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

5 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 …

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

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Create a Culture Where Teachers Thrive

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

His secret?

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

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

Two Reasons to Stay

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

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

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

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

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

2. Do I belong here? Show them love.

Let’s explore these.

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

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Chapter 4. Invest in Growth Through Mentoring

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

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

We do this through mentoring.

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

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

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

The ABCs of Powerful Professional Development^Ⓡ

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

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

Let’s explore each of the ABCs.

Authenticity

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

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

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

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

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Set Teachers Up for Success With Onboarding 

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

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

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

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

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

So how do we do that? 

Design Your Onboarding Playbook

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

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

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

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

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Rethink Interviews to Make the Best Hire

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

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

It was all about how they dressed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How This Book Can Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that’s where they’re wrong.

Because now, these teachers have you. 

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

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

Teachers Are Suffering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stress

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

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

Workload Overwhelm

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

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

Lack of Support

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

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

Lack of Compensation

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

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

Charged Political Environment

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

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

And when teachers suffer, all of us suffer. 

Three Principles of Teacher Retention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These principles are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 1. Attract Top Talent

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

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

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

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Chapter 4. Lead Your Remarkable School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflect: Visualize Your Remarkable School

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

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

Remarkable School Vision List

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

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

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

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

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Chapter 2. Dream Up Your Remarkable Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Introduction: Rowing In the Same Direction

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know what this feels like.

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

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

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

They stay in the same place.

They get stuck.

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

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

The Remarkable Vision Formula

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Retreat.

2. Visualize the future.

3. Define expectations.

4. Seek feedback.

5. Implement the vision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How cool would that be?

Get Away

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

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

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

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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