👋 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.
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.
Prefer listening? Check out the audio version 👇
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:
