelius (2003, p. 75).

Think back to all of the times when you were in the interview chair, hopeful that someone would believe in you enough to give you a shot as a teacher’s aide, teacher, coach, supervisor, assistant principal, principal, athletic director, central office administrator, and/or superintendent. You believed in the best for your students and staff, and you wanted to make a positive change in the world for the better. You felt you had to work hard to prove that you were there for the right reasons.

Then it happened—you got the job.

When you’ve been recognized for your efforts, it’s easy to start to believe that you deserve to be there, that you really must know what’s best. Your ego starts to sneak up on you from time to time, and when that happens, you forget your true purpose: to serve the people around you.

This is why justice starts with humility: Because to serve others, to advocate for the common good, you must be able to put aside your own ego.

Aurelius was crowned Imperator Caesar, meaning that he was the military leader and ruler of the Roman Empire. Later, the title Augustus, which signified a divine appointment, was added. He was in every way—spiritually, militarily, and organizationally—the leader of the largest empire on earth at the time. It would have been easy for him to think that he was always right, to always insist on his way as many other emperors before and after him did.

Yet, in his journals, Aurelius reminded himself not to let those titles go to his head. He reminded himself constantly that his job, the job he was privileged to have, was to use the short time he was given to fight for the common good.

You must not let your accolades go to your head. The only thing that a trophy or a piece of paper in a frame will do is collect dust. You’re here to serve, not collect fancy titles or trophies. You must always remain humble.

Quick test: When you introduce yourself to someone else in your school/district, is it, “I’m Dr. [insert last name here], and I am the [position] at this district,” or is it, “Hi, my name is [insert first name here].” Last time we checked, we are all human beings. Do you really need to remind everyone else of your titles? If you need to announce yourself as a leader, are you really a leader?

Practice Justice

Curriculum Director Williams is attending a national conference looking for a new math curriculum. He arrives a few minutes early and browses the vendor hall, looking at all of the exciting edtech products available. At one of the vendor booths, a tall young man tells him all about their incredible product. Williams is intrigued; this product would be a huge help to the math department, and the salesman is offering a bulk discount.

Williams is really flattered; the salesman seems like a kind, authentic young man. He’s a former teacher, like himself, and the salesman really seems to get what their struggles are. Williams feels drawn in; he could be friends with this guy. He has the authority to make the call but hesitates, wondering if he should run it past a few of the teachers first to get their buy-in.

The salesman can sense that Williams is waffling. He turns up the charm, asking more thoughtful questions and flattering him.

“Hey, you know what?” the salesman says. “You’re doing great work out there. How about I throw in something for you, too?” He pulls a few $100 gift cards from his pocket and tucks them in Williams’s suit pocket with a grin.

Williams is shocked. Is this a bribe?

Reflect

1. How common is this type of behavior in your environment?

2. How can you protect your ego from flattery and avoid unethical behavior?

3. What helps you to stay humble in your position?

Be Kind

“For man, evil consists in injustice and cruelty and indifference to a neighbor’s trouble, while virtue is brotherly love and goodness and justice and beneficence and concern for the welfare of one’s neighbor” Musonius Rufus (2015, Lecture XIV:9).

Just be nice—it’s that simple.

As the leader, we often have the power to approve or deny. We have the power to be gracious or strict. Most of us want to assume the best in others. We want to give latitude as often as we can. Yet it’s also natural to worry that if we’re too gracious, people might begin to take advantage of us.

Have you ever wondered if all the doctors in your community only have appointments available around school arrival or dismissal times? You’ve probably received an email or call to your office asking, “Can I leave 20 minutes early (or arrive 20 minutes late) because I have a doctor’s appointment?” If you haven’t received that email yet, buckle up. It’s coming your way soon.

When you’re dealing with everyone’s requests, everyone’s needs, it can be easy to think they’re all ganging up on you.

The truth is, you have no idea what people are dealing with in their lives. Being a leader in a school requires you to be a jack-of-all-trades, yet taking care of your staff needs to be at the top of the list. Sickness, cancer, death of a loved one, divorce, depression. Everyone is dealing with something.

The questions you need to be asking are: Are my people OK? Can I give the person in front of me the benefit of the doubt? How can I see the person in front of me as an individual with their own unique needs and circumstances instead of just one more person in a line asking for something?

Too often, you let your emotions get the best of you and focus only on the negatives of the request that requires extra work on your part.

Instead, take a minute to thank them for making their day more chaotic for the better of the school/district, fellow staff who would have to cover them since there are no subs, and most importantly, the students. Take a minute to show that you care, and see how you can serve them.

When you are the first to serve, you set the example for everyone else. Compassion fuels justice.

Practice Justice

It’s Friday, and Assistant Principal Henderson has been looking forward to this afternoon all week. She’s excited to join in on the 100th-day-of-school assembly and participate in some friendly competition with the staff and students. At 12:50 p.m., 10 minutes before the assembly begins and right as she is about to walk down to the gym, a teacher and student show up at her door.

“Could we chat with you, Mrs. Henderson?” the teacher asks.

She can see the student has been crying and wonders what’s going on. Probably bad behavior. Does this conversation really need to happen now? Don’t they know the assembly is about to start? Couldn’t it wait?

Reflect

1. If you were in AP Henderson’s shoes, what questions would you ask?

2. How could AP Henderson make this student and teacher feel welcomed and prioritized despite the inconvenience to her schedule?

3. How do you work to make every individual in front of you feel like they belong?

Protect Others

“Of injustice there are two kinds—one, that of those who inflict injury; the other, that of those who do not, if they can, repel injury from those on whom it is inflicted.” Cicero (1887, Book I.7)

It’s not enough to simply do good for others, to avoid inflicting injury, and hope for the best. If you do not protect others from injury as well, you’re part of the problem.

You’re probably thinking, “Of course I protect others from injury! I would never stand by!”

But ask yourself this: Do I know of all of the injuries that might be happening in my school under my watch? Who are the most vulnerable people in my school? What would they say about their school experience? Does everyone truly feel welcomed as part of the community?

In his book, No Name in the Street, writer and civil rights leader James Baldwin wrote:

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony (p. 149).

The most vulnerable in your school and district are the ones who need your protection most. Do whatever you can to seek them out and know them. Make it your personal mission to advocate for their needs.

Practice Justice

Mr. Hughes has been a teacher at his school for 15 years. By now, he knows pretty much everyone in the school—or thinks he does. One day, he notices two of his students having a dispute during class. One is Evan. Mr. Hughes knows Evan well; he taught Evan’s brother and sister, and Evan’s mom is a regular volunteer at the school. Evan is gregarious and loud but generally a good kid.

“Mr. Hughes, David started it!” Evan whines. Mr. Hughes looks at David. He realizes he doesn’t know much about David except that his parents are immigrants from Mexico—or maybe Honduras? He can’t remember; he’s never met them. David doesn’t speak much in class and usually keeps to himself. Mr. Hughes knows he needs to resolve this issue quickly before the rest of the class starts to get bored and lose focus.

Reflect

1. What questions should Mr. Hughes ask?

2. How can Mr. Hughes foster a better relationship with David and all of his students?

3. What blind spots might need addressing? As Mr. Hughes’s leader, how would you help him address those blind spots?

Resist Vengeance

“Leave other people’s mistakes where they lie” Marcus Aurelius (2003, p. 122).

When you think of a character in a movie looking for “justice,” what is it that they’re usually actually looking for? Vengeance. Our understanding of justice has, in many ways, been degraded to the idea of tit for tat, of score-keeping, of repaying one another’s bad deeds with more bad deeds.

The Stoics challenge us to raise the bar.

As we just discussed, we all have an obligation to advocate for and take action on behalf of the marginalized, the injured, and oppressed. We have an obligation to restore dignity. You might even argue that we have an obligation to allow others to feel the consequences of their actions when they do something wrong. These consequences actually further the common good.

But to perpetrate further harm by exacting revenge? That’s where the Stoics draw the line. “To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice—it degrades you,” said Aurelius (2003, p. 119).

Still, it’s quite difficult to resist getting back at someone. What’s the worst name/thing you were ever called or accused of growing up? You probably felt angry, hurt, and totally justified in name-calling right back, even if you were able to stop yourself from doing so.

But that experience is probably small potatoes compared to what you’ve experienced as a school leader. This role isn’t for the weak of heart. All leaders, including school administrators, have been and always will be easy for the public to criticize.

Leadership can be compared to being in a fish bowl in the middle of a shooting range. Regardless of where you try to turn, everyone can see you, and everyone can fire remarks at you. There will be crude comments, hate, threats, slandering your name on any platform that will listen, and petitions asking for your removal because you made a decision that wasn’t to someone else’s liking. As I (Danny) shared in the Introduction, other school leaders may even conspire against you.

The world is full of Machiavellian people who work against the common good. Your duty is, as Aurelius said, to leave their bad deeds where they are and focus on preserving your own good character.

Follow the law, school policies, mission, and vision of where you work. Work together with your team to make informed decisions. Constantly communicate with your school board members, as there should never be any surprises. Always “read the room” before speaking to the room. Remember what you said in your interview chair before you were hired and who you serve each day. Be strong and kind, as what you do in response to others’ bad behavior will not be long forgotten. Your dignity and character should always prevail.

Practice Justice

Ms. Foster has been making Principal Parker’s life miserable all year long. She was a runner-up for his position, and unfortunately (for her), she didn’t get the job. Since then, she’s been a thorn in his side—bad-mouthing him to parents, contradicting him in front of the staff at meetings, and once, even taking credit for one of his ideas in front of the superintendent. To say Parker is angry would be an understatement.

And now it’s evaluation time. Principal Parker heads to Ms. Foster’s room, ready to look for any possible infraction or mistake. Wouldn’t it be great to see her face when he gives her a bad score?

He sits for 20 minutes, the usual amount of time, watching eagle-eyed for anything he can mark her down on. There’s nothing. He stays another 10 minutes, and then all the way till the end of the class. Finally, he has to admit she’s a pretty good teacher.

But that doesn’t mean he has to give her a good review. She certainly wouldn’t do the same for him. He sits in his office and contemplates his options.

Reflect

1. Have you ever felt like Principal Parker?

2. Have you ever been tempted, or given into the temptation, to exact revenge when something didn’t go your way?

3. How do you remain focused on the job in front of you and ensure that you do the right thing?

Chapter 3. Courage

Bravery, fortitude, honor, sacrifice

“Give me courage to meet hardships; make me calm in the face of the unavoidable” Seneca (1917, p. 218).

Glenn

Relinquish Fear

“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality” Seneca (1917, p. 67).

When we are in the thick of things, when the stakes and emotions are high, it’s easy to believe that whatever we are facing could last forever.

Years ago when I (Danny) lived in Scotland, I had a horrible toothache. This was a big deal for me because I had never had so much as a cavity before.

When I went to the dentist, who must have been a novice, she told me to take some paracetamol and see her in a few weeks if it didn’t get any better. She did no X-rays on my mouth, and I didn’t think to ask.

The next day, I boarded a flight to Cyprus to visit some friends and spend time in the mountains. The pain got worse and worse. My face began to swell. The throbbing was so intense, I even cried and could barely sleep.

Lying awake at night in Cyprus as my jaw throbbed, I thought, “Will this last forever?” For a moment, I even thought, “This is the end.”

When I returned home, I immediately saw a new dentist who did the proper X-rays. My tooth was infected; I would need a root canal. He did some quick work that relieved the pain almost immediately. And in a few months I was back to normal.

I count myself fortunate that I was born in a time with access to modern medicine. If I had been born 200, 500, or 1,000 years earlier, the infection might have indeed killed me—a middle aged man.

It might seem crazy to you that I was so afraid of my toothache (although if you had felt it yourself, you would understand!). But that’s how fear works; it grows in our minds like a weed, nearly impossible to uproot.

Other experiences in my life have also caused fear to take hold: a fight with my wife, the death of my father, and so on. Just like the toothache, these experiences often feel like they will last forever, but they do not.

The only permanent thing about experience is impermanence.

As school leaders, there are some experiences we just cannot escape from. They might be as small as a disciplinary meeting with unhappy parents or as large as a global pandemic. Either way, our position calls for us to step up and face whatever it is we fear. Our fears, both the real ones and the mountains we create in our imaginations, are useless. Fear does not make the situation go away; it only delays our facing it.

Seneca wrote often about fear in his letters to his friend, Lucilius. Seneca was no stranger to fear: He lived in the shadow of a mysterious disease and was banished multiple times by capricious emperors. Eventually, he was commanded to commit suicide.

Fear is a common theme in his writing—as is anger, which we’ll discuss more in Chapter 4. Nevertheless, Seneca was clear on his priorities, and he knew that the solution was not to escape from his trials but to become the kind of person who could face them with courage: “If you really want to escape the things that harass you,” he wrote, “what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person” (Daily Stoic, n.d.-b., “Quotes” section).

Practice Courage

Dr. Greene gets a call during fourth period and learns that a large group of students across grade levels are walking out of their classes in silent protest of the school dress code.

“They’re in the courtyard,” the teacher on the phone tells her. “They all deserve detentions for walking out like that!”

Dr. Greene asks a couple of the student leaders to meet with her to explain their thoughts. The students tell her how the dress code discriminates against students of color. She can see immediately that they’re right, but she hesitates. There are several teachers on staff who have been vocal about the dress code, often citing violations and sending kids who “refuse to cooperate” to Dr. Greene’s office.

Honestly, it’s no surprise that things have come to a head. Dr. Greene is on the students’ side, but she’s afraid that if she tries to change the dress code, she’ll face significant backlash from many of her teachers.

Reflect

1. Have you ever been in a situation where you knew that doing the right thing would be met with backlash?

2. How can Dr. Greene advocate for her students and set the right expectations for teachers through this scenario?

3. What strategies do you have for confronting your fears?

Embrace Challenges

“The only contestant who can confidently enter the lists is the man who has seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent’s fist, who has been tripped and felt the full force of his adversary’s charge, who has been downed in body but not in spirit, one who, as often as he falls, rises again with greater defiance than ever” Seneca (1917, p. 66).

The Stoics often remind us that challenges are a necessary part of the journey to success. Remember what we learned in Chapter 1 on wisdom: We have to know the difference between what we control and what we don’t.

Unfortunately, most of what lands in the category of what we don’t control are obstacles we never invited into our lives and certainly don’t want to face—especially when we have so many goals that we’re trying to accomplish for the sake of our students, our staff, and our schools.

But it’ll be easier if we expect that challenges will come, and we embrace them with as much dignity and patience as we can muster.

We can also turn those challenges into opportunities to become better. Whether it’s that teacher we just can’t seem to make happy or the parents who are constantly frustrated about our policies, we cannot grow if we don’t allow friction in our lives, if we run away from conflict or try to avoid making people angry. It’s not possible anyway, so we might as well embrace it and use it to our benefit. Doing so repeatedly over time will build our confidence.

That confidence proves useful when facing the criticism that inevitably comes with being in a position of authority. In a speech perhaps inspired by Seneca’s words, President Theodore Roosevelt reminds us that we can’t allow those critics to stop us from fighting:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat (Theodore Roosevelt Center, n.d.).

This is the spirit of strength and courage that the Stoics advocate for: a relentless refusal to be cowed, intimidated, or turned away from the pursuit of what’s right.

Practice Courage

Helen is the principal at an urban elementary school. She wakes up feeling great one morning and decides to arrive at the office 30 minutes earlier than normal, bringing with her coffee and breakfast for the staff. However, when Helen pulls into the parking lot, there is a couple waiting by the front door. Upon walking to the door with the coffee and breakfast, Helen can see the mother is red in the face.

“I hope you read the email that I sent last night,” the mother declares icily. Helen continues to walk slowly towards the couple, asks for their names, and wonders if she should even open the door to let them in. So much for thinking that this is going to be a great morning.

The couple responds with their names. Helen has heard of this family before, and what she’s heard was never good. These parents have a reputation for bulldozing their way over staff and manipulating leaders to get whatever they want. They love to mention their well-known lawyer if anyone dares to disagree with them.

Feeling that it is the right thing to do, Helen opens the doors and invites them in. She places the coffee and breakfast on one side of the conference table of the main office and then asks the couple to sit with her.

Helen asks when the email was sent; the last time she had checked her email was at 8 p.m. the night before. She had set a policy with staff and community leaders that if anything was urgent at night that couldn’t wait until morning, they were to call her directly.

The mother had sent the email at 1:25 a.m. When Helen explains her policy, the mother responds with a number of words that you wouldn’t use in a PG-rated movie. The father joins in the tirade, and it doesn’t take too long before their lawyer’s name is mentioned.

Helen takes a deep breath and considers how to respond.

Reflect

1. What other information is Helen missing?

2. Have you ever felt backed into a corner in your role? How did that situation resolve?

3. How could Helen plan ahead to set boundaries and build a more positive relationship with these parents?

Expect the Unexpected

“In this way you must understand how laughable it is to say, ‘Tell me what to do!’ What advice could I possibly give? No, a far better request is, ‘Train my mind to adapt to any circumstance’” Epictetus (Daily Stoic, n.d.-c., section 1).

To be a school leader in today’s world requires that you understand and embrace VUCA leadership: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The greatest school leaders admit that they do not have all the answers, but they help their school/district teams accept the realities of a VUCA world.

Leading a school in a VUCA world isn’t about adopting the newest technologies that promise quick solutions, though. It’s about finding the tools the school needs to be able to continue doing (and improving) its work within an ever-changing technological environment. The COVID-19 pandemic was, in many ways, a much-needed wake-up call for many districts who struggled to continue serving their students when they couldn’t be together in person.

It’s easy to get comfortable with what you know; it’s much harder to maintain the attitude of a constant learner and humble yourself to be open to new ideas. It’s difficult to imagine a world very different from the one you’ve always known. Yet the Stoics teach us: Expect the unexpected. And to the best of your ability, help your team to do the same.

Many school districts have a position you might not have heard of, but you’ve definitely noticed it. It’s called the Chief “Yeah, But” Officer (CYBO). This person’s comments go something like this:

“Yeah, but I’ve done it this way for 30 years, and it’s never been a problem before.”

“Yeah, but what if [insert idea they don’t like] fails?”

“Yeah, but that would never work in my classroom/school/district.”

As a leader, how have you prepared and trained your team and/or staff to embrace VUCA? Are they given the freedom to fail without the fear of becoming a failure? Do they have the psychological safety to know that you will support them when they present ideas that push the boundaries of traditional schooling? Can your team of diverse perspectives disagree with you and/or others in meetings without the fear of retaliation? Do you embrace the ideas of your innovators, or do you follow the beliefs of the CYBO in the district?

If you continuously follow the traditional scripts of outdated best practices—because that’s how you learned best, that’s what you learned from your mentor, or because of the CYBO—then how do you expect others to change their minds and adapt to any circumstance? Be the school leader you needed when you were a teacher instead of the one you resented.

Practice Courage

For the past several weeks, the rumor mill in the community has been spiraling faster than a tornado. Everywhere Superintendent Muñoz looks, people are asking if everything is going to be OK. On the news, in social media feeds, at the school sporting events, around town—just about anywhere people congregate—the heated topic is there.

Earlier in the month, the state government body required a controversial curriculum revision be made to all public school districts in the state for the upcoming year. The latest rumor is that people are going to be lined up for hours wanting to speak during the public portion of the next school board meeting and city/town council meeting. Superintendent Muñoz is already starting to stress out and dread going to the meeting.

Reflect

1. What options does Superintendent Muñoz have? What are the different ways she might handle this situation?

2. How can she avoid becoming the CYBO?

3. How do you prepare teachers and staff for the realities of a VUCA world while honoring their autonomy and preferences?

Fight to Be Better

“No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. Like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, ‘No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be an emerald, my color undiminished’” Marcus Aurelius (2003, p. 87).

We all face temptations from time to time. Temptations to take the path of least resistance or to choose what’s best for you over what’s best for your school. Temptations to give up when faced with poverty and trauma and bureaucracy and bickering and sadness.

It takes courage to stay devoted to your why.

It takes courage to stay devoted to your vision, your hope for a better future.

It takes courage to remember who you truly are and not to let the negative circumstances or obstacles that you face obscure the brilliance of your true colors. Aurelius (2003) said, “No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. Like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, ‘No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished’” (p. 87).

Sometimes, we can fool ourselves into believing that we are courageous because we dare to rebel or make a scene. We believe in being Ruckus Makers in education—but not because we love chaos or anarchy. We believe in being Ruckus Makers for a purpose: to make schools and the people within them better. What matters here is motivation: Are we doing it on behalf of our students and the common good? Or are we doing it to serve ourselves?

Daring for your own benefit may be brave—but it’s not courageous. The Stoics are firm on this point. Courage is the willingness to face danger for the sake of the common good.

Practice Courage

Mr. Ramirez is a new instructional coach at one of the best schools in the state. He’s lucky to have been hired there—all of his new colleagues have congratulated him, and his old colleagues have been envious. He’s also part of the leadership team. At one of their first meetings, the principal shares the school’s most recent test results with pride, noting their overall high performance.

The meeting moves on to other agenda items, but Mr. Ramirez glances through the report more closely. He notices that although overall scores are high, when looking at the breakdown of students, he can see that many of those from low socioeconomic backgrounds are still struggling. They haven’t been making the same gains—and even worse, when he digs further into their history, he can see that this problem has been occurring for the last few years. He brings it up to another teacher, but she shrugs it off.

“Look, we’re a blue ribbon school. What more do you want? We can’t make everyone happy.”

Mr. Ramirez is shocked. Is this the attitude here? He wonders if he should avoid the topic at the next leadership team meeting. After all, he’s still the new guy.

Reflect

1. What should Mr. Ramirez’s next steps be?

2. What might the consequences be if he brings this problem up to the leadership team?

3. How can you prepare to do the right thing, regardless of the consequences?

Introduction

“If, at some point in your life, you should come across anything better than justice, honesty, self-control, courage . . . it must be an extraordinary thing indeed” Marcus Aurelius (2003, p. 30).

Glenn

Stillness in a World of Chaos

The world around us is volatile; it changes constantly. Our schools are a microcosm of that chaos; they are touched by disorder, trauma, and turmoil on a daily basis. All of us have our stories—we’ve seen Machiavellian maneuverings amongst staff, kids suffering in poverty and abuse, unfair policies that hurt the most vulnerable, great intentions foiled by lack of funding or support, and a host of other problems.

Meanwhile, many of our colleagues are jumping ship—and who could blame them? A survey from NASSP (2022) reported that school leaders’ stress levels are so high that over half of them are planning to leave the profession in the next three years.

No matter how noble your intentions, it’s hard to continue when you feel constantly at the mercy of everything around you. Like a ship being battered by the waves, you wonder how you can ever recover your balance, let alone get where you’re trying to go.

Most of us respond reactively. We can’t help it. We’re a product of the people we learn from, and most of us haven’t had great mentoring. At best, we’ve figured out how to be leaders on our own. At worst, we’ve witnessed or been subject to political infighting and backstabbing that’s made us cynical and wary of each other.

Many of us don’t know how to trust our teams and delegate. Our own ego, reinforced by dozens of bad experiences, tells us that we are the only ones who can get a job done “right.” And when we pile up responsibilities on ourselves, imposter syndrome takes over: I’m a fraud; there’s no way I can do all of this on my own. And yet, our ego and fear of humiliation keep us stuck.

We all face challenges in our daily role as leaders in education. We want to meet those challenges with poise, confidence, groundedness, and flexibility. We want to take a stand for our students when we need to, respond to aggravations with kindness and forbearance whenever possible, recognize the good in the people around us, and know what the appropriate actions are for each circumstance. Most of all, we want to feel the sense of inner peace that comes with knowing we’ve done our best and the assurance that no matter what comes next, we have the inner tools needed to navigate these waters.

Thankfully, many leaders before us have faced the same challenges. Our goal in this book is to equip you with the mindset and timeless practices that have served leaders for centuries. We want to introduce you to an ancient philosophy that has provided leaders an incredible foundation of wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice—sustaining them with an unshakeable equanimity through every storm.

This ancient wisdom is found in Stoicism.

Why Stoicism?

When most of us hear the word “stoic,” we think of a person devoid of emotions, someone who represses their natural urges and builds a wall between themselves and the chaotic world. Actually, a Stoic is a person committed to the practice of managing and appropriately regulating their emotions, so that they might respond in the best way no matter what the situation calls for. This ancient school of philosophy was pursued in ancient Rome and developed over hundreds of years by a group of unlikely philosophers, including a shipwrecked merchant (Zeno), a crippled slave (Epictetus), and one of the greatest emperors who has ever lived (Marcus Aurelius).

More recently, Stoicism has seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to a college dropout who was inspired by a little book of Meditations by Aurelius: Ryan Holiday. Since Ryan published his first book on Stoicism, The Obstacle Is the Way, in 2014, millions of people have enjoyed discovering how this ancient philosophy applies to and benefits their daily lives. Including us.

Danny

Glenn

We don’t claim to be experts on Stoicism. Neither of us has a philosophy degree. Rather, having seen the power of Stoicism in our lives and in our leadership at schools—not just for us, but for the people we serve—we want to share it with you. There are many misunderstandings and critiques of Stoicism, so we’re not going to try to convince you to adopt this way of thinking across the board (we’ll leave that to Ryan Holiday and the Stoics themselves).

Instead, we simply want to focus on the four main virtues that Stoicism teaches and help you practice using them at school. The benefit will be greater emotional equanimity for you and the people you serve. Whether you’re new to Stoic philosophy or have an entire bookshelf dedicated to it, you will be delighted to learn practices so useful you will see immediate results in your leadership.

About This Book

Cicero, one of the greatest documenters of Stoic philosophy—though not a Stoic himself, ironically—taught that the Stoics held four virtues above all:

But whatever is right springs from one of four sources. It consists either in the perception and skilful treatment of the truth; or in maintaining good-fellowship with men, giving to every one his due, and keeping faith in contracts and promises; or in the greatness and strength of a lofty and unconquered mind; or in the order and measure that constitute moderation and temperance (Cicero, 1887, Book I.5).

On the Daily Stoic (n.d.-a.), Ryan Holiday distills these descriptions into four words: wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. The outcome of those four virtues is equanimity.

Wisdom: Cicero defines wisdom as “the investigation and discovery of truth.” It is about the relentless pursuit of learning and education. We’re all lifelong learners, right? But it’s about more than just knowledge and facts; wisdom is knowing the difference between what we control and what we don’t, between good and evil, between right and wrong—and then acting on that knowledge. Armed with wisdom, the other three virtues help us to live and operate with the people around us so that, as Cicero says, “the fellowship and union of society might be maintained.”

Temperance: Like many other ancient wisdom traditions, Stoicism teaches to guard ourselves against extremes, to exhibit self-control in all situations. Temperance is the practice of order and moderation, of deliberating before acting, and of not being led by our impulses.

Courage: To be a “brave and great soul,” as Cicero described, each of us needs courage to resist the comfort of the status quo and act with bravery and honor despite the cost. Courage helps us to turn down temptations, tackle challenges with eagerness and curiosity, and fight every day to be a person of character.

Justice: For the Stoics, justice was the foundation of all virtues and demonstrates our interconnectedness as a human race. When operating with justice, we injure no one and we take action to prevent the injuring of others. We prioritize the common good and exercise generosity as often as possible.

Equanimity: Once we have cultivated these four virtues in our lives, the end result is ataraxia, or equanimity—a calmness of mind and soul. When we temper our emotions with reason for the good of ourselves and those around us, we can enjoy a state of inner tranquility and peace. Isn’t that what we all want?

This is the framework we will explore throughout the book. Each chapter will unpack one of the four Stoic virtues. You’ll notice that all four of these virtues blend together. They rely on each other. Temperance may sometimes require wisdom, justice may require courage, and so on. In each chapter, we’ll unpack the main ideas inherent in each virtue and offer three realistic (though hypothetical) school scenarios for you to practice these ideas.

We’re convinced that upon finishing this book, you will know how to apply self-control and perseverance to help you manage your emotions, become an open-minded thinker, and grow to be an effective problem-solver. But don’t just take our word for it.

We challenge you to think critically and test the ideas found in this book to see if they are worthy of your time and effort. Although we have thousands of years of examples and experience to prove these practices work, ultimately our opinion and experience does not matter. What matters most is that you validate these ideas and practices for yourself.

Chapter 1. Wisdom

Knowledge, education, truth, self-reflection

“Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things” Heraclitus (2003, p. 10).

Danny

Remember What You Control and What You Don’t

“Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not.” Epictetus (2013, p. 13).

Leadership often sounds like the key to greater freedom and autonomy. Surely when you get to make more decisions, you are more free!

But if you’ve been in leadership for a while, you know that’s not true.

Often, leadership means more responsibility but less control over the situations you’re meant to be leading.

The Stoics knew this as well. Epictetus, one of the most prolific Stoic philosophers, was born into slavery. His master was an advisor to the emperor Nero, so Epictetus could closely observe the lives of the most powerful men in the Roman Empire. But that didn’t mean they were free.

Later, when Epictetus was legally freed, he thought deeply about the question of control and freedom and wrote extensively about how to handle situations in which we often have little or no control.

Often, school leaders waste a considerable amount of time worrying about (and trying to solve) things that are ultimately out of their control. But Epictetus would say: We have to play the cards we’re dealt—and let everything else go.

So naturally, you might be thinking: What is and is not in my control?

What is in your control? Your actions.

What is out of your control? Everything else that does not fit inside the category of your actions.

For example, the following things are in your control:

• Your opinions

• Your goals

• How you choose to spend your time

• Your temper

• Your attitude

• Your character

And the following things are not in your control:

• Your students’ lives

• The outcomes of your school’s initiatives

• Your teachers’ classrooms

• Your reputation (phew, that’s a tough one!)

• The policies established by the school board and central office

• Parents and community members

The quickest path to being frustrated as a leader is misunderstanding what is in your control and trying to force certain outcomes from other people. Every leader who’s tried to force staff to adopt a new technology, initiative, or protocol knows how difficult this is!

Similarly, what other people say about you (reputation) or the actions they decide to take at school are not in your control. And when those things are hurtful or disappointing, it can send you into a tailspin of negativity.

But if you can understand that other people and their actions are outside of your control, then you can choose not to be harmed. Stoics believed it wasn’t the things outside our control that caused us distress and pain, but rather our view of those external events. Our opinions, which are within our control, are to blame.

You always have a choice about how you interpret others’ actions—that is always within your control. You can choose to take them personally, or you can choose not to be harmed. Learning from Epictetus’s writings, the emperor, Aurelius (2003), later wrote, “It doesn’t hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to” (p. 87).

In his book, A Guide to the Good Life, William Irvine adds one more nuance to the idea of control. According to Irvine (2008), “There are things over which we have complete control, things over which we have no control at all, and things over which we have some but not complete control” (p. 89).

We’ve already talked about the things we do and do not have complete control over. But what about that third category? Although not everything is in your control, many things are within your influence. In school, your leadership exists in this middle ground, a gray area where you can influence outcomes but not control them. What are examples of things you have some control over but not complete control?

Imagine you are a superintendent sitting on the school board. You cannot decide which members are voted in by the community, but you can certainly help to guide and educate those members on policies and procedures. You may not be able to stop certain books from being banned by the district, but you can advocate within the community. You cannot force students to study or learn, but you can give them all the tools they need for success.

Since you cannot control other people’s actions or decisions, you would be wise to focus on becoming the best version of yourself.

Practice Wisdom

After another successful school week, Principal Rosa awakens on a Saturday morning to the ping of notifications on her phone. Last night, while Principal Rosa was enjoying much-needed family time, a parent posted pictures of a book that her child was being “forced” to read, a book that she disagrees with. Friends of the parent were incensed and filled the school’s contact form with angry messages. The social media post is going viral and commenters have even tagged local and national news outlets to try to bring attention to it. Now, on her day off, Principal Rosa finds herself fielding panicked texts from teachers, staff, and parents wondering what they should do.

Reflect

1. What is within Principal Rosa’s control? What isn’t?

2. Where might Principal Rosa exert influence?

3. If you were the school leader in this situation, what would you do?

Commit to Learning

“Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind.” Epictetus (2013, p. 99).

So many of us might think of ourselves as “lifelong learners.” It might even be in our profiles on social media! But can you think of a time when you rolled your eyes at a required PD day and dragged your feet to get there? How are you challenging yourself to learn more about the students within your community and their lived experiences? What education and leadership books have you not only read, but truly applied in your life and your school? When was the last time you tried learning a new skill and experienced the discomfort and cognitive dissonance of being a beginner—as your students do every single day?

Have you fallen into the trap of thinking, “I already know this”?

To attain wisdom, you must be willing to learn—and learning requires humility. Epictetus (1890) wrote, “What is the first business of one who studies philosophy? To part with self-conceit. For it is impossible for any one to begin to learn what he thinks that he already knows” (Book 2.17).

As a school leader, it is vital to be open-minded and willing to listen to different perspectives. Check your ego at the door, and listen empathetically to what people are saying.

Leaders are responsible for making decisions that affect the people they lead. If a leader is closed-minded and unable or unwilling to put themselves in the place of a learner, they may not be able to consider all of the options available to them, and they may make decisions that are not in the best interests of their people.

Your willingness and humility to learn is also one of the greatest examples you can set for your team and your students. If you aren’t willing to engage in a PD day because you “already know this,” why should your teachers? If you’re “not an art person” and don’t want to try learning how to create 3D models with the art class, why should your students try to wrap their heads around this complex skill?

Practice Wisdom

Instructional Coach Carter has 10 classrooms to visit today, and he’s running behind. He walks into Mrs. Cho’s seventh grade biology class where they are learning about cell division and analyzing samples under a microscope. Planning to just stay a few minutes, Coach Carter starts checking items off of his checklist.

He can’t help but notice one student who looks confused, glancing around at the other students to try to mimic what they’re doing with the microscopes. Mrs. Cho is busy helping a group of girls as this student hides in the corner, painfully disengaged. Coach Carter considers trying to help but glances at his watch; just a few minutes before he needs to be in another classroom. Besides, when was the last time he used a microscope? Could he even remember how?

Reflect

1. What are Coach Carter’s options for next steps?

2. What will happen to this student if he leaves now?

3. What would you do if you were Coach Carter?

Own Your Mistakes

“If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance” Marcus Aurelius (2003, pp. 73–74).

As a “leader,” as someone to whom others look for guidance and stability, it can be hard to admit when we are wrong. What kind of leader am I if I make mistakes? we might think. We fear losing trust and influence if the people we’re leading know that we’re fallible humans, just like everyone else.

All of us are far from perfect. We’ve all made countless mistakes along our professional journeys, and those mistakes are part of the journey. Many of us have taught the acronym FAIL (First Attempt In Learning) to our students and helped them see mistakes as learning opportunities. We graciously coach our colleagues and give them whatever support they need to improve. We comfort others when they mess up. The only ones we don’t allow to make mistakes, though, are ourselves!

Here’s the secret.

Your staff already knows you make mistakes. They probably see your mistakes more clearly than you do.

What if you welcomed that information? What if you modeled how you want other learners to view their mistakes? What if, instead of protecting your ego, you made it clear that you want others to tell you when you’re missing something, when you messed up, or when you need to apologize so that you can correct it immediately?

When something goes wrong, be quick to point the finger at yourself before someone else. Own it!

According to author and speaker Danny Silk (2015), “being right doesn’t have to be sacrificed, but having to be the one who is right needs to go” (Foreword, para. 4).

When you prove to others that you want to learn from your mistakes, the people around you will actually respect you more than you’ll ever know. People love to follow authentic leaders who demonstrate that they, too, are human and working to be the best that they can. Shut your ego up, stop pointing fingers, own it, accept it, and work to correct it.

Practice Wisdom

On a cheerful morning, Principal Daniels heads to Mrs. Meyer’s room to conduct her spring evaluation. There were a few things they had discussed after her evaluation in the fall that he is hoping to see today. He slips into the back of the classroom as unobtrusively as possible, noting he has about 20 minutes to stay.

Everything seems to be going well—Mrs. Meyers is calm and engaging. She handles a small misbehavior graciously and keeps the rest of the class focused on their task. But he doesn’t see one of the items they’d discussed last time, so he feels he can’t check it off on the rubric.

At the end of his 20 minutes, he thanks Mrs. Meyers and heads out the door. He sends out her evaluation later that week with a good score but notes that the same issue has occurred again, and it needs to be corrected.

The next week, when Mrs. Meyers receives her evaluation, she calls him in tears.

“I did correct it!” she insists. “I did that the day before, but I didn’t know which day you’d be visiting, so I just had to move forward with my teaching plan.”

Principal Daniels’s face flushes with embarrassment. Did he make a mistake? Could he trust that she is telling the truth?

Reflect

1. Have you ever been in a similar situation?

2. How might Principal Daniels address the discrepancy with this teacher? What should his next steps be?

3. Have you ever made a mistake and had it pointed out to you? How did you make it right (or not)?

Find Your Heroes and Antiheroes

“For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler” Seneca (1917, p. 54).

For years, education has not evolved. The most common critique is that it is a “factory system” where the main focus has been to teach students compliance and prepare them for jobs that were common during the Industrial Revolution.

In this system, leaders are no more than managers—super-doers, legislators, and enforcers whose job is to make sure that everyone else stays in line. Unfortunately, that’s still the most common model of leadership.

Excellent leadership role models are hard to find. Many school leaders want to be great leaders, to break out of the factory-system mold, but we haven’t seen what good leadership looks like, so we stumble to put it into practice. Many of us have only seen examples of what not to do.

Try as we might, when we’re surrounded by bad actors, they’re likely to influence us. Jim Rohn’s famous quote, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with” (Canfield & Switzer, 2005, p. 189), is usually the kick in the pants a leader needs to investigate the other leaders they spend the most time with and look to as mentors. Those people will give you the best hint at who you are as a leader.

You have to ask yourself: Are these people I want to be like?

In Letters From a Stoic, Seneca (1969) writes to his friend Lucillius about the importance of mentorship and encourages him to find someone whom Lucillius admires, someone he wouldn’t want to disappoint. He writes about the tremendous gift it is to have an effective and encouraging mentor in your life, someone whom you can measure yourself against. The problem is, these mentors are few and far between.

But are they?

Maybe in the physical domain of your life.

If you find that you lack mentors, or the mentors you do have are not the ones you need, fear not. Countless biographies and autobiographies have been written by some of the greatest leaders history has ever known. Browse the shelves of your school library; you’ll find plenty.

Then there are all the classic Stoic texts that we cite throughout this book. Aurelius wrote Meditations while serving as the ruler of one of the largest empires that has ever existed. During his reign, he faced many leadership obstacles: attempted coups, political infighting, annoying coworkers, and even a pandemic. Sound familiar?

History is filled with great leadership heroes who have managed situations exactly like the one you’re going through. This is why the Stoics saw reading as one of the best ways to develop wisdom—because through books, you can learn from the greatest minds that have ever lived.

And what about the antiheroes, the people you want to be nothing like?

You can be thankful for them, too. Yes, avoid behaving like them and surround yourself with better mentors—but do watch the antiheroes. Watch how they act and how their actions impact the people around them. Watch how they continue to keep education stuck. Learn from their mistakes.

Then ask yourself: What kind of leader do I want to be?

Practice Wisdom

Superintendent Beckett has just been hired to her first superintendency, and she is stoked. Throughout the weeks of the interview process and getting to know various people within the school system, she’s gathered a list of over 30 changes and long-term goals she wants to start implementing right away. This district has a lot of problems, but Superintendent Beckett has a vision for how to improve things.

Her predecessor in the district was considered a bit of a lame duck—no vision, just someone checking things off the list. Not so for her! She has energy and enthusiasm and is excited to get started. This district hired her to get things done, and she is determined to start things off with a bang.

When Superintendent Beckett meets with her new executive assistant, though, she is cautioned to be careful, to go slow and get to know everyone first before making a lot of changes. Superintendent Beckett is frustrated by their conversation. Is her new EA trying to hold her back? Will she face opposition from others? Is this the start of an agonizing relationship?

Reflect

1. Have you ever been in a situation like this? What did you do?

2. If you were a mentor in Superintendent Beckett’s life, how would you advise her?

3. How could Superintendent Beckett get the relationship with her EA off on the right foot?

The average principal tenure is four years. The people who work for you spend half of that guessing who you are … and guessing wrong.

There’s one document that fixes it in an afternoon. Most principals never write it.

Before we get into it, here's the five-minute clip from my mentor Eddie Yoon interviewing Clint Carnell. This conversation created this mini-book for you.

Watch it first. Then keep reading.

Everybody Is Lying to You (And They Don’t Even Know It)

Clint Carnell is a CEO who has run several companies.

Recently he said something in a conversation that I haven’t stopped thinking about.

He said: “Everybody is lying to you unintentionally.”

He wasn’t talking about principals. He was talking about being a CEO.

But the second I heard it, I thought about every principal I’ve ever coached.

Because it’s the same job.

Your teachers are kissing up a little 😘 whether they mean to or not.

• Your APs are telling you what they think you want to hear.

• Your office manager is softening the truth about the parent who called three times this week.

• Your secretary is guessing at your mood before she knocks on your door.

Nobody is doing any of this on purpose.

They’re doing it because you’re the boss.

And when you’re the boss, people bend themselves around you (your moods, your tells, your preferences) and they do it from the first day you walked into the building.

Clint said the fix is a document.

A User Manual.

He requires every one of his executives to read his.

And he requires them to write one of their own.

Because the people who work for you cannot do their best work if they have to guess who you are for the first 18 months.

Principals have been told for decades that leadership is about modeling, listening, and being present.

Nobody ever told us the most generous thing we can hand a new teacher is a document that says this is how I actually work.

This mini-book is about that document.

The Cost of Being Unreadable

Principals are the most-watched, least-read leaders in their buildings.

Your staff is running an interpretation of you every single day.

• They’re reading your face in the hallway.

• They’re reading the length of your emails.

• They’re reading how long it took you to respond to a text.

• They’re reading whether you said hi back in the parking lot.

• They’re reading the way you sat in the last faculty meeting.

And most of them are guessing wrong.

Because you’re not being unreadable on purpose.

You’re being unreadable because you’re a human being with a hard job and a limited amount of time, and you cannot narrate yourself every minute of every day.

But the cost of that compounds.

It shows up as a veteran teacher who hasn’t brought you a real problem in two years because the last time she did, she couldn’t tell if you were mad.

It shows up as an AP who started CCing you on every email because he can’t tell which decisions are his to make.

It shows up as a first-year teacher who won’t ask for help because she thinks asking for help looks weak to you.

It shows up as a staff that holds its breath when you walk in.

Not because you’re scary.

Because they haven’t figured you out yet.

And they never will, unless you tell them.

Clint said something else in that same conversation that I want you to sit with:

“Usually, whether it’s counseling or a therapist, or you go through one of those group sessions — everybody already knew. But nobody talked about it. So it created the dysfunctionality.”

Your team already knows your worst habits. Your team already knows your tells. Your team already knows what lights you up and what shuts you down.

They just don’t talk about it.

That’s the dysfunction.

A User Manual takes the dysfunction out from under the rug and puts it on the table.

Where it can actually get better.

The User Manual: A Selfmentor Artifact

Here’s the move that matters.

A Ruckus Maker writes a User Manual. A Play-It-Safe Principal lets their team guess.

That’s the fork in the road.

Writing a User Manual is Selfmentorship.

It’s not an HR exercise.

It’s not a personality test.

It’s not an onboarding packet your district handed you.

Credit where it's due — I learned to think this way from my business mentors at Category Pirates. Their work on category design is the lens I use to see the difference between a Ruckus Maker and a Play-It-Safe Principal. The Clint quotes I've been sharing? They come from this episode of theirs. Listen if you want the deeper version. It will change how you think about leadership and category in the same afternoon.

Category Pirates

Win The Customer's Customer: How Clint Carnell Became CEO Six Times By Designing What's In Bounds

Welcome to Creator Capitalist Conversations, a series spotlighting Category Designers who have rejected traditional career paths and built lives around what makes them different…

Listen now

8 months ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Back to your User Manual — and the work only you can do.

It’s you doing the hard work of naming who you are:

• your scoreboard

• your tells

• your non-negotiables

• your worst characteristics

And handing it to your team before they have to guess.

A Selfmentor can write one.

A Play-It-Safe Principal can’t.

Because a Play-It-Safe Principal is waiting.

Waiting for the district to define the role. Waiting for the superintendent to tell them what a win looks like. Waiting for someone else to do the work of naming them.

A Selfmentor does that work themselves.

And here’s the part that takes the most guts:

“You think I’m giving you this because I’m proud of it? There’s things in there that are super embarrassing. When I read through it, I kind of cringe.”

—Clint Carnell

That’s the Ruckus Maker move.

Not false humility.

Not a résumé in disguise.

Real stuff.

The things the people who know you best would say are your worst characteristics — written down, on paper, handed to your team.

Because when you name your own dysfunction before anyone else has to, you take its power away.

It stops being a whisper in the staff lounge.

It starts being a conversation you can actually have.

That is what Selfmentorship looks like in the wild.

Why Most Principals Won’t Do This

I want to be honest with you.

Most principals who read this mini-book will nod their heads, agree with everything, and never write the document.

So let’s talk about why.

Reason 1: It feels arrogant.

Who am I to hand my team a document about me? Isn’t leadership supposed to be about them?

Here’s the reframe: the User Manual isn’t for you. It’s for them.

Clint tells his executives this directly: “It’s not for me. It’s for you. And it’s for us.”

Every minute your team spends guessing at you is a minute they’re not teaching, not leading, not building. The User Manual is the most generous thing you can hand them. It gives them their time back.

Reason 2: It feels too vulnerable.

Naming your worst characteristics on paper? In writing? Where people can go back and read it?

That fear is real.

And that fear is exactly why you have to do it.

Because if you won’t name your dysfunction, your team will (just not to your face).

Writing it down doesn’t create the vulnerability. The vulnerability already exists. You’re just the only one pretending it doesn’t.

Reason 3: I’ll be held to what I write.

Good. That’s the point.

If you write “I want you to bring me the problem with a proposed solution” and then you shut someone down the next time they do it — your team can hold you to your own words.

That’s not a threat. That’s accountability. And accountability is how leaders get better.

Reason 4: I don’t know myself well enough to write one.

This is the most honest reason. And it’s the one that actually proves you need to.

If you can’t articulate your tells, your scoreboard, and your non-negotiables on paper, your team is trying to articulate them for you every day. They’re just doing it worse than you could.

The User Manual is a mirror.

If the mirror is blank, that’s the problem.

Not the exercise.

The Eight Parts of Your User Manual

Here are the eight sections. Write them in your own voice. Keep it short! A User Manual longer than three pages won’t get read. Aim for one page if you can.

1. Who I Am, In One Line.

Not your title. Not your résumé. One sentence that tells a new teacher what kind of leader they’re walking into. Clint’s version: “I’m a full-contact CEO.” Yours might be: “I’m a builder, not a manager.” Or: “I lead from the field, not the office.” One line. Do the work to find yours.

2. What I’m Actually Responsible For.

Name your real job. Not the job description. The strategic job. Clint says his is strategy — everything else gets pushed back on his team. What’s yours? For most principals it’s some version of: “I’m responsible for the direction of this campus and the development of our people. Everything else we delegate, automate, or kill.” Put it in writing. Your team will stop bringing you things that aren’t yours.

3. How I Measure Success.

The scoreboard. What are the three to five things that tell you the year went well? Not the state report card — the real scoreboard. Student engagement. Teacher retention. Families who would send their other kids here. The things that actually matter to you. When your team knows the scoreboard, they stop playing the wrong game.

4. How I Give Feedback (And How I Want It Back).

On-the-field coach, or once-a-year review? Real time, or scheduled? In the meeting, or in private? Can someone push back? Can they get to a NO? Can they get to a HELL NO? This section is where most User Manuals get soft. Don’t let yours. If you’re a kind-conflict leader, say it. If you expect your APs to disagree with you in the room, say it. If you go to the mat on things you believe in, say it.

5. What My Tells Mean (And What They Don’t).

This is the gold section.

If I get quiet in a meeting, I’m thinking, not angry.

If I start asking a lot of questions, that’s when I’m concerned.

If I’m short in email, it’s because I’m short on time — not short on respect.

If my door is closed, I’m writing, not avoiding.

Every leader has tells their team misreads. Name yours. Name what they mean. Name what they don’t mean. This one section alone will save your culture.

6. My Worst Characteristics.

The people who know you best already know these.

Impatient. Interrupts. Plays favorites early. Says yes too fast. Hates small talk. Takes forever to respond to texts. Gets quiet when I’m frustrated instead of saying it. Whatever yours are.

Write three to five. Honestly. The ones that would make you cringe if your team read them out loud.

That’s the point.

Clint said it: “If you don’t do it, if you’re not honest, people already know it.”

Put it on the page. Take the power out of it.

7. My Non-Negotiables.

The HELL NO line.

What doesn’t get re-debated on your campus.

What will always have your protection.

What ends a working relationship.

These aren’t Sticky Core Values for the school — those are the rules of the campus.

These are your personal rules. The things you won’t bend on. “I won’t speak poorly about a colleague in front of a student.” “I will always protect a teacher in a parent meeting before I hear the other side in private.” “I don’t negotiate on our core values, even when it costs us.”

Three to five. Clear. Direct.

8. What I Need From You.

Flip it.

The User Manual isn’t just “how to survive me.”

It’s: here’s what I actually need from you if we’re going to build something great together.

Bring me the problem with a proposed solution.

Don’t surprise me with board-level news.

Disagree with me in the room, not in the parking lot.

Tell me the truth, even when it costs you something.

Whatever yours are. Three to five.

Your team will build the version of you they can see.

Write the one you want them to read.

Your Next Move

Most of this mini-book is describing something you already knew was true.

Your team is guessing at you. You knew that.

They’re getting it wrong half the time. You knew that too.

The fix is a document. You probably knew that.

What you haven’t done yet is sit down and write it.

Here’s what I’d do this weekend.

Block 90 minutes. Somewhere quiet. Coffee shop, back porch, kitchen table after the kids are asleep.

Draft all eight sections. One page. Imperfect on purpose.

Hand the draft to one person you trust — an AP, a coach, a mentor, a spouse — and ask them: what’s missing? what’s wrong? what’s true but embarrassing?

Revise.

Then share it with your full team at the next staff meeting.

The meeting itself will shift the culture. Because you’ve done something no principal they’ve ever worked for has done.

You’ve told them who you are.

The Halloween Party

It’s Halloween 2001.

I’m at a party hosted by my colleague Ms. Sneed — a fellow language arts teacher and, I would come to learn, a legendary southern host.

I’m a Yankee. Fresh out of Illinois. I took a job in Georgia partly because I was sick of the cold, partly because of two spring breaks at Panama City and New Orleans that convinced me the South was where I needed to be. I’m an outsider who’s been welcomed in, and I’m grateful for it.

The party is everything. Music. Jello shots. Shrek and Harry Potter and Freddie Krueger. A Statue of Liberty — patriotism still running high two months after September 11th.

And then there’s me.

Hoodie. T-shirt. Jeans.

Not a costume. My weekend outfit.

Here’s why: My best friend Casey won the coin toss for our shared Super Chicken costume — a yellow chicken suit with red underpants and a red cape that absolutely killed at parties. He went to a different Halloween party. I went to Ms. Sneed’s. No costume.

So I did what any slightly creative 22-year-old would do.

I printed 1,000 business cards. One side: Kokopelli — Halloween 2001. The other side: You’ve been pranked.

For the rest of the night, I moved through every room of that house. Cards in the couch cushions. Cards in the CD cases. Cards in the medicine cabinet, between the cotton balls, inside the aspirin bottles. Cards between every plate in the kitchen, in every glass, possibly in the food inside the fridge.

Once the cards were gone, I had one last beer and went home.

Mid-December. Last day before Christmas break. I stopped by Ms. Sneed’s classroom to wish her a Merry Christmas — and she was dying with laughter when I walked in.

“Danny,” she said. “We’re still finding your cards.”

Two months later. Fifty-fifty: frustrating and hilarious.

Nobody remembered what anybody else wore that Halloween. I can guarantee that. But Ms. Sneed — who I’m told is still hosting those legendary Halloween bashes — probably still tells the story of Kokopelli and the cards.

When you lean into your different, you have a much bigger impact.

That’s what I wanted to talk about.

Why School Marketing Is Ineffective and Forgettable.

I spent time doing recruitment and admissions at a top-10 school in Chicago. Highly selective. Great outcomes. The kind of place you’d be proud to say you worked.

And when I went to recruitment fairs, I was excited. We had a strong story to tell.

But when I looked around the room — at our table, at everybody else’s table — we looked identical. Same setup. Same talking points. Same energy. Same pitch.

Here’s our school ranking. Here’s what we offer. Please consider us.

We were trying to fit in when we should have been trying to stand out.

Later, as a middle school principal in Houston, I watched the same thing play out in hiring. The candidates who got the highest marks from our panel all dressed the same, went to the same university, had the same kinds of experiences. No appetite for risk. No room for someone who came to the table differently.

I found it incredibly frustrating.

Here’s the thing most school leaders won’t say out loud:

The average job posting could belong to any school in the country. Swap the name at the top, and nobody would notice.

Rigorous curriculum. Collaborative culture. Student-centered learning. Passionate, dedicated team.

Every single school says this.

And the problem isn’t that it’s untrue. The problem is that it’s not yours.

When your marketing sounds like everyone else’s, you attract everyone — and no one in particular. You get applicants who are shopping. Families who are comparing. You get the people who will go wherever the commute is shortest or the salary is highest, because you’ve given them nothing else to decide on.

The best teachers, the best families, the best students — they’re not looking for a school that checks boxes. They’re looking for a school that stands for something. A school that’s clearly, unapologetically, for people like them.

And they will drive past three other schools to find it.

The question is whether they’ll find yours.

Category Design Is Not Branding

A lot of school leaders hear “stand out more” and think: new logo. Better website. More social media posts.

That’s branding. And it’s not what I’m talking about.

Category design is a different idea entirely.

It comes from the business world — from thinkers like Christopher Lochhead and Eddie Yoon — but the principle translates directly to schools. Category design says: don’t compete for the same position everyone else is fighting for. Create a new position. Name what’s broken. Build the thing that solves it. Then make sure everyone knows you’re the only one doing it.

In school terms: stop trying to be the best school. Be the only school that does what you do, the way you do it.

I have a friend named Loren. He’s a principal of an arts integration elementary school in Washington, DC. He called me once from a recruitment fair — bored, discouraged, not getting any traction. As we talked, it became clear what was happening: he was showing up exactly like everyone else. Table. Banner. Brochure. Talking points.

I asked him: What makes your school different?

He knew immediately. Arts integration. Every subject taught through and alongside the arts. Not as an elective. As the curriculum. Not something other schools aspire to do — the absolute focal point of everything.

I told him: that’s your whole presentation. That’s the headline. That’s the thing that makes a certain kind of teacher stop walking, turn around, and come back to your table.

By his next recruitment fair, he had a line.

He also plays violin. Loves a bow tie. Has learned to be open about his family, his hobbies, the things that make him him. Three or four years in, his staff started wearing bow ties too — not mockingly. As a kind of tribute. A signal that they’d found their people.

That’s category design. When your school has a clear enough identity that the right people self-select in — and the wrong people self-select out.

The Four Moves

Category design isn’t magic. It’s a set of choices. Most schools never make them — not because they can’t, but because nobody ever asked them to.

Here are the four moves that change everything.

Move 1: Get Clear on Your Legendary Outcome

Not your test scores. Not your college acceptance rate. Not your graduation numbers.

Your legendary outcome is the transformation your school produces that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

What happens to a kid — or a teacher — after three years with you that couldn’t happen at the school down the street? What do your families say when they describe why they stayed? What do your teachers tell their friends when they explain why they drive past three other schools to come to work?

This is the question most schools can’t answer. And it’s the most important one.

One of the leaders in a session I ran recently — Ted, an executive director of a charter school — had the answer sitting in his data and didn’t know it. He’d added a question to his staff’s intent-to-return form: Why are you staying — and what would you tell a future employee?

He had a library of authentic, specific, emotionally honest responses. Teachers describing the moment they realized this school was different. Stories about trust, autonomy, belonging, purpose.

He wasn’t using any of it prominently.

That’s your legendary outcome, hiding in plain sight. Find it. Name it. Lead with it.

Move 2: Lean Into Your Different

Your school has something no other school has. It might be a program, a philosophy, a practice, a design — or it might just be you.

Loren plays violin. Loves bow ties. Built a school around arts integration so deep and intentional that the arts aren’t an add-on — they’re the architecture. He stopped hiding any of that and started leading with all of it.

Here’s the test: If you removed your school’s name from your marketing and replaced it with a competitor’s, would anything break?

If the answer is no — if the copy still works — you’ve failed the test.

Great positioning is non-transferable. Your different is the raw material. Amplify it. Repeat it. Build your whole recruitment message around it.

The fear, usually, is: What if being different repels some people?

That’s the point.

A $4 sheep’s milk yogurt popsicle repels the person who wanted a 78-cent ice pop from the freezer aisle. And it attracts exactly the right person — the one who gets it, who wanted this, who tells their friends.

You don’t need every teacher. You need the right ones.

Move 3: Make Your Core Values Sticky

Integrity. Excellence. Respect.

Nobody believes this anymore. Not because the words are wrong — because they could be posted in any school in the country. Values that belong to everyone belong to no one.

Sticky values are specific. They’re lived, not laminated. They have stories behind them — specific moments, real examples, things that happened at your school that nobody could have scripted. They’re a little polarizing. The right person reads them and feels recognized. The wrong person reads them and quietly decides this isn’t the place for them.

Both outcomes are wins.

Ask yourself: Can your staff name your values without looking at the wall? Can they tell you what those values look like in action on your specific campus? Can they give you an example from last week?

If the answer is no, you don’t have core values. You have a poster.

Move 4: Reject the Premise

Most school marketing starts from the same premise: We want to be everything to everyone who might possibly choose us.

The application pool is shrinking. The teacher shortage is real. The pressure to fill seats and positions is intense. So the instinct is to cast the widest net possible — soften the edges, remove anything that might push someone away, keep the message broad enough that nobody feels excluded.

This is exactly backwards.

The school that says we’re not for everyone, and that’s the point fills its seats with the right people. The school that says here’s the specific problem we’re solving, and here’s why traditional schools haven’t solved it attracts the teacher who’s been waiting for exactly that.

Fall in love with the problem.

Don’t fall in love with your solution. Don’t lead with how great your school is. Lead with what’s broken about the status quo — name the frustration that the right candidate already carries — and then show them that you’ve built the answer.

You know what’s wrong with most schools. So do we. Here’s what we built instead.

That’s not a threat. It’s a signal. It tells the right person they’ve found their people.

The Brevard Academy Teardown

Ted is the executive director of Brevard Academy, a charter school. During a live session, he pulled up his school’s employment page and asked for feedback.

Here’s what I saw:

A headline that said Join Our Team. A logo. A paragraph about the school. Nine things listed below the fold. A button to apply.

It’s not bad. A lot of schools would be happy with this page.

But here’s the coaching:

The headline is talking to itself.

Join Our Team — they’re already on the employment page. They know why they’re there. You’ve used your most valuable real estate to say something they already know. That space belongs to your legendary outcome, your point of view, your most compelling reason why.

The good stuff is buried.

Ted had a list of nine things that made his school different from traditional schools. It was specific, honest, and compelling. It was below the fold — after the logo, after the boilerplate, after the reader had already scrolled past their attention span. Lead with it. Make it big. Make it bold.

The social proof is invisible.

Ted’s intent-to-return form had given him a library of authentic teacher quotes. Real people. Real reasons. Real transformation. None of it was on the page. It should be front and center — not as a testimonials sidebar, but as the emotional core of why someone would choose this school.

The framing is school-centric.

Almost everything on the page was about Brevard Academy. What a reader wants to know is: What happens to me if I come here? What will I be able to do that I can’t do anywhere else? How will my life be different?

Flip the frame. Don’t talk about your school. Talk to the teacher you want to hire.

(read that line again — 99% of leaders in K12 do not understand this!)

Ted had one more insight during that session — one that I think is the whole idea in miniature. He said: “I’m going to go talk to the teachers we hired from traditional schools last year. The ones who said, ‘I can’t believe a place like this exists.’ And I’m going to ask them to tell me more about that.”

That’s the marketing.

The teachers who said I can’t believe a place like this exists.

• They have the story you need to tell.

• They crossed over from the status quo.

• They can describe what they left and what they found.

• They can speak directly to the candidate who is still stuck in a school that isn’t this.

Let them.

Your Turn

Answer this:

Why would a great teacher drive past three other schools to work at yours?

Not a good teacher. A great one. The one who has options. The one who knows what they want and won’t settle for less.

If your answer sounds generic — if it could describe any school in your zip code — you’re not done yet.

The schools that win the talent war aren’t the best-resourced. They’re the most unapologetically themselves. They’ve done the work to name what they stand for, who they’re for, and why the status quo isn’t good enough.

That work doesn’t require a new logo or a bigger budget.

It requires a clear point of view.

You already have one. Most leaders do. They’ve just been trained to hide it — to sand down the edges, to fit in, to not make waves.

This is your permission to stop.

Make a ruckus. Lead with your different. Build the school that the right teacher has been looking for — and then make sure they can find it.

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.

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.

Meaningful Work: Am I Doing a Good Job?

McKinsey reported that “meaningful work” is the top reason that motivates teachers to stay. We all want to believe that the work we do is having a positive impact on the students within our charge. We want to believe that the actions we take have the outcomes we’re aiming for. 

That’s why we ask, “Am I doing a good job?”

Of course, most teachers try their best within their classroom, and a lot of them see progress with individual students. But when you keep seeing the same problems appearing year after year—the same fights you have to fight, the same hurdles you have to jump—it can start to feel like you’re not making any progress at all. In fact, some years, it can feel like things are getting worse. 

Like the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, many teachers feel doomed to roll the same rock to the top of the mountain every day, only for it to roll back down and have to start over again. 

Have you ever felt this way in education? 

This is more than just “burnout.” Burnout is extreme exhaustion caused by overwork. But what we’re talking about is demoralization, feeling like “My work and effort doesn’t matter.” If you get to this place, then you’ve lost hope.

How, as leaders, do we help our teachers avoid this feeling and offer them a positive trajectory for the good work they’re doing?

Tell them the truth.

Your honest, transparent, consistent communication is the best way to help your teachers do their job.

You don’t have to solve every problem for them. But you can consistently communicate: “I hear you. I’m troubled by this, too. Here’s what’s outside of my control, and why. And here’s what I can do.” Your thoughtful and intentional listening makes a world of difference. 

The next thing you can do to help teachers retain their hope and avoid demoralization is to empower them with the high-quality feedback we talked about in Chapter 4, and give them as much autonomy as possible so that they can bring their creativity to the craft of teaching.

I’m convinced that the antidote to demoralization is creativity. And I don’t mean painting, playing music, or doing arts of some kind—unless a teacher would truly find that empowering. 

By creativity, I mean using your ingenuity and innovation to create something good within your community. Remember when Google’s genius hour was a popular idea ten years ago? While it’s not the buzzword it once was, it’s still a great idea to offer your teachers (and students!) this option to pursue projects that they are passionate about. 

When was the last time you trusted your staff to come up with something new and meaningful that they could retain ownership of? 

Culture and Connections: Do I Belong Here?

The second reason teachers say they stay is because of the community and their colleagues. 

In other words, the school’s culture and their connections. No surprise, this is why teachers ask the second question, “Do I belong here?”

According to McKinsey, “87 percent [of teachers who chose to stay] say their coworkers show genuine concern for one another, 83 percent say their coworkers help one another to achieve their work goals, 85 percent say they fit in with the culture of the organization, and 84 percent say they can be themselves at work.”

Feeling like you belong, like these are your people, can make all the difference between staying and going.

This is where the love that Daniel Coyle was talking about comes in.

As a leader, you can show them love and create this sense of belonging with teachers in both large and small ways.

On the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast recently, authors and consultants Peter DeWitt and Mike Nelson shared about how they build a sense of belonging in the workshops they do. For a recent workshop they held in Yakima, Washington, they sent out a pre-workshop survey to all the staff. One question asked what their favorite (nonalcoholic) beverages were. 

The responses were incredibly specific! The staff didn’t just respond with “soda” or even “Dr. Pepper,” but said things like, “a 16-ounce Diet Dr. Pepper.” It wasn’t just a Starbucks latte—it was a double-shot grande caramel macchiato with whipped cream. Peter and Mike got every single person their drinks, running all over Yakima to try to get every drink just right.

At one point, Peter shared, he turned to Mike and said, “Wow, some people are high maintenance.”

Mike looked at Peter and said, “Isn’t that great?”

Peter suspected Mike was about to teach him something new. “What do you mean?”

“We asked them what their favorite drink was,” Mike said, “and they felt like they could tell us.”

He was right. When the teachers walked into the PD, they were greeted with name cards, pens, personalized notebooks—and their favorite drink. One teacher had written on the survey that she was hearing impaired, so Peter made sure they had hard copies of all of the materials and included closed captioning in their videos. This kind gesture made the teacher cry!

How do you think every teacher in that room would have answered the question, “Do I belong here?” And how well do you think they remember that PD experience?

You better believe they remember it and they felt like they belonged.

These are the kinds of experiences we want to create for our staff as well. I’m not saying you have to buy every teacher their favorite drink before every PD meeting—though every once in a while wouldn’t hurt! You can find other meaningful ways to show teachers that you care about them personally, that every teacher in your school matters to you, and that you want them to feel like they belong.

Reflection Questions

Be Innovative: What new ideas have your teachers pitched recently? How could you give them autonomy and let them run with it? What’s holding you back?

Be Intentional: How can you surprise staff at your next meeting with something personal and meaningful? 

Be Proactive: How will you build a sense of belonging into every interaction with your team?

Conclusion: Retention is the Result

I’ve barely talked about “retention” directly. That’s because retention is the natural outcome of the processes we’ve discussed.

If you attract the right potential…

And make the right hires through your innovative interview process…

Then set them up for success with your onboarding…

And invest in their professional growth through mentoring with the ABCs of Powerful Professional Development^Ⓡ…

And create a culture where teachers can thrive with truth and love…

Then they will want to stay. 

Not everyone will. Some won’t be able to stay for personal reasons. Some will find their passion elsewhere. Some will no longer align with your school’s vision and values. 

That’s okay. But if you’ve done the work to create this culture, then more teachers will want to stay.

The bonus? 

Your school will become a place where you want to stay, too. Where you benefit from the ABCs of Powerful Professional Development^Ⓡ right along with everyone else. Where you know the answers to those questions just as well as your teachers do:

1. Am I doing a good job? Yes.

2. Do I belong here? Yes.

This is the goal of everything we do at Better Leaders Better Schools: To help you get better, so that everyone benefits. We help Ruckus Makers Do School Different™ and by creating this kind of thriving campus culture, your school will stand out.

It’s not about you becoming the principal you always wanted to be—although that’s probably a by-product.

No, instead, with this process you’ll become the principal people want to work for. And there’s an incredible pride in that.

In fact, it’s the best strategy for retention. 

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:

• Meeting in small groups. Small groups make it easier for every voice to be heard, and make it harder for the shy folks to hide.

• Co-creating group agreements. We set goals and deadlines together, rather than the “leader” handing down decisions and expectations.

• Check-in questions. At the beginning of each interaction with a mastermind member, I ask them a set of questions to check in. It’s hard for people not to share what’s on their mind when they’re answering these questions!

  • In one sentence, what’s it like to be you right now?

  • 1-10, how are you right now? (1 = low, 10 = high)

  • What made you smile this week?

  • What did you do that was scary this past week?

  • How did you take a risk this week? What did you learn?

The second requirement for authenticity is self-awareness. Most leaders aren’t really aware of the effect they have on others—just like Rick. To some extent, this is human nature, but it’s always something you can get better at. And yes, most of us have leadership reviews or 360s where our staff can give us some feedback, but how honest is your staff really in those assessments? And how seriously do you take the feedback? When you have an environment that is safe, you can invite honest feedback from your staff so that they trust you with their needs.

The third requirement for authenticity is being values-driven. Hopefully, your school has a list of sticky core values you’ve created (if not, read my book The Remarkable Vision Formula for advice!). These sticky core values create a set of boundaries that everyone in the school can operate fully within. They’re not restrictive; they’re actually freeing. Good boundaries allow everyone to carry out their ideas and plans with both autonomy and accountability.

Belonging 

Everyone can grow in the right environment, an environment where they feel welcomed, where they don’t question their place or their role. That is what belonging is about. 

There are three conditions for creating a culture of belonging:

• Shared purpose

• Inclusive environment

• Trust

Every school has a mission or vision statement—usually one that is decided by committee and then handed down to the teachers and staff. Kind of defeats the purpose, don’t you think?

Instead, schools can create a sense of shared purpose by building new agreements every year (like we discussed earlier) and including all teachers in the process. But that’s just the start. Next, you have to live it out within an inclusive environment.

We already talked about changing your interview process to bring more diversity to your staff, like Lupita’s team has done in Arizona. But after being hired, the work of creating inclusive environments continues through deep listening, by showing empathy, and by centering others rather than yourself. 

One of the biggest challenges to self-awareness that I see for leaders is centering others in their conversations. As the leader, we often feel like our authority means we need to have all the answers, and we should jump in with advice. Author Carol Radford pinpoints the problem—and the solution— succinctly:

“As a mentor, you will have lots of advice about survival and creating a community of learners. Your challenge will be holding back a bit and allowing the novice teacher to experience the process while you guide, question, and assist. Hold back. Become a listener.” (Radford, 2017, pg. 50)

By being aware of where you want to jump in and instead holding back and listening, your staff will feel more comfortable around you and like they can be themselves.

Finally, we have to build trust with our staff. Key to this is consistently demonstrating that we care by taking action to solve their problems. As I wrote in Mastermind, “Leaders who are able to drive results and respond quickly to problems build trust with their teams” (pg. 171). 

Challenge

The truth is, none of us will grow if we stay comfortable. Comfort leads to complacency, and complacency leads to stagnation. 

We all need to be challenged in order to grow.

And the beautiful thing is, once you have a culture where you can be yourself and where you are confident you belong, challenge shifts from something we dread and avoid to something we welcome, invite, and even seek out.

This is the whole idea behind the motto of our Ruckus Makers Mastermind™: “When you get better, everybody wins.” We mean it for leaders, but it’s true for every single staff person on our team. Everyone benefits when we challenge each other and ourselves to grow.

We do that first with honest communication. Remember Amy from the Introduction—it was only when she and her teammates decided to get honest with their leader, Rick, that he was invited to grow and become the leader they needed. Rick also had to be honest with them in return: honest about what was going on behind the scenes that they may not have been aware of, and what constraints he was operating under. Getting honest allowed all of them to work together to build a better system for communicating with parents.

The next piece of challenge is high-quality feedback. All teachers need feedback that is timely and aligned to the professional learning goals they set for themselves. If you’re using the Staff Success Scorecard, that should make delivering this feedback quick and effective. 

I’m also a big fan of Kim Scott’s book, Radical Candor. In that book, she makes the important point that feedback is a two-way street. Yes, bosses have to give their team feedback—but they also have to be willing to receive feedback, too. 

“The key insight behind Radical Candor is that command and control can hinder innovation and harm a team’s ability to improve the efficiency of routine work. Bosses and companies get better results when they voluntarily lay down unilateral power and encourage their teams and peers to hold them accountable, when they quit trying to control employees and focus instead on encouraging agency.” (Scott, 2019, p. xi)

This is why allowing teachers to design their own pathways for professional learning and welcoming their ideas is crucial to ensure that everyone—especially you—benefit from the ABCs of Powerful Professional Learning.^Ⓡ

The final component of challenge is a commitment to growth. It isn’t easy challenging others or being challenged, but if we’re all committed to growing as a team and community, we can all make progress towards our goals.

Reflection Questions

Be Innovative: How do you want to rethink your mentorship training program, so that all teachers have access to high-quality support?

Be Intentional: How will you integrate the ABCs of Powerful Professional Development into your mentoring process?

Be Proactive: Who is one teacher you can connect with in the next week to ask them how they’re doing and make sure they feel supported?

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. 

Inside the playbook, they should find information on your school’s sticky core values and a description of the Remarkable Vision you have for your school. Hopefully, they will have already had a preview of these elements in the Staff Success Scorecard and during their interviews—but having it on-hand in their playbook will help them reference those tools again and remember them. You should also include the school’s strategic goals for the year and a calendar of important dates, events, and milestones so that they know what to look forward to. 

My favorite part of the playbook is an FAQ section—ideally written by teachers who have been with the school the past two to three years and who were recently new hires themselves. For these teachers, the questions they had will be fresh in their minds and they’ll be able to help your new hires get adjusted more quickly. If they’re open to it, have these teachers include their contact information as well so that they can be another on-campus resource for your new hires.

Customize your playbook to make it fun and entertaining. Feel free to add whatever you think would be interesting: jokes from the school mascot, pictures of staff members’ pets, create a madlib with the school vision, or award a prize to anyone who reads the fine print and completes a small challenge—go crazy with it! This is a chance to inject some whimsy and wisdom into what might otherwise be a boring document that no one reads.

Revamp Your Back-to-School PD

Most schools have a day or two where all the teachers show up for orientation or back-to-school professional development. Remember back to when you were starting as a new teacher. What was that back-to-school PD like? What stands out in your memory? Was it helpful? Was it fun? Or was it so boring you almost fell asleep? 

When I was starting as a new teacher at a high school in Chicago, the most meaningful part of our teacher onboarding was a student panel, where the students shared what it’s really like at the school. 

“They might not have told you this when you were hired,” one of the students said, “but here’s what the students are like…” 

The students did not hold back, and it added both levity and a good dose of reality to our first days at the school. They shared everything: the good, the bad, and the ugly. They told us what not to do and how to authentically connect with them. What’s more—they were 100% correct. When I look back at what the administration and the staff shared versus what the kids shared, it turned out that the advice from students was more helpful than the advice from other staff! 

You might consider doing the same thing, or try hosting a panel of veteran teachers as well. Ask yourself, “Who knows this school best?” and try to get a diverse range of voices represented on your panel. Alternatively, you could create a series of videos and/or podcasts to “flip” your back to school PD and use your time together to delve deeper into areas of growth identified for your new hires from the interview process.

Design Personalized Learning Plans

Assuming that your new hire doesn’t have a perfect score in every category on your Staff Success Scorecard, they now have a good assessment of their strengths and an accurate idea of where they still need to grow. Meet with them—or ask a mentor, department head, or other lead teacher to meet with them—to create a personalized plan for their professional growth. 

Let the new teacher guide the conversation. Ask them where they are currently, and where do they want to be? Help them to own their professional growth and create a plan that others can hold them accountable to as they settle into their new roles.

Remember, onboarding will be an ongoing effort throughout the first weeks as a new hire.  As the school year gets going, let new teachers set the agenda and tell you what they need. Invite their feedback to help inform your onboarding process for future teachers as well.

Reflection Questions

Be Innovative: Take a look at your current onboarding process. What materials do teachers receive, and how helpful are they? What would be the most engaging way to deliver these materials?

Be Intentional: Invite recent new teachers into the process of examining your onboarding process. Let them tell you what new teachers need and how you can make them feel welcome.

Be Proactive: Does every new teacher know exactly what their strengths are and where they need to grow?

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. 

Other types of implicit biases often show up during the interview processes at schools: gender bias, racial bias, ageism, affinity bias (wanting to work with someone who resembles ourselves culturally), and first impressions bias (making snap assumptions about a candidate). 

They all have the same effects:

• Less racial, ideological, and cultural diversity in our schools

• Hiring the wrong people who aren’t fully committed to the vision and mission

• Missing the opportunity to hire someone who would be a truly great fit

Superintendent Lupita Hightower has felt the effects of implicit—and even explicit—biases throughout her career. Often, multiple biases were at work at once.

“Because I'm a woman with an accent, I had a lot of bad experiences with interviewing,” she shared, “from my principal telling me that they don't need people like me in her district to a professor saying, ‘You'll never be able to step into a classroom because when you speak, you speak with an accent.’” 

As a result of these comments, Lupita was nervous about interviewing for teaching and administrative positions. She felt like she had to over prepare and applied to jobs she didn’t want just to get more practice interviewing and rehearsing her answers to questions. 

Now, as a superintendent for the past thirteen years—and having been named the 2019 and 2023 Arizona State Superintendent of the Year—Lupita has instituted new hiring practices to reduce implicit biases throughout her district’s hiring process. She is determined that no candidates who apply to their district will have to face the prejudices she experienced. 

Solving for implicit biases in education—and even in our hiring practices—is a complex issue that cannot be resolved overnight. Schools should be engaged in rigorous equity work with qualified consultants to help them design more equitable processes, but over the years of coaching hundreds of school leaders, I’ve found the following strategies to be good places to start.

Blind Screening

If you’ve ever seen NBC’s The Voice, then you have an idea of how blind screening works. The concept was popularized by a 2000 study in which symphony orchestras held blind auditions to test whether they might avoid gender bias in their hiring and increase the number of women hired to orchestras. It worked; the study found that having candidates stand behind a curtain as they played their instrument increased the chances of female instrumentalists being hired. 

Since that study, blind screenings have become a popular strategy for trying to eliminate implicit biases. Usually, identifying information or information that could convey social class or other potential group identities—like names, hobbies, or college graduation years—are removed from resumes, applications, and cover letters (Fath, 2023). Several studies have shown that doing so, in most cases, does result in a more diverse pool of applicants being asked to interview.

Lupita’s team uses blind screenings in another way when hiring for instructional coaches, directors, and other administrative positions. They have created a rubric for each job position to ensure that candidates have the required experience. If a candidate meets the requirements of the rubric, then they come in for an “in-basket activity,” a written problem-solving exercise designed by the team to assess the skills required for that position. But here’s the catch: No one on the team knows whose assessments are whose. Candidates are given a number, then the in-basket activities are proctored by their IT director—the only person who knows which candidate has which number.

When the in-basket activities are complete, the hiring team grades them according to another rubric and decides which numbers they want to interview. Then they have a reveal, where the IT director shares the names assigned to each number. The candidates who are chosen to interview get a yellow ticket inviting them to return—just like American Idol. 

Lupita says this process has worked incredibly well in helping them hire a diverse staff for their central office and administrative positions.

“We have a lot of women leaders—like almost our entire district, except for IT and Operations,” she says. “And they’re diverse. They’re white, Black, Latina. You don’t see that in a lot of school districts. But these women came up on top.” 

Once, a board member raised a concern that they were hiring too many women. 

“I was like, ‘They were the ones who rose to the top!’ They were the best ones,” she responded.

Although blind screenings are a great place to start for most schools and several studies support their efficacy, blind screenings alone are not enough. 

Self-Assessment

Ask candidates to assess themselves using the Staff Success Scorecard you created in Chapter 1 and bring in their assessment to discuss during your individual interview with them. Having something to look at together gives you a good foundation for asking better questions that give you a more accurate picture of how this person would operate within the culture you’ve created. It also gives you an opportunity to observe how they react to the Scorecard itself. Are they on board? Do they understand all of the categories? Or do they disregard it as unimportant, a minor formality? 

During the next phase of group interviews, you’ll want to keep their Staff Success Scorecard handy so that you can compare their responses to what you and your interview team observe in person as well. 

The great thing about the Scorecard is that candidates walk away from the experience with a personalized plan for their own learning and growth as teachers. This is an incredible gift to them, whether or not you end up hiring them. We’ll talk more about how to use the Scorecard to plan onboarding and PD in Chapter 3.

Group Interviews

Group interviews at schools involve problem-solving scenarios and collaborative activities where candidates have to work together quickly and productively. The Society for Human Resources Management says that group interviews, “allow an interviewer to observe the candidates’ ‘soft skills’ such as teamwork, problem solving and interpersonal communication” (YEAR). 

Lupita’s district also uses group interviews during their hiring process, and the experience, she says, is “very telling.”

She shared a group coaching exercise that candidates were asked to collaborate in. “Some people were more negative reinforcers—more direct—that we knew wouldn’t fit within our culture. Or it would be a lot of work to try to teach them cognitive coaching. And then others were quickly able to build relationships and focus on the objective and offer support.” Using these kinds of group interviews is like a shortcut to seeing candidates in action and deciding early on whether they have the necessary skills.

In the best cases, group interviews are fun and provide a good learning experience for the candidates, offering the school’s leadership team a chance to mentor aspiring teachers—even if they don’t end up hiring them. Besides, the best teaching and leading is collaborative rather than siloed, so conducting group interviews is more authentic to what their lives as teachers in the school will (hopefully!) look like. It’s also a good strategy if you need to hire for multiple positions at the same time.

Stephanie, an educator at an international school in Singapore, described her first group interview experience like this:

“It was run with clear learning intentions and success criteria, there were individual tasks, group tasks, pair tasks. We were planning lessons, talking pedagogy and learning about leadership. If nothing else comes from the interview, I got a free afternoon of professional development run by some amazing school leaders with some brilliant student teachers. That’s the first time I’ve ever come out of a job interview and immediately wished I could go back for another session.” (2011)

If you have an interview process that has candidates singing your praises like this, it’s more likely that you’ll end up with the right candidates to choose from.

Group interviews are also a great way to put the Staff Success Scorecard you created in Chapter 1 to good use by designing projects and scenarios that reveal candidates’ skills in each of the categories you chose. Be sure to give each member of the interview team a copy of the Scorecard so they can write down their observations and make note of where each candidate is excelling or struggling as the interview progresses.

Back at my previous district, I had suggested trying out group interviews to see how potential candidates work together. The suggestion was declined at the time, but I was happy to hear some time later that they had adopted the group interview process after all. 

Quick leadership lesson: Sometimes leadership is about planting seeds and challenging the status quo, knowing full well those seeds may come to fruition after your time! 

Other Ways to Rethink Interviews

The best way to switch up the interview process is to have it start in the main office as soon as a candidate walks in—before they even know it’s started. The men and women who run the main office at a school or central office are the heart of the building. They know everything that’s going on and they know all of the people there. Give them a copy of the Staff Success Scorecard and ask them to watch out for any indicators of where a candidate might rank on any of the values or categories. It’s likely that they’ll notice things you and your interview team won’t when the candidate knows that they’re being evaluated and assessed. 

Another fun idea might be to manufacture some kind of crisis in the lobby while they’re waiting for the interview to start, like a problem with the copier. If the executive assistant asks for help, how will a candidate respond? Will they defer and say, “No, I’ve got an interview scheduled,” or will they jump up and offer to help even before being asked? Or are they so engrossed in their phones that they don’t even realize what’s going on?

After the formal interview process is over, make sure that you ask the main office staff for their impressions and their ratings on the Scorecard. 

It’s also a good idea to include students on your interviewing team. Again, share the Staff Success Scorecard with them and ask them to help evaluate the candidates. Students will pick up on things that you miss and ask questions you never thought of. Plus, including students in the group interview process can give you a chance to see how candidates interact with kids. 

Lupita says that taking candidates to schools to see them interact with kids and with other staff has often helped her make final decisions about who to hire. 

Trust Your Instincts—After the Facts

In his bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes about his experience as a young recent graduate designing the interview process for incoming soldiers for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Kahneman had no idea what he was doing at the time, and so he relied on a book by an American psychologist, Paul Meehl, to guide him. Meehl argued against interviewers trusting their guts, and instead encouraged them to prioritize more objective evaluations against highly specific metrics. Kahneman tried out these recommendations, creating a list of six characteristics that he thought were relevant to soldiers’ performance in the IDF, creating questions for each of the characteristics, and then instructing interviewers to ask exactly those questions and rate the candidates according to their answers. 

The interviewers hated the process, though—complaining that Kahneman was taking away all of their own “expertise” (which was kind of the point). So, to make them happy, he added one more question at the end of the interview.

“‘Carry out the interview exactly as instructed,’ I told them, ‘and when you are done, have your wish: close your eyes, try to imagine the recruit as a soldier, and assign him a score on a scale of 1 to 5.’”

Kahneman was surprised to find that the interviewers’ instinctual ratings were just as accurate as the more objective ratings they had been asked to give. 

His conclusion?

“Intuition adds value… but only after a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits.” 

To put all of this together, use your Staff Success Scorecard to help you and your interviewing team (including students, front office staff, and others!) decide who has the most potential on paper. Then close your eyes and imagine them teaching in your school. What do you see? 

At the end of the day, hire good people. You can teach a good person skills, but it’s a lot harder to teach integrity, work ethic, and character. For those attributes, trust your instincts. 

Reflection Questions

Be Innovative: How might you change up your interview process to avoid blind spots and biases?

Be Intentional: How much have you been relying on your instincts versus the hard facts when it comes to making decisions about staff? 

Be Proactive: How can your interview process not only help you make a good decision for your team—but also provide value for the teacher candidates?

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. 

Develop a Remarkable Vision for Your School

It starts with having a clear vision. When every puzzle piece is in its place, what does the picture look like?

I laid out a five-step process for developing your vision in my book Remarkable Vision Formula: A Guided School Leader Retreat:

1. Retreat

2. Visualize the future

3. Define expectations

4. Seek feedback

5. Implement the vision

Let me take you through a simple exercise to help you get started. If you want to go deeper with this powerful work, then you might want to grab a copy of the book and take a weekend away to plan your remarkable vision.

First, go somewhere quiet. Retreating isn’t just about getting away from distractions, it’s about fueling up and preparing to re-engage with intentionality. So take yourself away from your normal environment, where you might easily get sucked back into your everyday responsibilities, and instead put yourself somewhere you can think and do deep work. For me, this is usually a hike with my dog Alba.

Then imagine yourself three years into the future. Things are great. Everything you wanted to accomplish has happened and everyone is fulfilled. Picture yourself walking down the halls of your school. What do you see? What are the students doing? What are the teachers doing? How does it look different from your current reality?

When you have that image in your mind, write it down somewhere safe or record yourself describing it on your phone (this is especially helpful if you like to take a hiking retreat, like I do!). 

Create a Vision for Teacher Success

The most important part of this process for attracting the right people is having clarity about how the teachers in your school can contribute to that vision. And don’t think too generally about this; be specific! Don’t say, “Teachers are using effective pedagogy to improve student learning” when you could say, “Teachers are cultivating high-quality dialogue in their classrooms” or “Teachers are facilitating student-led project-based learning.” The more specific, the better!

For the Ruckus Maker Mastermind™, we created a School Leadership Scorecard^TM to help us make progress toward more effective leadership and impact throughout our school. Having a scorecard helps every individual take ownership of their growth and gives them a pathway to accomplishing their goals. Lots of people want to get better without knowing exactly how, and so they stumble along in the hopes of just magically getting better someday. But when you can identify your current level of performance and where you want to go next, you infuse more energy and focus into your own growth process.

You and your leadership team can use the same idea to create a scorecard for teacher success at your school. Here are the seven categories that we’ve chosen for growth as school leaders, but they would work just as well for teachers, too. You can use these, or feel free to add or replace them with your own sticky core values! Just make sure that you’re able to articulate what it looks like for a teacher to be making progress toward that goal. The full School Leadership Scorecard^TM is located on the next page.

7 Categories for School Leadership Development

1. When you get better, everyone wins. You invest in your professional growth and actively look for ways to optimize your performance.

2. Isolation is the enemy to excellence. If you act on your own, you’re making a conscious decision to limit the value you can create and the impact you can have on your school campus. If you score high in this category, it means you cultivate a peer network that you rely on for advice and support.

3. You can never go wrong treating people right. People trust you have their best interests at heart. You’re able to deliver feedback that is both direct and compassionate.

4. Measure what matters. You know what success looks like and you find meaningful ways to measure success beyond the usual metrics of student achievement, attendance, and discipline. You hold yourself and others accountable for these metrics.

5. Ideas are great, but not the greatest. You don’t just have a vision for excellence, you also consistently take action to implement that vision.

6. If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up there. You need to have a plan and vision to guide your efforts, and you consistently monitor your progress.

7. WTF (What’s the Framework?). You have tools, frameworks, and other resources on hand that help you to do your job with excellence.

Why all this talk about a scorecard?

In a very competitive market for teachers, imagine two schools. School A has a Staff Success Scorecard. School B does not. Assuming the teacher is aligned and excited by the vision of success you painted on your Staff Success Scorecard, which campus will she choose?

Download the School Leadership Scorecard^TM at betterleadersbetterschools.com/scorecard. Feel free to use these same categories or adapt it for your team!

Humble, Hungry, and Smart

You may also want to integrate the three virtues of an ideal team player from Patrick Lencioni (2020): humble, hungry, and smart. 

Humility is about being others-centered and ego-less while still claiming and developing our strengths. Lencioni says, “To deny our God-given talents is actually a violation of humility, just like it is to exaggerate them.” In other words, we want to work with people who have an accurate self-concept—not too proud, and not self-denigrating. These people know exactly where they fit in the puzzle. 

Being hungry, Lencioni says, is really just about having a strong work ethic—meaning they care passionately about their jobs and hold themselves to a high standard. These people never do the bare minimum. 

Lencioni’s third virtue is being smart—but, he says, “it’s not about intellectual smarts. This is about emotional intelligence—common sense around how we understand people and how we use our words and actions to bring out the best possible impact to others.” 

Whatever virtues or categories you use, make sure that your leadership team agrees on them and that they reflect your Remarkable Vision. Now you know exactly the kinds of candidates that will be a good fit for your school.

Build Your Teacher Pipeline

Second-year teacher Margaret Bartlett knew she wanted to teach high school social studies from the time she herself was in high school. But she was discouraged from teaching by her own teachers, who warned her that it was “a terrible career.” Thankfully, she became a teacher anyway—but what does it say about the profession when our own educators warn others away?

If we’re going to change this, we have to start with our students themselves. If we want to attract a diverse pool of aspiring teachers who are passionate about educating others and who are “humble, hungry, and smart,” then we have to create environments where all students and teachers love to be. Most of us can think of a teacher and/or school leader who inspired us to get into education, and whose classroom felt like a safe and fun place to learn. How can we create that same inspiration for more students?

On the flip side, students often hear teachers complaining about the profession, about administration, and so on. How uninspiring!

In addition to consciously cultivating welcoming and supportive learning environments, many districts are designing “grow your own” programs to help students learn about the teaching profession and give them real-world experiences early on. Dwayne Chism (2022) writes that these programs usually cover four areas:

1. Child development

2. Principles of education

3. Best instructional practice

4. Education internships

Another way to build your teacher pipeline is to collaborate with a teacher residency program in your area. In Chattanooga, TN, teachers in the Project Inspire residency program have a year-long apprenticeship with an experienced teacher in the local school district, receiving a living stipend throughout their time. At the end of the program, residents commit to teaching for four years in a high-needs school in the district. It’s a win-win-win relationship that benefits students, teachers, and the community. 

My friend TJ is an assistant superintendent at one of the fastest growing districts in Delaware. And in the evenings, he’s also a professor at a teachers college, investing in raising up the next generation of teachers. This is an intentional and proactive move: By building positive relationships with aspiring teachers, TJ is already beginning to attract them to his district and prepare them to be successful there. Plus, he has a jump start over competing districts because of this consistent face time and relationship-building with future teacher candidates. 

When you’ve articulated your vision and started building the right relationships, you’ll be amazed at how you attract more potential candidates who can help you realize that vision. Next, you’ll learn how to rethink your interview process so you can get around your own biases and find the best fit for your school.

Reflection Questions

Be Innovative: What’s one new idea you have about how your school can begin to attract the right potential candidates for staff?

Be Intentional: Does your team have a vision for who the ideal staff member should be? Have you articulated that in a scorecard or another rubric?

Be Proactive: What’s one simple step you can take to build relationships with potential teachers in your community?

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!

Reflect: Ideal Week

Imagine it’s a perfect week at school. Now respond to the following questions using the space below or your own journal:

●      How are you spending your time?

●      What gets done every day?

●      What is your number one priority?

Reflect: Sticky Core Values

Here’s a secret I learned about core values: If you can connect your values to the aspirations of your community, you’ll have a powerful combination and others will love your Remarkable School Vision.

Sticky core values aren’t what we typically think of as our values; they’re not just a word like honesty or integrity. Instead, they’re a phrase that embodies how you and your team want to show up.

Former principal Scott Long heard about sticky core values on an episode of the Better Leaders Better Schools™ podcast and decided to try it out with his elementary school staff at the time. The team had created a collective social contract that listed several values they wanted to embody, but Scott wanted it to be more than just a list of words on a document. He wanted their values to be memorable, meaningful, and fun.

The value that stood out to him the most from their social contract was supportive. Scott wondered if there was a better phrase that embodied the culture of care, accountability, and willingness to help that everyone loved about their school.

As a fan of the movie, Rocky, he thought of the scene where the character, Mickey, Rocky’s coach, gives him a cufflink on a chain. Mickey says that the cufflink would be like an angel on Rocky’s shoulder, always reminding him of Mickey’s love.

That’s how Scott thought of his school’s community, too—that everyone was like an angel on each other’s shoulder, helping each other out and reminding each other of what’s important. “Rocky’s Cufflink” became Doherty Elementary’s first sticky core value.

In Chapter 5, we’ll share more about what Scott did next to get his team excited about their sticky core values and create more of them. For now, consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      What values does your staff share?

●      How would you describe the culture at your school?

●      What values do you want to see (and does your team want to see) reflected at school?

Reflect: Learning

You probably know by now that I’m very committed to the idea of getting better together through mentoring, coaching, and masterminds. I know it works, too, because I’ve seen the impact firsthand in my own life and in the lives of the people in my mastermind.

Remember, when YOU get better, everybody wins.

Respond to the following question in the space below or in your journal: How do you want to invest in your own learning?

Reflect: Reputation

Consider the following questions and write your responses in the space below or in your journal:

●      What do you envision people saying about your Remarkable School? What’s the buzz?

●      What are people in the community saying? What do the parents think?

●      What does your staff say when you’re not around?

●      Are you getting any media coverage?

Reflect: Edges

Your school’s edges are the unique qualities and strengths for which you decide to go all-in. For example, you might decide to go all-in on being a STEM campus versus trying to invest in several different programs to meet various student needs and interests.

You’ll never be able to make everyone happy, so instead of trying to do lots of things (and doing them poorly), make decisions about a few things you want to go all-in on and do really well. For instance, your edges might be focusing on project-based learning, SEL, or PBIS—but not all of those initiatives.

Respond to the following question in the space below or in your journal: Where do you want to focus your team’s energy?

Reflect: Culture

Consider the following questions and write your responses in the space below or in your journal:

●      What do you see in your Remarkable School’s culture?

●      How do people make others feel welcome?

●      What makes your school unique?

●      How will you surprise and delight the people in your school?

Reflect: Ideal Team

Speaking of the people in your school, take a minute to dream about your ideal team. Who do you need on your team? Maybe you’re thinking of some open positions that need to be filled right away, but also think about the qualities of the people you’re looking for. What’s important to them? What are their personality traits? What is their character?

Moreover, what do you need to do to attract these people or grow these qualities in the people you have? What new programs could you offer to help them?

Write your responses in the space below or in your journal.

Reflect: Brand Promises

We don’t usually think of our schools like a business, but it’s true that every school is a brand as well. Brands make promises and declarations about what they offer to their customers—in this case, your students and teachers.

If your school doesn’t yet have a strong brand, your brand promise could be an aspirational statement about what you want your students and teachers to experience there.

In the Better Leaders Better Schools™ mastermind, we have four brand promises:

1. High-quality leadership training for innovative leaders with a bias for action

2. Instantly plug into a powerful network of school leaders that operates like a grassroots organization

3. A place where you can talk about what you need to talk about without fear of consequences or judgment

4. Learn from the best leaders across industries and apply those lessons to your leadership practice in education

So imagine that you had to market your Remarkable School to your teachers and students—as I’m sure you’ll have to do! What brand promises do you want to make? Record your responses in the space below or in your journal.

Create a Mind Map

I love to go visual when I’m being creative because it helps me think more expansively. You can create a mind map using sticky notes, or just doodle one in your journal. There are also great mind mapping softwares available for free online if using technology is your jam.

Here’s an example of how I started mind mapping my Remarkable School Vision:

The amazing thing about your Remarkable School Vision is that it can be whatever you want. Often leaders tell me that when they started doing this exercise, they didn’t realize how emotional and vulnerable it would be. It’s actually harder than you might realize to let yourself dream because, if you’re like most people, you spend so much time limiting yourself. But when you finally embrace the total freedom of this exercise, it can be humbling and awe-inspiring.

On this retreat, you’ve now dreamed up your Remarkable Life, Remarkable Family, and Remarkable School. Your vision will probably change—in fact, it should change as you get feedback and incorporate the visions of the people around you. In Chapter 5, we’ll talk about how to do the last two steps of the Remarkable Vision Formula: Seek feedback and implement the vision.

Chapter 5. Spark Change With Remarkable Execution

In Chapter 1, I shared the quote from the book of Habakkuk: “Write the vision, make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.” You’ve got your vision. You’ve made it plain. Now, let’s get ready to run.

Seek Feedback

Ruckus Makers know that although they start with themselves—their own self-care, their own vision—they don’t take action before they’ve included the others in their circle and received feedback so that it’s everyone’s vision, not just their vision. You can take the first step of dreaming and imagining something better, but in order to make that vision a reality, it has to be a vision everyone in the community shares.

In order to start getting feedback on your vision, use the concentric circle method.

In the concentric circle method, communication about your Remarkable Vision should flow outwards through the hierarchy from you to your students, their parents, and the broader community.

I don’t know about you, but often when I’m journaling and brainstorming, the end result is a chicken-scratch mess that no one but me could possibly figure out. You might need to write out your vision in a way that’s more readable and cohesive before you start sharing it.

When you’re ready, the first people you should send it to is your leadership team. This group includes the people you trust to make decisions and represent the broader school community. Ask them to take a look at your “IN-PROGRESS DRAFT” vision. (The all-caps is important for overemphasizing that this is a draft and you want their input.)

It’s likely that this group will have the most feedback for you because they’re the most comfortable with you and they’re the first ones to see your earliest thinking. Get ready to make lots of edits. Better yet, after the leaders have had a chance to review the draft, schedule a qualitative discussion about it and collaborate to create a newer, better version.

Once you have a version that your leadership team is pretty happy with, have them take ownership of it, personally send it to the department heads in your building, and repeat the review process. Support them with any messaging or accountability they need in order to get timely input from everyone involved. Overcommunicate (again and again and again) that this is a draft.

Once your leadership team has gotten feedback and come up with the next iteration, have the department heads share it with all of the teachers in their respective departments. Offer to help them in any way you can. Oh, and by the way, have I mentioned that they need to know this is a draft?! That said, the hope is that, by this point, your vision will have already been fleshed out and edited to the extent that most people align with it.

The outward-most circle includes your students, their parents, and the broader community. This message is best coming from you, but enlist your teachers and other staff to help reinforce it for everyone so that it’s clear this is a school-wide endeavor and everyone’s on board with this vision. Still, you should make it clear that this is not the final product and that you want students’, parents’, and the community’s opinions on the collective vision for a Remarkable School. At this point, yes—it’s still a draft.

That said, it can’t be a draft forever. You could perpetually postpone action by nitpicking the right words or bickering over priorities. According to author Ryan Holiday (2022), “What you don’t ship, what you’re too afraid or strict to release, to try, is by definition a failure. …We have to be brave enough to soldier on” (p. 132–133).

With each circle of feedback, give people a short and firm deadline to have input back to you. After the deadline, it’s time to move on to consolidating the feedback and sharing the vision with the next circle. If there are any debates or stand-offs between people’s opinions, you’ll need to make a choice and help everyone move on. Remember, some progress is better than none.

You’re the leader. This is what you’re here for.

The Vision for Sticky Core Values

Scott Long’s process for sharing his vision for sticky core values at Doherty Elementary School is a great example of how he built buy-in with his team. Scott heard about the idea and created the first one, Rocky’s Cufflink, on his own. But then he had to get everyone else on board.

First, he created curiosity with a hook. The whole idea of sticky core values is that they’re memorable and meaningful—and Scott wanted to make sure the process of creating them was memorable, too. He posted flyers around the school building—in the staff lounge, on teacher’s computers, next to teacher mailboxes—and sent the flyer to the staff via email. It had pictures from the scene in Rocky where Mickey gives him the cufflink. Scott says:

Out of nowhere, I was asking staff to determine what these images had to do with the Doherty Family. The challenge was cryptic yet simple: Post a video on Flipgrid that predicts how these images from Rocky related to our staff. The person with the most accurate guess would receive a prize at our next PD, and the true answer would be revealed during this time.

When staff arrived at the PD, they discussed the Doherty social contract and shared their thoughts on what it meant to be supportive: active listening, sharing resources, taking an interest in each other’s personal lives, holding each other accountable, and asking others if they need help.

Finally, Scott presented the winners of the Flipgrid challenge and explained the purpose of their PD.

They watched the scene from Rocky, and Scott clarified the idea of sticky core values, revealing the first value of Rocky’s Cufflink. He invited them to submit another Flipgrid video sharing a story of how another staff member was demonstrating Rocky’s Cufflink.

After the PD, Scott sent an anonymous survey to the staff, inviting them to offer feedback. These are the results:

Used with permission from Scott Long.

With consensus from the majority of the staff, Rocky’s Cufflink was officially adopted.

A month later, the staff came together again for their final PD session of the year. They grouped into grade-level teams, and Scott challenged each group to choose a value from their social contract and turn it into a sticky core value.

Part of the assignment was to explain the meaning of the phrase, tell a story about it, and draw an image or symbol for it. From there, the staff voted on their favorite sticky core values. They decided on three more together:

●      All Hands In: This sticky core value emphasized that they are “all in;” that they are fully committed to their goals and to each other.

●      Find the Marigold: Marigolds bloom where they’re planted; to the team, this symbolized the positivity and optimism that they wanted to bring to their school and the students they served.

●      R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: One teacher at Doherty was a singer in a rock-and-roll band, and Aretha Franklin’s classic song was one of her favorites. They decided that there was no better way to remember this important core value.

Implement the Vision  

There’s an ancient Japanese proverb that says “vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” Once you have buy-in on your Remarkable Vision, you’re halfway there. Now it’s time to put it into practice.

Four Pitfalls to Avoid

It’s at this point that I often see progress at schools stall in one of four ways:

1. They do nothing. Everyone pats themselves on the back for coming up with a beautiful vision, and then they go back to their lives. The habits they’ve held for years take over again, and it’s as if those conversations about vision never happened. In my opinion, this inertia is the biggest threat to implementing your vision.

2. They do everything. At the other extreme are the schools and leaders who push to accomplish everything all at once. The key to successful implementation is segmentation—breaking the vision down into smaller steps and milestones, setting deadlines, and making our way slowly but surely.

3. They do it alone. It’s easy for leaders to get caught up in trying to make something happen on their own, which leads to siloing, isolation, and burnout. Dan Sullivan, in his book, Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork, teaches that instead of asking, “How can I accomplish this?”, we should start asking, “Who can help me achieve this?” (Sullivan, 2020, pp. 7–8).

Wise leaders know that having support from their team and from peers (like we do in the Ruckus Maker Mastermind) will make it so much easier to accomplish their goals.

4. They communicate poorly. Some leaders make the mistake of communicating poorly about the vision. Most often, they say it once and then fail to follow up or reiterate it in other modes of communication—which results in doing nothing. As Jeff Weiner (2020), former CEO of LinkedIn, said, “You need to repeat yourself so often that you get sick of hearing yourself say it. And only then will people begin to internalize it.”

Or leaders might downplay the vision and fail to make it inspiring and relevant to everyone in the community. They end up sounding like the teacher in Charlie Brown: “Wah wah wah.” It’s hard for people to take action on a vision if they’re already asleep!

Let’s learn how to avoid these common pitfalls by following the four steps to implementation.

Four Steps to Implementation

1. Communicate effectively. Ruckus Makers who are excellent communicators make their vision obvious and visible to the entire community. They share it with the team, post it publicly online, and talk about it in meetings.

Not only that, they also know how to recreate for others the same passion and excitement they felt while drafting the vision. That might even mean leading your team on a visioning retreat together (and if you’d like help with that, please reach out! My team would be honored to facilitate this experience for you).

2. Have a bias toward action. In an article, “How to Manage Through Chaos,” Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen (2011) tell the story of the epic race to be the first to reach the South Pole. It was 1911, and the two competing teams were led by Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. The trip would be over 1,400 miles with temperatures often dipping below -20 degrees Fahrenheit and sometimes fierce winds as well. Each group of explorers faced the same challenge, but they tackled it with vastly different strategies.

Amundsen’s group committed to covering 15 to 20 miles per day no matter what. Rain or shine, warm or frigid, wind or calm—they would be traveling 20 miles every day. Scott’s group, on the other hand, decided to press their advantage whenever they could—pushing themselves to exhaustion on the good days and then taking breaks to wait out bad weather.

Amundsen’s group made it to the South Pole right on time, averaging 15.5 miles per day (Collins & Hansen, 2011). Scott’s team showed up 34 days later, having lost five men, including Scott himself (“Comparison of Amundsen and Scott expeditions,” 2023).

Collins and Hansen call this idea of committed progress “the 20-mile march.” It’s about taking small steps every day that get you closer to your goal, no matter what obstacles stand in your way. Aesop’s Fables tells a tale about the tortoise and the hare that teaches the same lesson. Focus on taking whatever actions you can toward your vision, and be patient with the results.

3. Measure what matters. Segmentation is the key to success. Break your vision down into smaller milestones that can be measured. For each part of your vision, set three-to-five objectives that you want to accomplish—no more. Then, for each objective, identify three-to-five key results you’d like to see.

I do this everyday by identifying three tasks aligned with my vision that I want to accomplish that day. Of course, I would love to be able to do more than that, but I don’t count on it. Instead, I just keep score on whether or not I achieved those three tasks.

For example, if one piece of your vision is a culture of belonging, then here are the objectives and key results you could put into place:

Objective: Make everyone feel welcome on the first day of school.

Key Results:

1.    Greet all students getting off the bus.

2.    Visit every classroom to personally say hi and encourage teachers.

3.    Acknowledge every person I see within the walls of my school.

Objective: Stop the bullying occurring during the second lunch period.

Key Results:

1.    Lead a “belonging and othering” discussion at next PD day.

2.    Empower teachers to do the same exercise/discussion with their classes.

3.    Sit and talk with students during second lunch; be present and visible.

Objective: Create powerful moments.

Key Results:

1.    Hold a 100-day celebration assembly.

2.    Bring a cake, donuts, or another favorite treat to put in the teacher lounge for each teacher’s birthday.

3.    Solicit student feedback about teachers who are doing great things, and give them that feedback at the next PD meeting.

4. Intentional celebration. The late Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos, said in an interview for The New York Times: “We really view culture as our number one priority. We decided that if we get culture right, most of the stuff… will just take care of itself” (Bryant, 2010). One of Zappos’s core values is to “create fun and a little weirdness.” They take fun seriously, and it’s one of the reasons their company has been successful. Can you imagine what would happen if schools took fun seriously?

If you separate the personal and the professional, if it’s all business and all data about student achievement, you tend to miss the human element. The faces become numbers. And don’t get me wrong, that stuff is important. But it’s not the way to a great culture.

Celebrating progress toward your vision is the best way I know to make sure that progress keeps happening and to consistently build your culture at the same time.

Now, Ruckus Maker, you have everything you need to take these ideas and put them into practice with Remarkable Execution.

Three Benefits to Remarkable Execution

When you start implementing the vision using the four steps above, you’ll quickly start to see three powerful changes at your school:

1. You’ll see alignment between teams as everyone embraces the vision, commits to making progress everyday on their own 20-mile march, and measures what matters. Everyone is rowing in the same direction and creating incredible value.

2. You’ll attract your ideal team members as they see a culture of fun and celebration where their achievements are noticed and appreciated and where everyone feels welcomed. Conversely, those who don’t see the vision will be pushed away.

3. You’ll feel purpose as you work together toward something bigger than yourselves. This is how you make meaning: by contributing to each other and accomplishing more together than you could alone.

Remember Sarah from the Introduction? Now, 8 years later, Sarah is an assistant principal at the same school, and she’s continued the tradition of leading her team on retreats to build the same sense of collective efficacy that she felt. It’s working, too.

They’ve established a partnership with an organization called The Learning Alliance to place more instructional coaches at each grade level. Several of their teachers have been recognized as District Teacher of the Year, and one was even a finalist for State Teacher of the Year. She sees the ripple effect their shared vision and values have had across the district and the state.

What’s more, the failing Title 1 school is no longer failing; in fact, they’ve embarked on becoming a model school in the district and increased student proficiency in reading and math, transforming the way their community sees them. Next year, they’re launching demo classrooms to help share the best practices they’ve learned.

Sarah’s team still faces many of the same challenges that they had when she started, but now they have greater capacity and collective efficacy to overcome them.

What could be more remarkable than that?

The Three-Year Vision

We’re not here to create a Remarkable Vision, share it with others, stir up excitement, and then fail to see it through. It’s likely that your vision for your life, your family, and your school won’t be accomplished in just one year; some seeds just take longer to bloom. To help you stay committed to your vision and continue making progress towards it, I’ve included the following annual reflection pages.

On your next retreat, I encourage you to read through your vision for your Remarkable Life (Chapter 2), Remarkable Family (Chapter 3), and Remarkable School (Chapter 4), and then come back to these pages to reflect on how it’s going and where you want to go next. You can record your responses to the questions using the space provided or in your journal.

Years 1-3 Annual Reflection Questions

My Remarkable Life

1. What dreams from my Dream 100 List have I accomplished?

2. What dreams are no longer meaningful or important to me?

3. What have I been putting off that I need to address next?

4. What skills do I still need to develop in order to continue making progress toward my dreams?

5. How do I plan to develop those skills?

6. What have I done in the last year to become a better person?

7. What have I done to bring joy to someone’s life?

8. What is the minimum (and the maximum) impact I want to have in the next 12 months?

My Remarkable Family

9. How has my nest changed in the last year?

10. What’s my favorite memory of time with family in the last year?

11. What’s been working well in our nest? What should we celebrate?

12. What’s not working well?

13. Have we accomplished any of the dreams we identified last year?

14. What are our shared family dreams for the next year?

15. Are all of our rituals and milestones still serving us? What do we want to stop, continue, or add?

16. What practices are deepening our relationships? What new practices could we take up?

17. How have I served my family lately?

18. What else could I do to help each person in my family achieve their Remarkable Life?

My Remarkable School

19. How close does our school look to the vision I created on page XX?

20. What have been our big “wins” this year?

21. Where do we still have room to grow?

22. What’s one action I could take to improve our school in the next year?

23. How often have I lived out my ideal week? What could I do to make my ideal week a reality more often?

24. What are our sticky core values? Does everyone agree and seek to live them out?

25. How have I invested in my own learning this year? What did I learn?

26. Where do I want to invest next?

27. What are people saying about our school? Are we making a positive impact in the community?

28. What are our edges? What are our unique strengths?

29. What new edges do we want to develop next year?

30. How has our school culture changed in the last year? Is it improving? If so, how? If not, why?

31. What next steps should we take to continue improving our culture?

32. What have I done lately to surprise and delight my school community?

33. Do we have the ideal team to accomplish our goals? Who do we need to add?

34. What are our brand promises? Are we living them out?

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.

The same is true for your dreams. You have to pay attention to the dreams and goals you have for your life so that you don’t harbor resentment and bitterness against others when you see them achieving their goals.

The other reason to think about your dreams is that you only have this one life! Tim Urban has created a series of awesome visuals to help illustrate how short your life is. Here’s a chart he created of all of the weeks in your life:

Take a look at this chart and figure out what week you’re in right now, depending on your age. To figure out what week you’re in, Google “how many weeks between [your birthday] and [current date].” The answer should pop up immediately.

It’s hard not to see the value of the remaining weeks you have when you see them like this. Tim writes:

Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks, and they’re all you’ve got. Given that fact, the only appropriate word to describe your weeks is precious. There are trillions upon trillions of weeks in eternity, and those are your tiny handful (Urban, 2014).

Most leaders we know haven’t spent enough time thinking about their dreams and what they still want to accomplish in their lives; they’ve usually been too busy focusing on making everyone else happy. Let’s change that right now with the power of visualization.

Your Dream 100 List

First, let’s create what we call your Dream 100 List. This is just like it sounds: a list of 100 dreams you have for your life. If this feels hard to you, we get it! There’s no rush. Take your time and start paying attention to dreams as they arise in your life, the little nudges you feel pulling you toward a specific goal. But we challenge you to (eventually) fill out all 100.

To make it a little easier, we created 20 categories of dreams. If you write down five dreams per category, you’ll reach 100 in no time. Some dreams might fit in more than one category, too, and that’s fine. For now, just fill out what you can. You can write down your dreams here in this book or in your own journal.

Here are the categories:

Physical:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Hike the Grand Canyon.

Emotional:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Continue to develop awareness of my internal landscape so my emotions have less power over my actions.

Character:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Respond with kindness and gentleness to my wife, especially when I’m working.

Intellectual:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Learn how to fluently speak Shona, which is my wife’s mother tongue.

Spiritual:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Read The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, which I finished in 2023.

Creative:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Write a book of poetry.

Educational:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Increase my knowledge regarding systems and strategic thinking.

Professional:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Write a bestselling book. I actually accomplished this dream in 2022 with my book Mastermind: Unlocking Talent Within Every School Leader.

Financial:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Generate a million dollars in my business.

Travel:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Visit Japan.

Adventures:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Rappel down canyons in Moab, Utah. (This is the adventure experience planned for my live event there in August of 2024.)

Legacy:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Start a scholarship for students in need.

Family:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Have two to five kids.

Friendships:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Start an annual men’s trip.

Hobbies:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Learn to surf.

Sports and Events:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Go to Burning Man.

Fitness:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Run a half marathon in under two hours.

Health:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Stay healthy so I can be alive to see my future kids marry.

Possessions:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Own a home in Israel and Zimbabwe.

Miscellaneous:

1. ________________________________________________________________

2. ________________________________________________________________

3. ________________________________________________________________

4. ________________________________________________________________

5. ________________________________________________________________

One of mine: Meet the poet, David Whyte.

Once you’ve created your list, you can revisit it periodically to delete anything that no longer fits or add new dreams as they arise. The other thing you can do is organize them into immediate, short-term (zero-to-three years), and long-term (three-plus years) dreams. Keep checking off dreams as you accomplish them. It’s an incredible feeling!

Reflect: Visualize One of Your Dreams

Now let’s apply the power of visualization to one of your dreams. My recommendation is to start with an easy one and then progressively go to the harder dreams. Remember what Maria Konnikova said: Writing down your dreams prevents you from skipping steps. If it helps, set reminders in your phone for key action steps that you identify.

In your journal or the space below, respond to the following prompts about this dream:

●      What’s the first step you need to take?

●      What’s the next step?

●      And the step after that?

●      Imagine every single step it would take to make this dream a reality.

●      What obstacles might get in the way? What could possibly go wrong to prevent you from accomplishing this dream?

●      How could you respond to those obstacles?

Reflect: Define Expectations

For some dreams, the expectations (i.e., success criteria) are pretty clear. I’ll know I’m successful when I’ve gone to Burning Man. But other dreams, like responding with kindness to my wife during work, might be a bit harder to articulate, and the signs I’ve been successful might actually come from other people. For example, I might know I’ve been successful if my wife interrupts me, and it doesn’t cause a fight later that night. Try to get as specific as you can.

In the space below or in your journal, finish these sentences to help you define your expectations around success:

●      I’ll know I’ve been successful when…

●      Success with this dream looks like…

Help Your Team Dream

Cameron Herold (2020), the business-growth guru, put the Dream Manager idea into practice in real life. He owned a company called 1-800-Got-Junk. At the time, he had zero debt to his name, and by making a dream list for his staff, he learned that two of his employees wanted the same freedom in their own lives. He offered to personally mentor those employees and help them create a plan to get out of debt.

The plan worked; they both got out of debt. But eventually, one of those employees left the company to start his own business. Although while he was there, his engagement and contribution to the company increased, Herold did end up losing this high-performance employee.

One of the fears you may have about helping your team members accomplish their dreams is: What if you develop them and they leave? Sure, this can and does happen. But the better question to ask is: What if you don’t develop them, and they stay? The reality is that supporting your team’s dreams creates a better culture.

I decided to put the Dream Manager idea to the test myself. I asked my mastermind members about their dreams, and I learned that one of the members dreamed of mentoring first- and second-year principals so that they wouldn’t get burned out early in their careers, but she was having trouble finding anyone to mentor.

I thought, “Well, who has a large network of principals all over the world who might need help? I do!” In our coaching together, I helped her create an application, and I sent an email to thousands of school leaders inviting them to apply.

That mastermind member was thrilled; she chose one worthy mentee and spent three years pouring into that person. They developed a loving and mutually supportive connection. And guess what? After those three years, that mentee joined the mastermind as well. Now that mentee helps to mentor other new principals.

I’m convinced that accomplishing incredible dreams is the key to living a Remarkable Life. When I work hard to achieve my goals and focus on giving generously to others to help them achieve theirs, I see the ripple effect as they are inspired to pour into others in return. It reminds me of a line from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem: “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world” (Barrows & Macy, 2005).

On that note, let’s turn your attention to the most important people in your life: your family.

Chapter 3. Love Your Remarkable Family

My friend Karine Veldhoen likes to say that “our leadership story inhabits our life story.” Karine knows this better than most. She became a leader at a vulnerable time in her life: She had a broken marriage and two preteen children. She was devastated by what felt like a personal failure, even while her career flourished and she became a principal at her school. She was in the process of building and rebuilding her life all at once.

Years later, she met a handsome man named David and fell in love again. Before they got married, they went on a visioning retreat together—much like the one you’re on now—to co-create their vision for the Remarkable Family they would build together. The conversations were deep and sweet, and they set a strong foundation for the 14 years they’ve been married.

Since then, Karine and David have continued the tradition of going on a visioning retreat together every year—and they have binders filled with their written plans to prove it!

The insights in this chapter come from Karine and David’s experience building a Remarkable Family, and they align perfectly with Remarkable Vision principles you’ve been learning about. While this book is designed for a solo retreat, you may wish to replicate this experience with your partner and/or family after you’ve dreamed up your Remarkable Vision!

Build Your Nest

Every year in the spring, birds build nests in odd places around my house and yard—in the shed, under the eaves, even behind the wreath on our door. I’m always amazed at how the birds construct these sturdy little structures from materials like leaves, twigs, hair, and twine. Despite the fragility of the individual components of these nests, they’re surprisingly strong enough to protect the eggs from a late frost and any predators that might come snooping.

It’s kind of like life, right?

Together in community with others, you become more than the sum of your parts. And family is the glue that holds you to others and makes you stronger together than you would be alone.

Keep in mind, I’m not talking about your blood relatives necessarily. Your family is the essential people in your life, the ones whom you trust and rely on no matter what. They might be your blood relatives, or they might not. What matters is that they’re the people you’ve chosen to do life with.

Like everyone else, you need a place to come home to, a nest. And the quality of that nest will determine how much enjoyment you get from life and how fully you can contribute to the world around you.

Karine and David identified four essential questions that they ask about the quality of their nest during their annual visioning retreats. They use these questions to help guide them toward a Remarkable Family, and you can, too.

Question 1: What Are My Family’s Truths?

This question is often the most difficult to answer. It is an invitation to be honest with yourself and with the others in your family about what is and is not working.

The best part—though it sometimes gets forgotten—is celebrating what’s working. What are we enjoying? What’s everyone doing really well right now? Where have we seen big “wins” in our lives? What goals have we accomplished? It’s so important to acknowledge all of the good things that you’ve observed and experienced together to build each other up and strengthen the nest.

Then you have to get honest about what isn’t working. It can be as hard to admit what’s not working and to give that feedback as it is to receive critical feedback—but building up your resilience for both is crucial to maintaining truthfulness and authenticity in your nest. Karine and David have found that going on long walks during their retreat helps to make these sometimes hard discussions a little bit easier.

Reflect

Reflect on the following questions about your family. Write down your responses below or in your journal.

●      What’s working well? What do you want to celebrate?

●      What’s not working well? In which areas of your family do you want to see change?

Question 2: What Is Our Dream?

On their first retreat, Karine and David wrote down bold and vulnerable dreams. As they’ve seen some of these initial dreams come true, evolve, and become even more meaningful, they’ve been emboldened to dream even bigger. This is a no-limits conversation; they both know that they can bring up anything they want, and it’ll be received with openness and love by the other person. Together, Karine and David dream about their personal lives, children, friendships, extended families, business and professional lives, spiritual lives, and every other category we covered in the Dream 100 List.

While this retreat usually happens annually, your dreams don’t need to be limited to what you can accomplish within a year. For example, one year, Karine and David dreamed of giving away $1 million to charity in their lifetime together. Many of your dreams may take much longer than a year to complete, and that’s OK. What matters is that you’re regularly reviewing your dreams and celebrating the progress that you’re making toward them.

Because you made your Dream 100 List, you likely already have a good start on some dreams for your Remarkable Family. Now let’s visualize what one of those dreams could look like in the future. If you chose to visualize one of your family dreams for the last chapter, pick a different one to meditate on in this chapter.

Reflect: Visualize Your Remarkable Family

Imagine it’s a year from now, and you’re on another retreat. What dream accomplishment do you want to be celebrating?

Envision the faces of the people in your nest—your family. Think about each person, one at a time. How does this person feel about this dream? What might excite them about this dream? How could this dream improve their life?

Now, what questions or concerns might they have about it? What might arise as a challenge? Imagine their voices as they tell you their thoughts. How can you respond in love and with grace and understanding for their perspective? Write down your reflections below or in your journal.

Question 3: What Are Our Rituals?

Your rituals are the repeated events, milestones, and landmark moments in your family’s life together. These rituals might be breakfast on Saturday mornings, gathering for holidays, attending religious services, having family meetings, or maybe going on an annual visioning retreat together.

One of the rituals Karine and David maintain is reviewing and updating their marriage mission statement during their visioning retreat. This idea comes from The 7 Habits for Highly Effective Families (Covey, 2022).

The mission statement is a declaration of your intentions and goals as a family. You certainly don’t have to have a mission statement for your marriage or your family, but many people find them helpful.

Here’s Karine and David’s mission statement:

We will nurture unconditional love in every season. We will:

●      Dream, pray, and love.

●      Work hard and invest wisely.

●      Serve.

●      Play and laugh together.

●      Live healthfully.

●      Communicate honestly and respectfully each day.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      What rituals do you already have in your family?

●      What rituals do you want to adopt?

●      Do you have a marriage or family mission statement?

●      Write a simple statement of intention for your marriage or family.

Question 4: What Are Our Practices?

Your practices are the daily acts of love that help to maintain a strong bond between all of the people in your family. Karine and David do what they call “coffee and cuddles” every morning during which they spend about 15 minutes with their youngest daughter and cuddle together while they have their coffee. They talk about the practicalities of the day ahead and take time to connect in a peaceful environment.

Another practice they hold is meeting monthly as a family to discuss finances without judgment. It’s just to ensure that how they’re spending money is aligned with their goals.

These kinds of practices are also helpful ways to repair a relationship when stressors or disagreements arise, as they inevitably do.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      Does your family have any regular practices that help to build and maintain a strong daily connection?

●      If not, what practices would be easy to start right away? What do you think everyone would enjoy?

Get Intentional

Most of us don’t intentionally plan for the kind of family we want; we just live our lives and hope that it happens organically. But what Karine and David and many others have found is that great relationships don’t just happen; they are always the result of hard work and intentionality.

Spending time reflecting on your vision for a Remarkable Family is the best way to get started building this intentionality. It might feel awkward at first, but with consistency and time, you’ll reap the rewards.

And guess what? The same wisdom applies to our relationships at school, too.

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.

Sarah went on vacation with her family and spent time reconnecting with her husband. She reflected deeply on what she wanted her experience at school to be like and who she wanted to be as a leader in her community. She came back refreshed, motivated, and with a clear vision for herself, her family, and her school.

If you can, do what Sarah did. Go somewhere new, even if it’s just a hotel or an Airbnb close to your home. Go for a day or a week—whatever you need. In the worst-case scenario, you can do this at home by using a space you don’t normally work in, or you can take your journal with you to a park. Wherever you go, make sure it’s a change of scenery and somewhere you can be alone to reflect deeply.

Once you’re there, take time to unwind and unplug. Consider leaving your phone at home and getting one of those disposable phones for emergencies. Turn off the Internet on your laptop. Better yet, bring only a simple pen and notebook so that you can journal and write down your answers to the reflection questions throughout this book. Remove whatever distractions you need to in order to do deep work.

Most importantly, commit now to not censoring your dreams. Don’t worry about whether something is too big or crazy or countercultural. For now, think as big as you can. We’ll bring in your team and the community later to get their feedback. But this first step—retreating—is just for you. So make the most of it.

If it’s helpful, you can also listen to my audio course on the Remarkable Vision Formula, which you can find at betterleadersbetterschools.com. You might want to listen to it while you walk or hike or float on your paddleboard. What’s important is that you make time to take in this work and then devote yourself to dreaming up a Remarkable Vision.

Now it’s time to start making real progress toward the life, the family, and the school of your dreams. Use the following reflection questions to help you decide where you want to retreat and how you can make the most of that time. Then you’ll be ready to begin.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      Where do you want to go to get away?

●      What do you need to communicate in order to get away?

●      What would make this retreat a success for you?

Chapter 1. Start Close In

“Start close in,

don’t take the second step

or the third,

start with the first

thing

close in,

the step

you don’t want to take.”

“Start Close In” by David Whyte (2019)

Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist, decided in the 1920s that he wanted to explore the depths of his own subconscious in a more meaningful way than he had up until that point. He bought land near Lake Zurich in the Swiss mountain town of Bollingen and began constructing a small, primitive house where he could get away. It’s known today as Bollingen Tower.

Over the years, Jung added different rooms to the Tower, which represented different parts of his consciousness. If you look it up online, you’ll see that it looks like a small castle, his inner sanctum.

Jung lived simply there—chopping wood, making food, pumping water, and moving from room to room as he explored his own thoughts and impulses. He wrote in his memoir, “At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself” (Jung, 1989, p. 225).

Getting away like Jung did—retreating—is the first and arguably most important step of the Remarkable Vision Formula, which we’ll explore in this chapter. The formula is a five-step process for creating, sharing, and refining a compelling vision that will reignite your energy for your life, your family, and your school.

The Art of Retreating

There’s something special that happens when you step away from your daily life, when you remove all of the things you’re used to. All you’re left with is yourself.

Retreating gives us space to create. Have you ever noticed that the words “reacting” and “creating” have the same letters? Yet their meanings and their impact on the people around you could not be more different. When you don’t make time to get away from your daily routine, it’s easy to get caught in a pattern of reacting.

You don’t feel like yourself when all you do is react to the problems coming at you. As Carl Jung observed, it’s not until you give yourself room to create that you begin to feel most yourself. This is the place where you can do your best work.

But retreating is essential for more than just deep work. Retreating might also be the key to finally overcoming whatever problems you’re facing.

In his book, Executive Retreats for Busy Business Leaders, executive coach David Achata (2023) writes about the Battle of Chickamauga, the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War. The fighting lasted for three days, during which both sides lost countless lives. Eventually, exhausted and overcome, the Union army retreated.

Delighted by its victory, the Confederate army set up camp on the mountains around Chattanooga. But while the Confederates isolated themselves on the mountaintop, overconfident in their high positions, the Union army rebuilt its resources and resupplied its men.

Eventually, the Union soldiers were ready to engage again. They ran straight up the side of the mountain toward their enemy. The Confederates, by now exhausted and running out of supplies themselves, tried to fire back with their cannons, but the cannonballs simply rolled harmlessly down the steep mountainside. The Union handily won the Battle of Lookout Mountain and the strategic advantage at Chattanooga.

While it probably looked and felt like a defeat at first, the Union army’s retreat at the Battle of Chickamauga gave it the time and space needed to come up with a strategy and return to win at Chattanooga. From there, Sherman launched his deadly march to the sea, and the Union won the war.

Retreats can offer us the same opportunity to reflect and recharge in our own lives before marching on to victory.

My friend, Joe Clausi, is a mastermind leader and coach. He finds regular time to retreat at the beach near his home in California. After dropping his kids off at school, he walks on the sand with his dog and sips coffee. Making time for this in his daily routine allows him to plan ahead, create processes, and design ways to make our mastermind systems more efficient.

Joe says that he uses his retreat time to codify the best practices he sees and hears in schools so that he can share those lessons with other schools and mastermind members. In doing this, Joe says:

My hope is that they hear one thing that they like, go back to their site and try [it], and that snowballs into a change that allows them to get a peace of mind, a few extra minutes, a mental break from chaos, or helps them make progress toward their goals.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      What battles are you facing in your life?

●      Can you see a pattern in your actions of reacting rather than creating?

●      Where can you be most yourself? Do you have a Bollingen Tower in your own life? When was the last time you went there?

●      How does retreating help you prepare to engage with whatever you’re facing?

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Visualize the Future

The second step of the Remarkable Vision Formula, after we’ve removed ourselves from the stress of daily life, is to visualize the future. If visualization sounds woo-woo, don’t worry! This is a real strategy with real science behind it. Psychologist and author Dr. Gia Marson (2021) writes that visualization is “using your imagination to walk yourself through various scenarios as if rehearsing them.” She says it works because it puts you “in the right mindset to overcome life’s challenges and achieve your goals.”

Visualization is used in many high-performance contexts to help people reach new heights. For example, athletes use visualization to anticipate the moves they’ll make and prepare their bodies and minds for victory. Therapists often use it with their clients to help them overcome anxiety and make positive changes in their lives. Actors use visualization to get into character and deliver the performance of a lifetime.

Perhaps the most powerful way to use visualization is to imagine all of the things that could go wrong. In an episode of the podcast, No Stupid Questions, psychologist Angela Duckworth says:

When you just fantasize about the best possible outcome, the problem is that you don’t actually feel any sense of urgency to do anything because you’ve already indulged in this future that you, in some ways, experience just because you’ve been able to imagine it. So I think what they would say is to go to the obstacles, right? [It’s] fine to visualize the positive future that you’re hoping for. But then you need to contrast that with the obstacles that stand in the way (Duckworth & Konnikova, 2023).

By anticipating things that could go wrong, you can visualize how you might respond to worst-case scenarios and try out possible solutions in advance.

In the same episode, psychologist and professional poker player Maria Konnikova revealed that she not only uses her imagination to visualize outcomes when she’s playing poker, she also forces herself to write out those visualizations. She says:

Writing it out forces you to think it through in a way that you don’t if you just kind of say it in your head because it forces you to actually think of the nitty gritty and…how you really will be implementing something (Duckworth & Konnikova, 2023).

Years ago, I started to wonder, what if the power of visualization could be harnessed to help school leaders as well?

In the next three chapters, we’ll visualize both positive and negative scenarios to help you craft your Remarkable Vision and plan ahead for any obstacles. First, let’s see how it works.

Reflect

Try a simple visualization exercise right now. Sit in a comfortable position and close your eyes. Take three deep breaths, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth.

Now imagine yourself cooking your favorite meal. It doesn’t have to be fancy; it just has to be something you enjoy. See yourself getting the ingredients out of the fridge, taking out the pots and pans you’ll need, chopping the vegetables, and so on.

Visualize each step of the process clearly as if you were watching it happen in a movie. Bring to mind the other senses as well: What does it smell like? Do you hear the sizzling of oil or the bubbling of water? Can you feel the warmth from the stove?

Then, when the meal is ready, imagine yourself sitting down to enjoy the first taste.

Consider the following questions and write down your responses in your journal:

●      How do you feel after visualizing the meal (besides hungry!)?

●      What might go wrong with cooking the meal, and how could you avoid it?

●      What do you want to visualize next?

●      How do you think you could use visualization as a tool in your life?

Define Expectations

Author James Nottingham (2017) teaches a powerful exercise about expectations. It goes like this:

●      Draw a house.

●      Now give yourself feedback on your house.

●      And now improve your house.

Did your house get much better? How do you know?

Unfortunately, your house couldn’t have gotten much better because you never defined what you were looking for in a house. For example, how would you know the house is better because you added another window? Maybe it was only supposed to have one window.

It turns out that you can only give feedback, take feedback, and improve when you are clear on the expectations in the first place. Visualizing the future you want for your life, your family, and your school is a great step—but no one will be able to act on that vision unless they know what is expected of them.

You understand this to be true in terms of learning; you know these expectations as “success criteria,” and you have no problem coming up with them for your kids. Yet you probably rarely take time to identify the success criteria for your own work as an educator. We’ll fix that in this book.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      How do you set expectations for yourself and others in your own life?

●      Do the people around you know what you expect from them?

●      How well do they deliver on the goals you set?

Seek Feedback

As the leader, it’s your responsibility to take the first step—to visualize, to define expectations, and to lay out the initial plan. This is as far as you can get on your own. As you know, the plan means nothing if it doesn’t meet the needs of the people you’re trying to serve. You have to ask for their input and get their buy-in.

We recommend getting feedback on your plan in concentric circles—a process we’ll cover more in Chapter 5. First, send it to your closest colleagues. Ask them to comment on the vision. Ask:

●      What could make this better?

●      What am I missing?

Give them a clear deadline for input, and then listen and discuss with an open mind. Implement as much of their feedback as you can—even if you don’t love their suggestions.

Then, expand the circle of feedback a little bit wider. Send it to the department heads and team leaders you work with. Implement their input as well. Repeat the process, eventually sending your vision to your students, parents, and community. Overcommunicate that this is a draft and you welcome their thoughts.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      Are you in the habit of seeking feedback from your team?

●      Have you tried the concentric circles of feedback approach? If so, how did it turn out?

●      How do you typically respond to feedback? Does that response serve you and those around you well?

Implement the Vision

When the vision is ready, it’s time to put it into action. In the Bible, God told the prophet Habakkuk, “Write the vision, make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.” Your vision should not only be communicated plainly, but it should be actionable and exciting so that those who read it can (and will want to) “run” with it.

How do you do that? We’ll discuss this more in Chapter 5 when we talk about Remarkable Execution, but the first step is identifying the “vision keepers.” In your family, the vision keepers are all of you—your spouse/partner, children, and whoever else you consider to be an essential part of your family. At school, your vision keepers are the people who believe in the vision most ardently.

It’s easy for people to say of your dreams and your vision, “That will never work.” The vision keepers make it their personal mission to prove those people wrong. They become the guardians of the vision and help hold the rest of the community accountable for continuing to make progress towards that vision. Using our rowing analogy from the Introduction, they are like the coxswain, steering the boat and encouraging the rest of the team to work together. In Chapter 5, you’ll learn more about how to find these people and equip them to lead.

Reflect

Consider the following questions and write down your responses below or in your journal:

●      Think of other visions that you’ve supported. What inspired you about those visions?

●      How did you become a cheerleader for those visions?

●      Who do you trust to be a vision keeper?

That’s it! Congratulations. You have everything you need to craft a Remarkable Vision for arguably the most important relationships in your life: your family and your school. But you know that trying to cast a vision for life with others means nothing if you haven’t turned your attention inward to who you are and who you want to be.

That’s why we’ll start by creating a vision for a Remarkable Life first.

Part 6: Build Your Perfect 90-Day Entry Plan

Remember your vision for Day 91 that you wrote down in Part 1?

Go back to it now that you’ve read more about each of the five buckets, and revise it to include new ideas you’ve learned. Your hopes for how your school will make people feel might be the same, but ideally, you now have more specific actions and ideas to add to it.

In this chapter, we’re going to talk about how to make that vision a reality.

Pacing Your 90-Day Entry Plan

If you try to tackle all five buckets at full speed every day for the first 90 days, you will burn out long before Thanksgiving. Instead, you need to divide those 90 days into meaningful and strategic checkpoints that you’ll be building your plan around:

• Before school starts

• Day 1

• Week 1

• Month 1

• Month 2

• Month 3

• At each of these strategic checkpoints, you’ll be asking yourself:

• What do I want to accomplish in this time period?

• What aspects of the five buckets am I implementing?

• How will I communicate this focus to everyone in the school?

• How will I keep score and measure progress?

This new scaffolding might be an adjustment from what you’re used to. John Unger, principal at West Fork Middle School, shared that at first, it was difficult for him to envision what school should look like 60 or 90 days out—but by starting with specific actions before school started and scaffolding up from there, he was able to scale each of the five buckets seamlessly and communicate the new vision to his team in a way that made sense for everyone.

A Model for Your Perfect Entry Plan

The following is a model for what your 90-day action plan could look like. It’s filled with the ideas and activities for each bucket that we discussed in previous chapters—but go crazy with it! Make a ruckus and change it to fit your needs.

To make it easier for you, I’ve created a blank template that you can download here.

Before School Starts: Set the Stage

You

• Fill out the Ruckus Maker Mindset Tool™ and identify areas you want to grow in.

• Communications

• Create your Get-to-Know-You Survey.

Academics

• Find out the district’s preexisting expectations/goals.

• Gather any quantitative data that is available to you (e.g., standardized test scores, grades, etc.).

Culture

• During an in-service day, do the 10-picture activity from Part 4 to take the temperature of your school’s culture.

Operations

• Identify the operational needs that will have to be accomplished in the first day/week of school.

• Make a plan to keep score on the operational tasks you want to accomplish each day, and set reminders in your phone.

First Day of School

You

• How do you plan to incorporate eating, sleeping, meditating, moving, and unplugging on the first day?

• How can you integrate something fun and unique to you with your first day plans?

Communication

• Be visible.

• Make a point to welcome everybody individually.

• Visit classrooms.

• Check in with staff ahead of time to make sure everyone has the information they need to succeed on Day 1.

Academics

• While visiting classrooms, look for one good thing about the quality of the teacher’s instruction in each classroom.

• Leave each teacher a message sharing what you noticed.

Culture

• Make this day a powerful moment and celebrate it.

• Operations

• Be available and visible so you can help with any “fires” that arise.

Week 1: Focus on Relationships

You

• How do you plan to incorporate eating, sleeping, meditating, moving, and unplugging throughout your week?

• How can you share something meaningful from your life with your staff?

Communications

• Conduct the Get-to-Know-You Survey during PD.  (Alternatively, complete before school starts.)

• Take note of common challenges and write them on index cards.

Academics

• Continue visiting classrooms and finding one good thing to praise staff for. Try to visit all classrooms, counseling spaces, the cafeteria, and so on by the end of the week.

• Send out the Get-to-Know-You Student Survey or meet with students to interview them personally.

Culture

• Conduct the Belonging and Othering Exercise during one of your first PD gatherings.

Operations

• Refine your scoring system. Does it work, or are there any tweaks you want to make in how you keep score?

• Start compiling a long-term list of operational tasks that need to be accomplished.

Month 1: Take It All In

You

• Set goals for eating, sleeping, meditating, moving, and unplugging for the whole month.

• Pick someone to be accountable to and share your goals with them. Ask them to follow up throughout the month.

• What specific ways can you share more about yourself with your staff and learn more about them?

Communications

• Ask your administrative assistant to schedule 15-minute individual meetings with your staff throughout the month so you can get to know them and follow up on their survey responses.

• Refine what you identified as top challenges on the index cards as you learn more.

• Identify a rhythm or schedule for communicating consistently through multiple channels.

Academics

• Identify your in-house experts in different instructional areas.

• With your in-house experts, co-create a PD calendar for the rest of the year.

• As academic challenges arise, take action that delivers quick wins.

Culture

• Gather a culture team.

• Have your culture team take the lead on identifying your school’s sticky core values.

• Make powerful moments: Identify important dates and milestones in your school’s calendar.

Operations

• Download the delegation spreadsheet and start asking your staff to take on certain tasks.

• Add up your score for this month. Are you hitting 80 percent or higher?

Month 2: Vision and Goals

You

• Complete the Ruckus Maker Mindset Tool™ again. How are you measuring up against the first time you completed it?

• Set new goals for eating, sleeping, meditating, moving, and unplugging for the whole month.

• Pick someone to be accountable to and share your goals with them. Commit to when you will check in.

• What specific ways can you share more about yourself with your staff and learn more about them?

Communications

• Draft your Remarkable School Vision and invite feedback from your leadership team.

• Are you still communicating consistently in the channels you identified?

Academics

• Review and analyze data.

• At a staff meeting, present the long-term challenges you’ve identified and invite staff to help make an action plan to address them.

• Set goals together.

Culture

• Kick off the Staff Member of the Month nominations.

• Celebrate any powerful moments in your school calendar.

• Operations

• How many tasks have you given away? Aim to give away a minimum of three operational tasks per quarter or a maximum of three tasks per month.

• Add up your score for this month. Are you hitting 80 percent or higher?

Month 3: Progress and Planning

You

• Complete the Ruckus Maker Mindset Tool™ again. How are you measuring up this month?

• Set new goals for eating, sleeping, meditating, moving, and unplugging for the whole month.

• Continue your agreed upon check-in schedule with your accountability partner.

• What specific ways can you share more about yourself with your staff and learn more about them?

Communications

• After receiving and implementing feedback from your leadership team on your Remarkable School Vision, send it to department heads and other leaders throughout the school to gather feedback from their teams as well.

• Are you still communicating consistently in the channels you identified?

• Seek feedback from your staff: Is your communication meeting their needs?

Academics

• Identify lead indicators: What will you measure to make progress toward your goals?

• Check in with your team to see how you can support them in making decisions and progress.

Culture

• Celebrate any powerful moments in your school calendar.

• Make plans to celebrate the 100th day of school.

Operations

• How many tasks have you given away? Aim to give away a minimum of three operational tasks per quarter or a maximum of three tasks per month.

• Add up your score for this month. Are you hitting 80 percent or higher?

Completing Your Entry Plan

Don’t complete your action plan alone. Like Principal John Unger, you can join the Ruckus Maker Nation through our website, buildleadershipmomentum.com, to find support and encouragement, and you can even join our next challenge. John said he enjoyed the collaborative environment and meeting other principals and school leaders across the world to give him ideas and find solidarity.

Once you have a draft of your plan, if you haven’t already, bring in your leadership team to help revise it and make changes before you start implementing.

Even then, your action plan is not going to be perfect, and it should never be “done.” It’ll need polishing throughout the first 90 days. Keeping in mind the quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, remove as much as you can to maintain your focus and clarity about what you want to accomplish in each bucket.

John shared that his team used a simple cycle of inquiry to continuously refine their plan:

• Plan

• Do

• Reflect

As they came across new challenges, they were able to make adjustments while still maintaining their overall focus on their goals for each of the five buckets.

The other advice I give to leaders as they start to roll out their plan is this: Don’t stress about bad days! At some point, something will go wrong. Expect it. Embrace it. Stay focused on the big goals and begin again.

And here’s the best part about the 90-day action plan:

It’s not just for the first 90 days!

You can use this template to plan not just for back to school, but for every quarter of the school year.

The Impact Is Worth the Effort

When I asked John what it was like implementing his first 90-day entry plan, he said, “Honestly, that stress was completely gone.”

Besides the positive weekly communication, the successful launch of their RTI system, and the creation of the West Fork family engagement committee, John says that they’ve been able to create a culture of belonging throughout the school, and he’s increased the leadership capacity in his team by delegating and building trust.

And they haven’t stopped there; now, his team uses the 90-day entry plan to guide their focus throughout the entire school year.

Completing the action plan takes some dedicated time, but John and the other principals who have implemented their plans feel the effort is well worth it. “It’s an investment, but it pays off,” John said. “Are you willing to give up 10 to 20 hours of planning for a successful school year?”

That’s a great question. How will you answer it?

John and other principals like him have learned that a 90-day entry plan is a gift to their communities. It takes planning and a commitment to listening and learning, to pausing and reflecting, to focusing and pruning, and to including and welcoming. But the payoff is a greater positive impact on each of the five buckets in your school, and forward momentum to carry you through the rest of the school year.

Most of all, it takes a commitment to yourself. Will you be the kind of principal who gives your best self to your school?

Are you willing, Ruckus Maker?

Part 5: Pare Down to Scale Up Operations

When leaders start thinking about how to plan for a new school year, they usually think of operations first. That’s why I’ve saved it for last—because we have to plan for the important before the urgent.

Now that we’ve done that, let’s talk about how to handle the urgent.

It’s probably not hard for you to think of all of the operational challenges facing you: onboarding new faculty, welcoming students and families, establishing policies and managing district mandates, filing reports, creating the master schedule, and maintaining the facilities—just to start.

Three principles will help to guide us as we tackle the quickly-growing to-do list.

Less Is More

In 1960, Random House founder Bennett Cerf challenged one of his most famous authors to a bet: Write an entire book using just 50 words. The prize: $50.

That author was Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.

The book born out of this dare became his most beloved children’s book, Green Eggs and Ham, and it has sold over 200 million copies to date.

The surprising and profitable lesson from this little experiment was that less is more. The greater the constraint, the greater the creativity required. With only 50 words at his disposal, Dr. Seuss had to access his creativity in a new way, and it led to a breakthrough.

What’s even more remarkable is that 49 of the words he used only had one syllable! The 50th had three: anywhere.

Dr. Seuss liked this strategy of using constraints so much that he employed it in all of his future books, too (Clear, n.d.).

While handling operations can feel like a chore, we can access greater creativity—perhaps even make it fun—by establishing constraints for ourselves. Constraints work because they force us to boil the task down to its most essential elements and change the way we perceive what we’re actually trying to accomplish. They help us shed the weight of “the way we’ve always done things.”

French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1939) knew the power of distilling an idea or a task to its most fundamental levels: “It seems that  perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away” (p. 59).

Dedicate just one hour per day to handling operations-related issues, or set aggressive deadlines for operations tasks. In his blog, James Clear (n.d.) describes how he commits to a schedule for writing articles ahead of time, and it’s forced him to get creative with finding time for writing: “Constraints force you to get something done and don’t allow you to procrastinate. This is why I believe that professionals set a schedule for their production while amateurs wait until they feel motivated.”

Delegate

You already know that I believe in trusting and empowering your team. Along with the academic priorities, we can also learn to trust our team to take on operational tasks or handle the “fires” that so often seem to come up.

Sometimes what we think are emergencies are really just distractions. Often, our pride and ego as the leader make us think we need to be involved in everything when in reality, our team might be just as (or even more) qualified to handle certain things so that we can keep the focus on our academic priorities and culture.

Delegating doesn’t diminish your impact; it actually multiplies it.

When delegating, you can define the boundaries and constraints of the task or project. You can establish processes and set expectations around when you want to be contacted. You know your people’s strengths and can tap into their passions and excitement. You get to give them decision-making autonomy and authority; you can empower them to show off their leadership skills.

This is a hard shift for many leaders who have been used to overperforming, taking on too much, and trying to manage everything themselves. They wonder, What role is left for me if I am delegating well to my team?

Their role is to provide direction and coaching. Their role is also to clear the path, provide resources, and recognize their team’s effort.

To help you decide what tasks are right to delegate, create a spreadsheet or table with five columns:

You can create your own spreadsheet or use the one I’ve created for you at buildleadershipmomentum.com.

Aim to give away a minimum of three operational tasks per quarter or a maximum of three tasks per month. Communicate intentionally about any expectations you have around the project, and check in with your team regularly to see what else they need from you in order to be successful.

I’ve also created a Delegation Masterclass that goes into more depth about when and how to delegate effectively.

Keep Score

Now, I don’t mean keep score against your colleagues or create competition among them.

The only person you should be keeping score with is yourself.

As you already know, there’s a lot to accomplish in the first 90 days of school. Even your 90-day plan, which we’ll create in Part 6, will cover a lot of detail on every aspect we’ve covered so far: yourself, communication, academics, school culture, and operations. You’ll need an easy way to measure your progress.

The best way to do this is to set your main priority for each day. Keeping track is easy: Just write your priority in your planner or set a reminder on your phone, and then check it off as you complete it. Every single day, Monday through Friday, you should have the potential to score a 5 out of 5 for the week.

Don’t calculate your score daily! Worrying about keeping score daily might distract you from your work or set too rigid a boundary. At the end of the week or month, add up what you’ve accomplished and divide it by the total number of tasks you set for yourself. As long as you’re scoring 80 percent or higher, you’re doing great.

Are you ready to turn the page to actually create your plan? You now have everything you need for a successful first 90 days of school.

Now, let’s get started.

Take Action: Get Your Tasks in Order

• Create a list of all of the operational tasks you can think of that you’ll need to accomplish in the first 90 days.

• Download the delegation spreadsheet I created or create your own, and then fill it out.

• For each task, identify the constraints and deadlines.

• Communicate with your team about what they can take on and what you will keep.

Part 4: Co-Create an Extraordinary Culture

In his book, The Promises of Giants, John Amaechi (2021) tells a potent story about the importance of culture. The story is about the residents who live in an apartment building where all of their apartments border a shared common area.

Some of the residents smoke. When they are done with a cigarette, they flick the butts onto the ground.

“Someone else will pick them up,” they say.

Other residents start to notice the trash in the common area. Not my problem, they think. After all, it isn’t their cigarette butt. But now those residents start to leave behind sandwich wrappers, water bottles, paper, and plastic bags.

“Someone else will pick them up,” they say.

Next come the cardboard boxes. Finally, a mattress is abandoned.

The garbage continues to pile up, yet no one does anything about it.

The smokers continue to smoke, flicking their cigarette butts onto the ground, until one day, the embers catch on the cardboard, which sets fire to the rest of the litter. The whole thing goes up in flames, endangering the entire apartment complex.

What was once a problem that no one took responsibility for is now everyone’s problem.

Everyone is responsible for the culture of an organization, too. And what is a culture? It’s the accumulation of our choices.

Author and business psychologist John Amaechi (2018) writes, “People make choices. Choices make culture.”

It usually starts with something small. We notice that someone’s actions or words aren’t aligned with our mission, but we let it slide. Not my problem, we think. We notice that our colleagues are passing off responsibilities like a hot potato. But hey—not our problem.

As a leader, it’s tempting to want to keep the peace or ignore potential culture issues that aren’t really problems yet. We have too many other things on our plate.

This strategy works fine until one day, you’ve got a fire on your hands. Suddenly, that toxic culture has become everyone’s problem—especially yours.

Why We Ignore Culture

“Fires” and emergencies are the most common reasons I hear leaders give for losing focus on their school’s culture. They’re busy, and they have lots of urgent problems to address. Without even realizing it, culture gets pushed to the side.

The other obstacle to nurturing our culture is administrivia: paperwork, tasks, to-do lists. There are constant inputs and demands on your time that all take your attention away from culture.

You can’t afford to let that happen.

Culture is the heartbeat of your school. It’s especially important in the first 90 days because those days set a precedent for the rest of the year. In this part, I’ll share some of my favorite ways to make culture a priority in your school.

Take the Temperature

How do you know what your school’s current culture is in the first place—especially if you’re a new leader or new to the school? Sometimes it’s difficult for leaders to get an accurate read on how people really feel.

To help make it easier for everyone to share their thoughts, I like to use the following exercise in a staff meeting. You can repeat this a few times throughout the year to help you stay up-to-date, and you can try it with students and parents, too.

• First, find at least 10 random pictures that evoke strong emotions. For example:

  • One of your students

  • Puppy

  • Older person

  • Nature

  • Space

  • Traffic jam

  • Paperwork

• Ask staff to sort the pictures and pick the top three that best represent the quality of your school culture.

• Ask for volunteers to explain their reasoning, or if there’s time, let everyone share their thoughts.

• How do their responses align with the Remarkable School Vision you developed in Part 2?

This activity will help you understand the cultural history of the school and identify potential issues.

Put Relationships First

Quality relationships lead to a quality culture, and vice versa. As the leader of your organization, you set the tone and example for everyone else. The time and energy you put into building relationships will pay dividends in improving your school’s culture.

Be Present

The best place to begin is by staying present during interactions with our staff. This is often difficult! We’re so attuned to looking out for problems and staying on top of the demands of administrivia that it can be hard to set those aside. And yet, the number one way to show people we care is by honoring them with our full attention.

The self-care you’ve been practicing will come in handy here. It’s hard to be fully invested in others when your back hurts, you didn’t sleep well, or you’re starving. Practicing mindfulness will train your brain to stop being so reactive to the constant interruptions coming your way.

Create a Culture Team

Remember, culture is everyone’s responsibility, not just yours. Create a team of culture ambassadors in your school. This team might include staff, students, parents, and other stakeholders. They will be your culture cheerleaders and help you to represent the school’s vision throughout the community.

Get Explicit About Belonging and Othering

School culture is about our choices, but more specifically, it’s about the impact our choices have on everyone else in the school community. It’s about how we make others feel.

In the first 90 days, you can establish a common language around culture by talking specifically about both belonging and othering. Belonging is about the way we create a welcoming and inclusive environment where everyone feels valued, whereas othering is about the ways we (intentionally or unintentionally) exclude and separate people within our organization.

To get this conversation started, lead your team through this exercise:

• In the middle of a whiteboard, write the question: How does belonging feel?

• Give everyone five to 10 minutes to discuss. Consider playing some of their favorite songs from the Get-to-Know-You Survey in the background.

• Next, invite everyone to share, and as they do, create a mindmap on a whiteboard. You’ll probably hear words and phrases like safe, trusted, connected, or making a contribution.

• Have someone from your culture team take a picture of these words as a snapshot of how everyone can create a culture of belonging.

• Then, write the next question on the board: How does othering feel?

• Again, take five to 10 minutes to discuss. Othering might feel like being invisible, isolated, diminished, or unwelcome.

• Take another picture of these insights as a reminder of the feelings and emotions to look out for. They are the cigarette butts and garbage that piles up over time.

• Refer back to your mindmap work throughout the year.

If you invest in forms of belonging and work to eradicate the ways people feel othered in your organization, the quality of both your relationships and culture will improve.

Create Moments

Once I was coaching an elementary school leader who wanted help improving her school’s culture. The school was heavily invested in PLCs and loved data. This principal was so excited about the gains her Tier-3 intervention teachers were making and had been celebrating their success. Unfortunately, she’d received feedback that the rest of the staff felt overlooked since their progress wasn’t as dramatic as the Tier-3 teachers’.

This leader had done a great job recognizing and celebrating one group of teachers but needed to find ways to recognize and celebrate everyone’s accomplishments.

We do that by creating moments.

Author Chip Heath (2017) writes,

“Moments are what we remember and what we cherish. Certainly we

might celebrate achieving a goal, such as completing a marathon or landing a significant client—but the achievement is embedded in a moment. [...] This is what we mean by ‘thinking in moments’: to recognize where the prose of life needs punctuation.”

Remember my sticky core value about the purple cow from Part 1? Creating moments is how I live out this value in my work everyday.

Some obvious moments for your school are the first day, holidays, and the end of a quarter or semester—but you don’t have to wait for a milestone to create moments. Let’s talk about how to do this regularly throughout the school year.

Consistent Celebration

When I was a principal, my culture team sent out a Staff Member of the Month nomination form to all students, faculty, and parents. This form listed every staff member in the school, including the bus drivers and the staff who served lunch everyday, all of the teachers and custodians, and finally, our vice principal and myself.

The person filling out the form would check one person’s name from the list.  Then, the form listed our school’s core values, and the person would check the core value the nominee best exhibited. The final two questions were:

• How does this person live out this core value?

• Anything else you want us to know?

The culture team compiled the results and awarded one prize to a stand-out staff member every month. They made sure that these prizes were awarded equitably throughout the year.

But what’s more—even those who didn’t “win” still received a copy of the nominations they received so that they could see the positive feedback and compliments that others had written about them. Those forms were not anonymous, so they could follow up with the person who nominated them to thank them.

This monthly ritual was such a hit and staff were so excited about the feedback they received that they took to posting their nomination forms in the staff lounge every month. It was a great lesson for me on the power of moments.

Remember That You Set the Tone

Author Todd Whitaker (2011) writes, “When the principal sneezes, the whole school catches a cold” (p. 36).

Just as teachers set the tone in their classrooms, you set the tone for the whole school. Staying present and engaged, putting relationships first, and buying into the magic of moments begins with you.

Take Action: Gather Your Culture Team

• Create a culture team at your school.

• Plan to lead one or both of the exercises listed in this part—or empower your culture team to do so.

Part 3: Focus Your Efforts for Academic Impact

Remember playing Whac-a-Mole at the arcade when you were a kid? Armed with a soft pleather mallet, your goal was to smack down the plastic moles as they popped up randomly all over the mechanical game board. You could only win on pure adrenaline, whacking around at the board in a frenzy, hoping you were fast enough to put a stop to the madness.

As fun as it was, I think that game did us all a great disservice; it trained us to attack problems reactively in frantic spurts of adrenaline. We’ve learned to take action only when problems appear instead of seeking out long-term solutions by identifying the root of the problem.

Academics is the business of school. It’s likely that when the new year starts (or even earlier), you will be overwhelmed with urgent academic issues. What’s more—new urgent-feeling priorities and problems will arise throughout the year. Decisions will need to be made across a broad spectrum of academic concerns, including:

• Standardized testing

• Curriculum development

• Intervention and enrichment

• Acceleration

• MTSS

• RTI

• PLCs

• Grading

• And much, much more

Many of us have experienced what’s often called initiative fatigue—the constant churn of projects and priorities as leaders react to the newest issues that come up during the year. Initiative fatigue is what happens when we’re playing Whac-a-Mole with the academic needs across our school building.

As the leader, it’s your job to stop this madness by bringing a more focused, thoughtful approach to setting academic priorities and establishing a process for academic improvement. Once you do that, then your job is to trust your team. So many leaders get addicted to the adrenaline rush of playing Whac-a-Mole that they find it hard to let go of the responsibility to be the ultimate problem-solver in their school.

News flash: You’re not the only person who can make good decisions about how to serve your students. You’re not the only person who can solve these sticky, complex problems. You need your team.

In Part 3, we’ll talk about the four steps of instructional leadership that will get your academics off to a strong start this year: gather data, set goals, empower your team, and measure impact. These four steps will become a cycle that you can implement over and over again throughout the entire year.

© Better Leaders Better Schools™, 2023

Gather Data

Hopefully you’re picking up on a theme for these first 90 days: Listen first, act second. Before we can set goals or start to take any action, we have to get to know the students in our buildings and understand our school’s academic strengths and weaknesses.

If you’re a veteran leader or have been at your school for multiple years, it’s likely that you already have a good sense of where the pain points are. New principals—whether new to administration in general or just new to a particular school—will need to spend more time listening and learning before setting priorities.

You’ll want to collect annual standardized assessment data, formative assessment data across different departments and grade levels, and qualitative data such as surveys. (You’ll already have one piece of qualitative data from the Get-to-Know-You Survey you’ll be sending to your staff.)

I recommend empowering your department leads and grade-level or discipline-specific teams to not only gather relevant data, but to analyze it. Join as many of these meetings as you can, but let your teams take the lead.

First, teams should look at and discuss what’s going well. Often, what your school is doing right isn’t being celebrated like it should be. As you see things that merit celebration, make note to bring them up at the next PD meeting.

Next, teams should look for trends in the data to identify potential problem areas. Using disaggregated data can help schools spot the challenges for specific groups of students that may need additional support and attention.

After you’ve done your staff survey, consider conducting a similar Get-to-Know-You Student Survey as well. Relationships are the foundation of learning. All kids need to feel that at least one adult at the school cares about them, and you can get a sense for whether students in your building are feeling this way through a survey.

Below, I’m including some of my favorite questions to ask kids as a starting point, but you’ll need to adjust this for your own student population. If you’re serving elementary students, think about making an emoji survey or asking simple yes/no questions. Alternatively, you can meet with students individually throughout the first 90 days to interview them personally.

Get-to-Know-You Student Survey

1. What do you want to know about your new principal?

2. What do you want me to know about you?

3. What is your favorite song and who performs it?

4. When is your birthday?

5. Share three of your favorite traditions at [Name of Your School].

6. Share the name of one teacher you know cares about you.

7. Share your top three strengths as a student.

8. How can I support you more at school?

9. If you were me, what would be your biggest priority?

Set Goals

Imagine that you’re trying to hammer through a piece of plywood. As you swing the hammer down, the force of the blow is strongest wherever the hammer hits, but it gets dispersed fairly quickly throughout the rest of the board. You might make only a dent in the wood.

Now imagine that you hold a sharp nail on top of the plywood and use the same amount of force to bring the hammer down onto the head of the nail. This time, the nail pierces through the wood with no problem because all of that force has been concentrated into a much smaller area. It took the same amount of effort, but the impact was much greater.

The same analogy applies to the priorities and initiatives we take on in school. When we try to apply our efforts to too many initiatives, we disperse our force and end up making small dents here and there. But when we focus our attention on just a few strategic priorities, we can maximize our impact.

The philosopher Seneca said something similar: “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.” This is why you’ll want to pick no more than just three to five priorities to focus on per year.

Most leaders get this; it makes sense to us intuitively.

But that’s not the hard part.

The hard part is sticking to those priorities throughout the year, even as other problems and issues rise to the surface. The temptation will be to start playing Whac-a-Mole again. You have to resist it, and you have to help your teams resist it. You simply don’t have the mental capital, human resources, or time to tackle all of those problems. Taking on too much is the fastest path to a mediocre (or worse) school.

Obviously, there are going to be times when unavoidable problems come up. No one had “transition our entire school to distance learning” on their strategic priorities list at the start of the 2019–2020 school year—but a pandemic happened anyway, and we all had to adjust. There are certain issues that simply cannot be ignored. Thankfully, those are the exception, not the rule.

Learn to say no to even good opportunities so you can continue to say yes to what  is most important.

The other constraint on your goal-setting is that you might not have the autonomy to choose all of your goals; sometimes certain priorities are set for you at the district level, and you have to work those in. But as you’ll learn in Part 6, constraints can be powerful motivators for creativity.

Make sure that all of your department or grade-level teams agree on the priorities early on in the year. Then, as new problem areas arise, you can pause to ask:

• Have we solved our other priority problems yet?

• Should we de-prioritize another problem in order to focus on this new one?

Getting buy-in on the strategic focus right away will be critical to empowering your team to later take the appropriate action.

John Unger, the principal of West Fork Middle School, shared that one of the wins his team experienced from the five-day challenge was building a Response-to-Intervention (RTI) system throughout the building, starting with Tier 1 Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS). John’s team modeled positive communication weekly to all of the staff, and soon, they saw that teachers followed suit, giving students handwritten notes offering encouragement and positive feedback.

The school had been trying to get an RTI system off the ground for years, and they were finally able to make it happen with the focus and clarity their 90-day entry plan gave them.

Empower Your Team

Your job as the instructional leader of your school is to lead your team’s learning and then empower them with as much decision-making autonomy as you can to implement what they’ve learned.

Based on the feedback and data you’ve been gathering, you’ll have set your priorities. Now is the time for you to prepare PD experiences throughout the year around those core areas. Identify your in-house experts and lean on them to help guide the rest of the team. Where you have gaps, consider hiring outside help to partner with internal team leads.

Invite your staff into the creation of a PD calendar for the year, and send that calendar out as early as possible so that your staff and teachers know what to expect. Check in with internal leads often to make sure they have what they need. After every PD meeting, send out a quick survey to invite feedback on what was discussed and make sure that you’re staying committed to your strategic goals for the year.

Measure Impact

Project managers at companies typically look at two types of indicators to assess their progress: lead and lag indicators.

Lag indicators include information about the outcomes; they help identify where progress still needs to be made. Most leaders focus their energy here, which is a mistake. Lead indicators, on the other hand, refer to ideas that can help close the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. They are future-focused, action-oriented, and within your control.

Because lead indicators are within your control, they are what matters most. If the right actions are taken, the outcomes will happen anyway.

Progress trumps performance every day.

Finally, don’t forget to measure the intangibles. You can do this in your after-PD surveys, during classroom visits, and via individual check-ins with staff. How much joy and investment do you see in your team? Are they happy to show up to work everyday?

Remember, often the smallest details can make the biggest impact on your school’s culture. That’s what we’ll discuss in Part 4.

Take Action: Plan for PD

• Start collecting any quantitative data available to you, like grades and standardized testing scores.

• If you already know your team, start identifying your in-house experts who might be willing to lead PD throughout the year.

Part 2: Communicate How Much You Care

There’s one thing that high-performing schools tend to have in common: good communication. Communication is how we facilitate everything else that we want to accomplish as a school community: our academics (which we’ll discuss in the next post), our culture (Part 4), and our operations (Part 5).

On the other hand, when communication breaks down, the damage tends to extend to these other areas, too. It’s important that we get this right if we want everything else to go well.

The biggest communication challenge that educators face is that we tend to have the wrong focus. We view communication as a checklist of district mandates and protocols from the central office that we need to pass along to our teachers and staff.

Sure, we try to make it engaging—perhaps we sprinkle in a well-timed joke that no one laughs at—but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re trying to get through a laundry list of information, and everyone knows it.

If you’re thinking this sounds familiar, you might realize that this is exactly what we tend to do to students, too—viewing education as a list of standards to force-feed into their brains. It’s not effective for students, and it’s not effective for our staff.

When we do try to deliver this information during staff or department meetings, we tend to get sidetracked by another challenge: a focus on ourselves. We’re all human, and we’re all highly sensitive to the way we’re being perceived by the people around us.

Are they listening? Am I being funny enough? Do I have spinach in my teeth? So-and-so didn’t say hi to me. Why hasn’t you-know-who shown up yet? Is she ignoring me? This inner monologue distracts us from focusing on the people in front of us.

Remember the old adage: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”?

It’s cheesy, but it’s true.

In the first 90 days, our primary goal is not to rush through a list of logistical to-dos or dominate the airwaves with our own plans and vision. It’s to communicate how much we care.

And to do that, it helps to realign our ideas around who, what, where, and how we’re communicating.

Who Is Communicating?

Communication has to flow two ways. Yes, as a leader we are responsible for communicating to our team. But in the back-to-school rush, we tend to forget that it’s just as important, if not more important, for our team to be communicating with us.

Your focus, especially in the first 90 days, should be on listening and learning, not on dictating and informing. This is the best opportunity you’ll have all year to get to know your team, to learn what’s important to them, and to understand their pain points.

My favorite way to get to know my staff is to conduct a Get-to-Know-You Survey. Incorporate this survey into your back-to-school professional learning days; don’t assign extra work for staff to do at home and cut into their precious remaining time before the school year starts. This small consideration shows them that you respect their out-of-school time, and it can provide a fun break from your typical back-to-school PD.

So what should go in your survey? These are the questions I encourage leaders to ask, but you might adjust these or create your own instead:

1. What do you want to know about your new principal?

2. What do you want me to know about you?

3. What is your favorite snack or treat?

4. What is your favorite song and who performs it?

5. When is your birthday?

6. Share three of your favorite traditions at [Name of Your School].

7. Share three strengths of [Name of Your School].

8. Share three opportunities for growth.

9. What challenges do we face as a school?

10. Who has been instrumental in shaping the school?

11. If you were me, what would you focus your attention on this year?

You can find a downloadable version of this survey on our website here.

Some of these questions might surprise you. They’re not stale or typical; they’re thoughtful and intriguing. Most importantly, they give you lots of fuel for integrating your team’s personalities into your school communication throughout the rest of the year.

Think back to when you were a teacher. Imagine showing up to a weekly staff meeting to find your favorite snack food available or to hear your favorite song playing in the hallways. Maybe you even play a game with your team in which you guess whose favorite song is playing before a meeting. Imagine that your principal asked about your favorite hobby or asked if she could come cheer you on at your church’s softball game.

This survey not only gives you significant information about what priorities you’ll need to address throughout the year, it also gives your team a chance to get to know each other.

I always suggest that leaders make an effort to sit down with every staff member for at least 15 minutes in the first week of school. If you’ve already done the survey, these meetings are a chance for you to follow up on their responses or ask for further clarification.

It may not be with just staff that you need to improve communication. Principal John Unger’s team at West Fork Middle School identified that there was a gap in communication between the school and parents, so they decided to create a family engagement committee. This group was responsible for making sure parents were in-the-know about important updates from the school and for planning events to create a stronger sense of community.

For John, the surprising upside to this initiative was that it took one more worry off his plate and allowed him to focus on other priorities.

What Is Being Communicated?

In the first 90 days, when you communicate to your staff, you should focus on communicating just two things: your vision for your school’s success and how you plan to tackle their obstacles and challenges. Both should be rooted in how much you care.

Let’s talk about vision first.

The Remarkable Vision Formula

In the Bible, the prophet, Habakkuk, was waiting for the Lord to answer him, and God said, “Write the vision, make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.” Our visions should not only be communicated plainly, but should be actionable and exciting so that those who read it can (and will want to) “run” with it.

How do we do that? With the Remarkable Vision Formula.

The Remarkable Vision Formula has three parts:

1. Remarkable Life

2. Remarkable Family

3. Remarkable School

Your Remarkable Vision starts with you—what is your dream for a Remarkable Life? We talked a lot about this in Part 1, but we need to keep asking ourselves:

• What fills my cup?

• What does it look like when my life is a 10 out of 10?

The next piece of your Remarkable Vision is a Remarkable Family. Often our family is where we find the most meaning and purpose in our lives. If things aren’t going well at home, it tends to come with us to work.

To brainstorm a path toward your Remarkable Family, ask:

• What family issues or problems do I tend to take with me to work?

• What does it look like when my family is whole, happy, and healthy?

• How can I support my family members in being their best selves?

Finally, the last piece—and it’s last for a reason—of your Remarkable Vision is a Remarkable School. Ask yourself:

• In three years, what do I want students, staff, and parents to be saying about our school?

• What do I need to do on a day-to-day basis to achieve this vision?

You can’t create your vision for a remarkable school in a vacuum, and you can’t let others steer the vision away from your core values either. To find the right balance, draft the first iteration of your Remarkable School Vision on your own. Spend time in nature, go to your favorite weekend escape, or simply spend time journaling in your local coffee shop. Remove yourself from possible distractions so you can think deeply and dream big.

Then, invite your leadership team to send feedback. Make changes, and then circulate the vision to all of your department heads. Repeat the process, asking for feedback from broader concentric circles until everyone has had an opportunity to offer their input. You should end up with something that feels true to you and has everyone’s buy-in.

You can find more information about these three components in my book, Remarkable Vision Formula.

Addressing Challenges

When you gather information through the Get-to-Know-You Survey, you’ll learn what obstacles and challenges your team is facing. While you can’t make everything a priority—as we’ll discuss more in Part 4—taking the time to acknowledge and address your staff’s concerns will show them how much you care.

What I recommend you do with your team is write down on index cards the top 10 key concerns you find in the survey. Keep these index cards somewhere close, perhaps in your office or wherever you do your planning, so you can reference them any time you’re preparing for a staff meeting or drafting a newsletter.

If you can solve any of the challenges fairly easily, try to address those in the first month of school to show that you’ve heard your team and you’re taking action right away.

Most likely, though, the challenges will be more complex and might be tied to factors outside of your control. For those, I suggest consistently reminding your team that their concerns are important to you and that you’re keeping these challenges top of mind. Doing so will solve half the problem right away.

Where Are You Communicating?

This is the easy part of communication: the mediums we use for conveying our vision and addressing challenges. Already, we’ve mentioned team PD meetings and email newsletters. Other methods of communication include:

• Direct emails

• Classroom visits

• Parent communication

• Posters

• School app

• Texts

• Social media

• Video

There are many great books and online resources about how to effectively use these methods of communication, and as a sponge that scales, hopefully you are interested in taking advantage of those resources to level up your communication skills.

I see leaders who get trapped in thinking, If I said it/communicated it once, they should have seen/heard it. But people are busy. They’re buried in tasks and to-dos just like you are. Be redundant in your communication. If you say it in a staff meeting, put it in the newsletter, on the internal message board, and on social media. Ask yourself, How many ways can I overcommunicate what’s important so that people actually hear the message? Jeff Weiner (2020), Executive Chairman of LinkedIn says, “You need to repeat yourself so often that you get sick of hearing yourself say it. And only then will people begin to internalize it.”

Remember, though, that what matters most is not the tools you use; it’s how you use them.

How Are You Communicating?

Your team will know how much you care when you take the time to build trust. In a study of organizational trust, leadership consultants Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman (2019) showed that three factors contribute to the level of trust people have in their leaders:

• Positive relationships - Trustworthy leaders follow up on teams’ concerns, give honest feedback, and resolve conflicts.

• Good judgment/expertise - Trustworthy leaders also use good judgment when making decisions, respond to problems quickly, and demonstrate their expertise.

• Consistency - Trustworthy leaders have integrity; they follow through on promises and their actions reflect their words.

These three factors are woven throughout this entire book, but consistency is particularly important with communication. We can all think of leaders who say one thing and do another.

Don’t be that kind of leader.

Show up when you say you’re going to show up. Hold a meeting when you say you’re going to hold a meeting. Follow up when you say you’re going to follow up. It’s easy to drown in a list of to-dos and forget what you said you were going to do, so make friends with the reminder function on your phone and get good at acting on those reminders.

Take Action: Plan for Communication

You have two action steps for this part:

1. Prepare your Get-to-Know-You Survey for your back-to-school PD days. Buy a pack of index cards so that you can write down the top 10 challenges your team tells you about and keep them handy in your office.

2. Create your Remarkable Vision for your life, your family, and your school.

Introduction: Better Than Fantasy

It happened every year like clockwork.

July was incredible. Sometimes I slept in, or I got up early to go on a run and then relax with a cup of coffee. I caught up on my favorite science fiction/fantasy book series and met my wife at her office for lunch.

I went into the school a couple times a week to interview new staff, create our master schedules, and take care of logistical operations. There were the annual back-to-school professional development (PD) days to organize and lead and new teacher orientation meetings to plan. But for the most part, July felt like a much-needed escape.

Until August.

I felt it creeping up on me as I watched the calendar days disappear one after the other. The anxiety. I tried to ignore it for as long as possible, pushing off that inevitable day in mid-August when I would be overloaded and overwhelmed with a mile-long list of issues and to-dos that all needed to get done yesterday.

The first day of school always seemed to come sooner than I was ready for.

Don’t get me wrong; there was excitement, too. I couldn’t wait to see the kids and my staff (most of them, anyway). I looked forward to getting everyone else excited about the start of school. I lived off of their enthusiasm, trying to soak up enough energy and momentum to get me at least to winter break without burning out.

Why did it seem like something always went wrong at the start of the new school year? There was always a medical emergency, a discipline issue, a district miscommunication, an angry parent, a bus schedule off track. With having to put out fires from the get-go, I felt off-balance right from the start. I just hoped I could make it through the first 90 days without collapsing.

The truth is, I was never really ready for the beginning of a new school year. No one taught me how to prepare myself for it. There were no principal PD days to attend, no principal handbook I could read that would give me the play-by-play for getting the school year off to a good start. Once I became a principal, it was sink or swim. And for many years, I sank.

I’m guessing you’ve been there, too.

Every school leader hopes for the best at the start of the school year. If you’re an optimist like I am, you probably view those first 90 days as a fresh start, a chance for everything to go right. You envision students walking (not running, like my middle schoolers did) calmly to their classrooms, teachers getting along and turning in grades on time, parents showering you with flowers as you walk into the building…Ok, maybe not that. We’ll leave the fantasy to the pros.

But you definitely don’t envision the chaos that always sneaks its way into the school building every year. You hope and say a prayer and dive back into The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wondering in the back of your mind if you could hitchhike your way back to July.

The Problem With Hope Alone

The problem we all discover very quickly each year is that hope is not a strategy. That saying is cliché for a reason. It’s true: Hope helps us when we’re communicating our vision for the future and creating a culture that people want to be a part of (We’ll talk about that more in Parts 3 and 4). And hope is the birthplace of ideas. But hope can’t prevent the last-minute mix-ups or kids getting sick in the hallway trashcan or a particularly bad summer slide of kids’ learning retention.

I like to tell leaders: “Ideas are great, but not the greatest.”

What’s better than an idea? Action.

Hope without action is meaningless.

The good news is that hope is not the only tool available to you.

No, you probably didn’t receive a lot of training for your current role. You might not feel supported or prepared for the task ahead of you. You might think it’ll take years to adjust to the back-to-school rhythm and be able to pull it off successfully. But here’s the thing: You’re not alone, you’re more ready than you think you are, and you don’t have to wait years before you can head into a new school year with confidence and clarity.

In this 2-part series, I’m going to show you how to eliminate the back-to-school anxiety by creating the perfect 90-day entry plan for success and executing it with style.

The Perfect 90-Day Entry Plan

Imagine that instead of the first day of school feeling like a runaway train headed toward disaster (and you’re just praying it doesn’t go off the rails), you could start the school year feeling ready and confident to handle whatever comes your way. Imagine that your staff and students were clear on expectations and knew exactly how they could contribute toward helping the school meet its goals.

Imagine that the peace and authentic joy you felt in July didn’t stop on August 1. Imagine that you had enough time and space to keep reading your favorite book during the school year.

This is possible with the right kind of entry plan.

We usually think of entry plans as tools for principals who are new to a school—their own, self-guided “new principal orientation” to help them get settled in a new building with new teachers and students.

And they are.

But I believe every principal should have an  entry plan that they can use every year, no matter how long they’ve been leading that particular school.

Having a 90-day entry plan will help you:

✔ Get clarity on how you want to start the school year.

✔ Set the tone for the culture that you want to see.

✔ Create meaningful relationships with your colleagues.

✔ Learn how to communicate more effectively.

✔ And get more done in 90 days than your colleagues get done in a year.

Let’s look at a quick example of how one principal got off the merry-go-round of chaos and started down a calmer, more strategic path. John Unger is the principal at West Fork Middle School in West Fork, Arkansas. For several years, back to school was a hectic time. He and his leadership team tried to stay organized by holding countless meetings and creating detailed agendas—sometimes up to 15 pages long!—but still felt they lacked focus.

John was up at night with worries like, Who’s in charge of what? What are our office manager’s duties? Does everyone have their agendas? Is the schedule ready? Then, when school actually started, he and his team quickly became distracted extinguishing fires and handling logistical issues that came up.

While listening to the Better Leaders Better Schools™ podcast one summer, John heard about the Back-to-School Challenge I was hosting for which the goal was to create a 90-day entry plan to start the year off well. He joined the Ruckus Maker Nation online community to participate in the five-day challenge. His number one goal was to learn how to focus his team on doing the right work at the right time.

Throughout the challenge, John learned about the five buckets of the plan, which helped him think more strategically about how to organize and streamline his team’s efforts in those first 90 days. We’ll learn more about John’s story, but first, let’s learn more about how the plan is organized.

The 5 buckets

There are five categories, or buckets as I call them, that you’ll want to think about while we’re creating your 90-day entry plan for the start of the school year. These five buckets will be the topics of the book’s parts:

You—yes, you!

Leaders usually plan for themselves last, if they plan for themselves at all. Unfortunately, this self-sacrifice is praised and rewarded in our systems. Your tendency to put yourself last is likely what got you into your leadership role. But it’s not going to sustain you or your school. If you are burning out under stress, you won’t be able to serve the people in your school community. You cannot give from an empty cup.

So in this book, we’re not leaving self-care up to chance. Your plan to take care of yourself is integral to achieving success in the first 90 days. We’re going to make a plan for you first. We’ll also talk about how to refine the values that define your leadership, how to avoid your idea enemies, and how to show up the way you want to for the people in your school community.

Communication

After carefully planning how you want to show up as a leader, we will look at your communication systems next because, without thoughtful and intentional planning for communication, nothing else you try to accomplish in the first 90 days will be successful.

Academics

Learning is the business of school; it’s what we’re here to facilitate for our students. Yet there are so many ways learning happens. If we spread our attention and effort too thin across all of the possible areas that could be improved, we won’t make an impact anywhere.

Here I will guide you through a process of inquiry to help keep you and your team focused on the improvements that will have the greatest impact.

Culture

Often, the first 90 days of school are so filled with logistical worries and problem-solving that we neglect to think about the intangibles: the energy and feel of the school as well as the health and safety of the learning environment. We focus on the alligator closest to the boat and hope that when we fix that problem, everything else will fall into place.

Hopefully you’re seeing a pattern here. Nothing happens by chance—even our school’s culture; we have to thoughtfully plan for it. I believe in visualization and meditation—two important tools that help us create a vision and goals for our schools. In Part 4 of this series, we’ll discuss how to employ them to establish priorities and foster a healthy school environment.

Operations

Most school leaders are tempted to focus on operations first—the schedules, policies, facilities, and procedures—but you’ll notice that in our 90-day plan, operations comes last. Yes, operations is the setting in place of systems for the first four buckets, but without knowing what those buckets are, you can’t establish your systems.

In Part 5 of this series, we can start to pay attention to the logistical issues and make a plan for solving problems when they arise.

Finally, in Part 6 of this series we’ll bring together all of the ideas from the first five parts to give you a template you can use to create your own perfect entry plan.

Why 90 Days?

Ninety days works because it’s not so far into the future that you can procrastinate and avoid taking action. It’s also not so soon that you’ll think your plan is unrealistic. It’s just the right length for you to start to see real measurable progress right away.

What I’ve found from coaching hundreds of school leaders like you through this plan is that 90 days is the perfect amount of time to get to work and do something special. Don’t believe me? Test it out. Verify the claim for yourself.

So, Ruckus Maker, what do you say?

I can’t promise it’ll be better than the fantasy book you’ve been eyeing on your bookshelf. But I can promise this story has a happy ending.

Are you ready?

Let’s get started.

Take Action: Your Day 91 Vision

Before you start your 90-day plan … take some time today to think and write about this prompt:

Imagine it’s Day 91 into the new school year, and you’ve executed on the plan we’re creating in this book.

You’re thrilled with the progress that you see around you. What does that progress look like in your school? How are you measuring it?

Bring Your Best Self to School

How often did you eat lunch last school year?

And I don’t mean the times you scarfed down a microwaved burrito while answering emails or running from one building to the other. I mean, how often did you sit down (ideally outside) to eat a healthy meal without any distractions or outside responsibilities weighing on you?

If you roll your eyes or laugh out loud at the idea of being able to eat that kind of lunch, this part is for you. Because you deserve to eat a lunch like that every single day.

Of course, this isn’t just about lunch. The time and space you have to eat lunch is indicative of the overall margin you have in your work life and the stress you might be experiencing at school.

EdSurge reported that the mental health and wellbeing of principals has been particularly low since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Sullivan, 2022). And a 2022 study conducted by the RAND Corporation found that 85 percent of principals report experiencing job-related stress. (Steiner et al., 2022).

But I don’t need to tell you that. You see it everyday. Forget about lunch; we’re barely sleeping and making it through the day!

It’s easy for us to excuse the amount of stress on our shoulders; we think about the mile-long list of things that need to get done and the constant demands on our time. Shouldn’t the other people in our school building come first?

Of course we have to think about the other people in our buildings. In the foreword to Simon Sinek’s 2014 book Leaders Eat Last, Lieutenant General George J. Flynn wrote, “Great leaders truly care about those they are privileged to lead and understand that the true cost of the leadership privilege comes at the expense of self-interest” (p. xii).

Sinek wrote his book in response to the cultural lack of trust he saw in the businesses he worked with. Over and over again, he saw leaders take advantage of others and prioritize themselves over the people they were supposed to be serving.

That’s not the problem I see in schools. I see, and the research agrees, that we have the opposite problem in education. Leaders are burning out and leaving schools at an alarming rate, not by choice but for the sake of pure survival. That constant churn—the continual turnover of leadership—is harmful to our schools. Not to mention, it’s harmful to you.

I know, I know, you picked up this book to create a 90-day entry plan for your school. But I’ve learned over several years of helping Ruckus Makers like yourself that if you are not healthy, your school won’t be healthy. This is why the motto for Better Leaders Better Schools™ is “When YOU get better, everyone wins.”

The most neglected factor of school success is you. When school starts, it’s easy to get sidetracked by all of the other buckets that feel more important and more urgent than taking care of ourselves.

So in this part, we’ll talk about how you can plan to show up as your best self in the first 90 days.

The Ruckus Maker Mindset Tool

In 2018, John Antulov was waiting for his wife, Trish, to come home. Trish was the principal of a school in Perth, Australia, and it wasn’t uncommon for her to stay late into the evenings to get work done. He wasn’t too worried about it until she missed his phone calls. That was unlike her. By 10 p.m., John was seriously concerned, and he went to the school to check on her.

He found that his wife Trish had died at her desk (Hiatt, 2018).

This is a dramatic and, thankfully, uncommonly tragic story. But it’s a good cautionary tale for all of us who want to be around for a long time to serve our school communities.

Ruckus Makers want to be top performers, and all top performers work hard. That’s a fact. But the best top performers know how to recuperate and rest as well so that they can put in the hard work.

I like to use a simple self-evaluation with the leaders I coach to help them prioritize their mental and physical health. The Ruckus Maker Mindset Tool™ looks at five key indicators:

●      Eating, because, like any high performer, you need to be putting the right fuel in your body;

●      Sleeping, because our bodies need time to rest and recharge for optimal performance;

●      Moving, because it’s easier to maintain momentum when we move consistently;

●      Meditating, because our minds need time and space to process information and function optimally; and

●      Unplugging, because it’s hard to do any of the above things if we’re being constantly interrupted.

On a scale of 1 to 5—with 1 being “This area in my life sucks right now,” and 5 being “I am rocking this area!”—rate yourself in each domain:

Eating:                        ____

Sleeping:                    ____

Moving:                      ____

Meditating:                ____

Unplugging:               ____

If you’re reading this before the start of the school year (as I hope you are!), then I hope that you’re doing great in all five of these domains. But if you’re struggling before the school year has even started, that’s an indicator that this area of your life needs your full attention now before the busyness of school begins.

Take a few minutes to brainstorm specific ways you can take care of yourself in each of these domains. Here are some questions to reflect on:

Eating:

●      What kinds of snacks can you eat throughout the day?

●      When will you eat lunch?

●      What will you eat for lunch?

●      How will you prepare food so that you’re able to eat consistently nutritious meals?

Sleeping:

●      What time will you start getting ready for bed?

●      What routines and rituals can you establish to prepare for sleep?

●      What time do you want to wake up in the morning?

Moving:

●      What are your favorite types of movement?

●      How can you find time to move throughout the day at school?

●      What kinds of exercise can you incorporate into your weekly routine?

Meditating:

●      When is the best time for you to meditate?

●      Where can you meditate that is quiet and free of distractions?

●      Will you use guided meditations, music, or silence to help you quiet your mind?

Unplugging:

●      Where will you keep your phone while you unplug?

●      What steps can your faculty and students take before trying to reach you?

●      Who can be a point of contact for you while you’re unplugging?

Practice the 85% Rule

Olympic runner Carl Lewis famously took a counterintuitive approach to winning the 100-meter dash. Unlike his competitors, Lewis held back at the beginning of the race, often trailing the other runners at the 40-meter mark. But as their energy began to flag in the last half or quarter of the sprint, Lewis maintained a consistent pace and managed to come in first, winning nine Olympic gold medals with what would become known as the 85% rule. Inc. contributor Jeff Haden (2020) wrote that Lewis trusted “that preparation and technique—not ‘extra’ effort in this moment—would pay off.”

Practicing the 85% rule means that, at all times, you’re consistently using just 85% of your energy. The hardest part about this is learning to hold back, even when you could give more. It feels awkward, uncomfortable, frustrating, even morally wrong at times—but it is the best strategy for consistently contributing with excellence and avoiding the danger of burning out.

Once you get in the habit of taking care of yourself so you can bring your best self to school, you can begin thinking about what actions you want to take and how the people in your building will experience you. We do that by defining our sticky core values and getting to know our idea enemies.

Define Your Sticky Core Values

Every leader should live by what I call sticky core values. These are ideas that guide our actions and decisions from day to day.

When we think of values, we tend to think of words like honesty, integrity, excellence, and dedication. Obviously, these are admirable qualities to hold. The problem with general terms like these, however, is that they don’t provide a lot of guidance for our everyday actions.

A more powerful approach to defining values is to embrace memorable phrases that illustrate how you want to show up as a leader in your community every day. Here are my sticky core values to give you an idea:

Turn Pro

In everything I do, I want to show up to do my best, no matter how I feel. I put aside my complaints and focus on the job in front of me because that’s what the pros do. According to author Steven Pressfield, this is the only way to beat what he calls The Resistance and what you may know as imposter syndrome.

Purple Cow

This is an idea from a book by Seth Godin (2004) of the same title: Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. I grew up driving the incredibly boring interstates in Illinois. There’s nothing to see along these highways but cornfields and cows. And there are only two kinds of cows in Illinois: brown and white, or black and white.

Imagine, though, that you were driving along one day and saw a purple cow! You’d never forget it, right?

What’s more—you’d tell everyone else about it.

My purple-cow value encourages me to seek out and create extraordinary experiences that others will never forget and that they will want to share with everyone they meet.

Ripple Effect

My focus is on long-term impact. I want my actions to have positive consequences not just now, but long into the future. I believe that small changes add up to big results over time. Therefore, in my decision making, I’m always asking myself what the ripple effects of this decision will be.

Forest From the Trees

I try to maintain a long-term perspective, which helps me with my ripple-effect value as well. It’s easy to get caught up in minutiae, but I challenge myself to see the big picture of any situation.

Sponge That Scales

The idea of being a lifelong learner is a nice buzzword in education, but like all buzzwords, it tends to lose its value and meaning over time. Instead, I like the idea of being a sponge that scales because as I learn, my impact and influence grows. Like a sponge, I expand. This value not only tells me that I should be learning, but that I should be using and applying what I learn.

What are your sticky core values?

Know Your Idea Enemies

Your enemies are not the people you interact with; they’re the ideas that hold you back. Think of them as the opposites of your sticky core values. These are the ideas that prevent you from making good decisions and showing up as your best self.

My enemies are:

Status Quo

Traditions can be good and useful, but often, they hold me back. I never want to let inertia or “the way we’ve always done things” keep me from innovating or creating those purple-cow experiences.

Stagnation

I think of stagnation as a lack of desire to learn and get better. Often I use busyness to productively procrastinate on the real work I should be doing, the work of learning and growing. Ironically, stagnation can be the highest in those who look like they’re doing the most.

Isolation

Working and trying to lead on my own is a recipe for low performance. Business coach and author Greg Salciccioli (2011) says that isolation is the number one enemy of excellence. No one can get better in a vacuum.

Lack of Mentorship

I believe I need people who are at least 10 percent ahead of me to help me get where I want to go. Without that mentorship and guidance, I flounder. This enemy is one of the core reasons I’ve created the Better Leaders Better Schools™ administrator masterminds—so that leaders will never be without a mentor. I also make it a habit to surround myself with good mentors.

Open-Door Policies

While it’s important to be available and present to the people in my school (and we’ll discuss this more in Part 4, having an open-door policy is a terrible idea! Why? Because it invites distraction.

Most leaders with an open-door policy say something to the effect of: “People over paperwork.” But what they really mean is: “I prioritize people over paperwork while at school. By doing so, however, I prioritize my work over time for myself and time for my family because I believe work is more important.”

Ouch.

I cannot take care of myself when I am constantly distracted.

You might have similar enemies in your life, or you may encounter others. Your enemies might change over time. But know them and study them so that you’re ready to do battle with them when they arise.

Take Action: Your Sticky Core Values

What are five phrases that describe how you want to show up at school? You might find inspiration for your sticky core values in books or from mentors in your life.

What you stand for is important, but at times, knowing what you stand against can be even more impactful. What are the five idea enemies you want to avoid?