Feb 7, 2026Leading in Schools
What a principal hears in silence
After a whole week of observation I realized the office is the busiest room in the building, and the only one with no doors to open. Leadership here is mostly listening.
I had expected decisions. What I saw was interpretation: forty small moments where someone brought a fragment of the building into the office and the principal decided what it meant.
The most consequential thing she did all week was to not respond quickly to a complaint about a teacher. She waited two days, and the story changed in the meantime.
I am starting to suspect that a lot of what we call leadership is really the discipline of holding an interpretation loosely for longer than feels comfortable.