How to create the perfect principal entry plan [Part 2 of 6]

If you think communication is about updates, not empathy, don’t be surprised when no one’s listening.

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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.

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.

If this landed for you, here are a few ways to keep going.

Build your 90-day plan with Digital Danny. Work with him over the next 90-days or for the entire year. Two paths. Once choice.

He’s always available, never forgets, and evolves with you.

Listen to the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast. You’ll find over 10 years of conversations with the most interesting people doing the most interesting work in school leadership. Every episode is a Mirror Person who knows more than you about something you care about. Start anywhere.

Read the Part 3 in this series below.