When a Staff Begins to Believe in Itself

01

The best idea is not always the best decision

During our years together, this assistant principal did not need to learn much about instruction. He already understood good teaching. What he began to recognize more deeply was the value of consensus—not consensus as a way to avoid hard decisions, but as a way to build the ownership required to sustain them.

A few years later, he was named principal of his own school. Because I knew his creativity and energy, I expected him to move quickly. The building needed significant change, and I assumed he would arrive with a collection of new ideas and immediately begin putting them into place.

He did the opposite.

02

A staff that had lost confidence

During his opening meetings, he encountered a staff that seemed discouraged and apathetic. This was not a faculty eagerly waiting for a new initiative. It was a group that appeared to have lost confidence in its school and, perhaps, in itself.

The first time I saw him at a district meeting after the school year began, he asked me what I thought he should do. We talked over lunch about what he was observing.

He could have responded by announcing a major improvement plan, increasing expectations, or introducing a program that carried his name. Instead, he decided to begin by highlighting the good work teachers were already doing.

That decision required patience. Recognition can feel too small when a school needs significant change. Leaders often feel pressure to demonstrate urgency through visible action. But he understood that asking a discouraged faculty to take on ambitious change without first rebuilding its belief in itself would probably produce compliance at best and resistance at worst.

So, he began paying attention. He recognized teachers with effective classroom routines. He highlighted people who were finding ways to reach reluctant students. He celebrated practical solutions to recurring problems. Little by little, he helped teachers notice the expertise that already existed within their building.

The playbook was his idea, but its substance belonged to the faculty.

03

The moment the story changed

During the second semester, one teacher finally said something he had been waiting to hear: “You know, we have some really good teachers here.”

It may sound like a small statement, but it marked a significant change. A faculty that had primarily viewed its school through its problems was beginning to recognize its own capacity.

He seized that moment and turned it into a system.

04

The building playbook

He created a building playbook based on the strengths of his teachers. Having trouble getting a class settled at the beginning of the period? Go observe the teacher with an excellent opening routine. Struggling to get students to submit their work? Try the strategies another teacher was already using successfully. Looking for a better way to check for understanding? Talk with the colleague who had developed an effective process.

Whenever a teacher demonstrated a successful practice, that teacher and practice could be added to the playbook. The playbook did more than collect instructional tips. It made the faculty’s expertise visible to itself.

Teachers were no longer hearing only what they needed to improve. They were discovering that much of the knowledge required for improvement already existed among the people working beside them.

His creativity had not disappeared. It had matured. Earlier in his development, he might have created most of the solutions himself and worked to persuade teachers to implement them. In his own building, he used that creativity to construct a system through which teachers could recognize, share, and extend one another’s strengths.

The playbook was his idea, but its substance belonged to the faculty.

05

What the research helps us see

Research on collective teacher efficacy helps explain why this mattered. Goddard, Hoy, and Woolfolk Hoy describe collective teacher efficacy as a faculty’s shared belief in its ability to positively affect students. Their research also found a positive relationship between that shared belief and student achievement.

Bandura’s work similarly suggests that collective efficacy influences how groups approach challenges, respond to setbacks, and sustain effort. People act differently when they believe they possess the capacity to produce meaningful results.

This principal was not simply improving morale. He was helping a faculty accumulate evidence that it could make a difference.

The story also reflects Spillane, Halverson, and Diamond’s distributed perspective on leadership. Leadership practice does not reside only in the formal leader. It emerges through the interactions among leaders, other people, and the situation they are attempting to address.

The principal’s role was not to become the source of every good practice. It was to create the conditions in which the faculty’s knowledge could be recognized and used.

06

Leadership beyond presence

This is also what I mean by Leadership Beyond Presence.

Developing leaders should not mean teaching them to reproduce our programs or make the decisions we would have made. It should mean helping them develop the judgment to listen, interpret their own context, recognize the capacity around them, and choose the response their community needs.

He did not copy one of our programs. He carried forward an underlying principle: lasting implementation requires ownership.

Leadership extends beyond our presence when the people we have worked beside no longer need us in the room. They do not imitate our decisions. They develop the capacity to make wise decisions of their own—and then help others recognize that they possess capacity too.

Sometimes leadership begins with a new idea. Sometimes it begins when a staff looks around the room and realizes: “We have some really good teachers here.”