She Decided in September
The trust you need in January has to be banked now.
It’s a Thursday afternoon in January. A teacher you would have picked to lead her team next year asks whether you have ten minutes.
She’s kind about it. She isn’t coming back in the fall. She talks about the commute, about a season of life. Nothing she says is about you, and you’ll replay the conversation for a week looking for the sentence you missed.
It isn’t in there. She decided in September.
The clock is real, and it runs early
A head of school I interviewed last spring put a number on it. Roughly six months to get your staff with you, or you are in serious trouble. He had watched a dean lose the trust of a staff by Christmas and be gone by February.
Six months lands in January/February. Some schools send contract renewals or letters of intent right about then. Some schools do not, and it changes very little either way, because those are the weeks your teachers start picturing next year and deciding whether they are in it.
A form only writes down a decision somebody already made.
That is what makes month six deceiving. It looks like a month six problem. The work was months one through five.
Which puts two very different principals in the same September.
If this is your first year
You are in month one right now. You can’t bank trust in month five, when the deciding is already underway. You bank it now, before you need it, back when nothing is on the line and the deposits feel too small to matter.
Three moves, all available to you this month.
Listen backward before you lead forward. Whatever your staff feels about school leadership, most of it predates you. They have been through something in the last two or three years, and some of it was hard. Until you know what it was, your first schedule change lands on a wound you didn’t know you were touching. So in your first one-on-ones, ask the backward question. What has this staff been through that I would not know to ask about? Then stay quiet. The first answer is the safe one. The second answer usually starts with a name or a date.
Protect something you didn’t build. Find a program that already works and leave it alone. Same person running it. Same person getting the credit. One head of school inherited a dual credit program and the coordinator who had built it, and he kept both, because he didn’t need it to become his. Your staff is watching to learn whether you came to lead the school or to put your name on it, and they get that answer from what you leave alone.
Have one hard conversation this month. Your staff is deciding two things at once: whether you are safe, and whether you are serious. Avoid it until spring and you have answered both questions for them. It does not have to be big. The teacher who answers every new idea with what happened in 2019. Ten minutes, in your office, said kindly and said plainly. Your best teachers have been waiting years for someone to do that.
If this is your eleventh year
Long tenure feels like a balance. And while it might feel like you have track record and relationships, it doesn't remove the questions being asked.
Every year they decide again. Not consciously, and not all at once, but they decide. The teacher who has been with you nine years runs the same quiet math as the second year teacher, with more data and less patience for a year that looks like the last one. Nobody warns you the clock is running, because everything looks fine. Attendance is fine. The board is happy. Nobody has quit since March.
Three things your staff needs from you every single year.
Clear goals. Every teacher should be able to say, in one sentence, what this school is trying to do this year and what her part of it is. Ask three teachers this week. If you get three different answers, you have been talking to your leadership team and calling it communication. Goals do not travel by memo. They travel by repetition, in rooms where people can ask questions.
Clear expectations. The standards you set in year two are being enforced from memory in year eleven, and memory drifts. Your veterans are running an old version, and nobody has issued an update in a while. Say it out loud again this year, to everyone, including the people who have heard it before. Especially them. The teacher who has heard it five times is the one carrying your culture for everybody hired since.
Clear wins, with winners. Name the person. A win announced without a name teaches your staff that results belong to the school and effort belongs to nobody. Say who did it, where their peers can hear it. This is the cheapest item on the list and the first one to disappear in a busy fall.
What both of you are doing this month
First year or eleventh, you are working the same calendar. The deciding happens in the fall. The telling happens in the winter. No principal gets to reverse that order.
So the question worth sitting with this week is a plain one. Since August, what has your staff actually received from you? Clarity, or a busy leader.
Your best teacher is doing her January math right now, in September.
She is looking for evidence that this year has a point, that someone is listening to her and stretching her, and that when she does it well someone says her name out loud. That is cheaper than a raise and much harder to fake.
It can’t start in January. It has to start now.
