Timeout for Leadership-your one-minute leadership idea
The Principal Coaching Clinic #9
Do you know your shelf life?
Each year as the calendar changes from April to May, I start to think about all of the principals, and for that matter, all of the teachers who are thinking about or should be thinking about retirement.
Just like that stale loaf of bread that sits on the grocery shelf too long, understand that you too, have a shelf life. You have an expiration date. That may sound cold and hard to accept, but it is true.
You will eventually tire. Maybe you lose a step in your speed to respond. Maybe you are challenged by a younger, more fit leader. Maybe people are tired of hearing your voice. Maybe you are not up to the daily challenge any longer. You become both physically and emotionally drained. You are not the leader you once were. If you know it and feel it, so will others. I never wanted to leave being chased out. I never wanted to leave on a stretcher and I never wanted to leave taking pills to settle myself. Sadly, I have seen colleagues leave in the aforementioned states only to quickly wither in their retirement.
The same thing happens in other professions. When you stay too long, people tend to stop listening. They turn your message off. In athletics, head coaches and managers can only stay in one place so long. Your message loses its appeal. Perhaps, you too, have lost some of that emotion and passion that you once had. It is impossible to maintain the intensity level needed to thrive for an endless amount of time. The key for me is recognizing the fact that you do have a shelf life. Your professional time runs out. Be aware of it when you see it coming, and I assure you that you will see it and you will sense it. Once this happens, you need to create and plan your exit strategy in order for you to go out on top. For me, that is the only way to go. You have earned it. Do not wait to be chased out of the door because if you hang around well after your expiration date, you will be chased: it will not be pretty.
Once your decision is made to leave, it is a reason to celebrate and a reason to exult. You might not have always been successful, but you contributed. You have had the opportunity to touch many people in a positive way.
I always worry about those who choose to stay too long. They do not know that their time is up and their final years on the job become torture. It becomes painful for everyone. It will eat away at each person differently. There is a time when no matter who you are, your skills will erode.
What if all the signs and signals tell you that you are ready to go, but you are unable to retire because of your age or financial situation? What if you are five years away from this magical date? Ten years? What if retirement is all you are thinking about? If this is the case you must do a serious lifetime assessment and seek to make some changes in your personal and professional life. You cannot stay where you are miserable.
You may need to change districts. You may need to change schools. You may need to change positions. You cannot keep doing the same thing every day because now you are cheating your staff, students and perhaps more importantly yourself. Make sure the change is your idea. I know I have moved people administratively because they were no longer effective in their roles. I sometimes had to create a position for them. And perhaps the most difficult thing was convincing them that they should embrace the move. I know I had some people convince themselves that they were being promoted, when in fact they were being removed from the front lines. I let them believe what they wanted to believe so they could make it through the day. Yet, I think that at night, when they were alone and peaceful with their inner thoughts, they knew they were being replaced because they could no longer perform. Making these moves was the right thing for the school or district. You cannot impede progress and you cannot, even if it is inadvertent, hurt the children. The adults in the schools have done this for too long. I know that the next generation of principals will be better at this.
If you stay too long, people will forget all of the happiness and good things that you accomplished. They will forget all of your great wins and only remember the losses. Do not become an embarrassment to yourself.
Do not become the principal who teachers love to work for you because you have become a pushover. Do not allow yourself to become that principal who teachers and students see as now too miserable, too nasty and too mean. You may have forgotten why you became a teacher or a principal in the first place. It is very easy to become the joke that your colleagues talk about in the faculty room or the principal that is lampooned as a caricature of a school leader.
When we slip and stay too long, we are negatively impacting the lives and futures of a generation of students. To me, that is the crime!
*excerpted from my new book coming out soon, Edukate Me II- A Survival Guide for the First Year Principal: Unspoken Commandments of School Leadership
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