How to Have Tough Conversations With Staff

One of the most challenging aspects of school administration is managing a diverse group of employees. Ensuring that your team not only is meeting the basic expectations of their job descriptions, but is inspired to go above and beyond every day, is not an easy task. Regardless of where you work, your staff team will almost certainly include people whose ages, backgrounds, and teaching abilities vary wildly. Given this, it is inevitable that your role as a school administrator will require you at some point to meet with a member of your team to address concerns about their behavior or performance.

For instance, you may have a staff member whose poor performance and lack of teaching skill is adversely affecting student achievement. Or maybe you have a staff person whose lack of social skills and negative interactions with colleagues are undermining the collaborative culture that you are trying to promote. In these sorts of situations, many administrators struggle with being either too authoritarian or too conflict-averse. Neither is good! Based on my 14 years as a school administrator, here are my suggestions for productively managing conflict.

Preparing to Manage Conflict

First and foremost: Remember your moral purpose. Your job as an administrator is to ensure a positive and productive school experience for all. This means that staff, parents, and students all rely on you to promote and celebrate positive behaviors, while also addressing teachers who are ineffective, inappropriate, or unsafe. As a teacher yourself, you likely had school administrators who failed to resolve ongoing issues, and as a result their credibility and the overall health of the school suffered. Don’t be that administrator.

Your job as a principal is to find yourself in uncomfortable situations on a regular basis. Move toward the discomfort! Over the course of my career, this has sometimes meant meeting with teachers whom I genuinely liked as people, in order to help them understand the ways in which their teaching was not up to par. In other cases, I have had to book meetings with the loudest and most opinionated teachers in the building in order to remind them that they are not independent contractors who can set their own rules or hours of work, or write their own job descriptions.

Self-awareness and restraint are key. Staying self-regulated is vital to your credibility and ability to resolve issues. This means that when considering whether or not to pursue a particular issue with a particular staff person, ensuring that you are aware of your own emotions and biases is vital. School administrators are human beings, of course, but our job is to put students’ experiences above our own. Any conversations with staff should have student needs, not principal ego, at the center. Ask yourself these questions:

• Are you taking things personally, or actually advocating for what is best for kids?
• Are you clear on the particular issues and the contract details or legislation around this issue?
• Have you checked your thinking with a “critical friend” or colleague who can add to your understanding?

Supportive Approaches to Staff Management

Start from a position of goodwill. You should start from a place of assuming that the teacher is willing to do better. It has been said that education runs on goodwill, and in many cases the presence of goodwill in a school depends on a complex mix of respectful communication, shared opportunity for input, clear expectations, and positive relationships among the adults in the building.

Brainstorm informal solutions to the problem. The best way to resolve an issue with a staff person is outside of a formal process. It’s important to leave room for the staff person to share why they aren’t performing and then come up with potential solutions. Depending on the issue that you want to address, this would include any or all of the following:

• Conducting ongoing unscheduled classroom observations as part of your regular walk-throughs.
• Building rapport by getting to know staff first and by noticing positives.
• Requesting to have informal but private conversations.
• Offering supports (professional development, extra time/resources, mentoring, visits to other classrooms, etc.).
• Mutually negotiating goals and check-in dates.

If you already have a respectful and collaborative culture in place at your school, the actions listed above may well be all that is required to resolve the issue and provide the teacher with the needed support so that their performance improves. I think of all of the above as the “support” part of my job.

Moving Beyond Supportive Approaches

In some cases, however, certain staff may be willfully disobeying you, rejecting your leadership authority, or even working against you. Make no mistake: The other staff in the building are aware of this person and are watching to see how you handle the situation. In these cases, I still recommend all of the usual supportive approaches, but I follow up with an “accountability” approach.

Adopt a formal process. A formal process should be followed for meetings, and many boards and districts will have their own templates and formats for these. Have a second person present for meetings, where possible. Usually this is a vice principal or another principal. In a unionized environment, union representatives may need to be invited to meetings. Documentation should be gathered and kept (meeting times, notes, parent emails or complaints, etc.).

Set clear expectations and consequences. The same resources and supports can be offered, but hard deadlines can be set for improvement (four to six weeks, assuming the issue is not a safety issue). Resistant staff should first be reminded of their job descriptions, contract details, professional standards, and other formal requirements. They should be given a physical copy of these and any other related documents. All of this is designed to underline the fact that a change on the part of the teacher is required and that there will be follow-up on your part.

After the intervention

Afterward, you will of course be professional and not talk about the content of any meetings with teachers. Some teachers, however, will leave your office and immediately tell their story to as many colleagues as they can get to listen. Don’t worry about this. In my experience, most teachers know who their least effective or most toxic colleagues are, and so the news that you have begun a formal process with a particular teacher will not be surprising. Assuming that you have conducted yourself with restraint and self-awareness, the news that you have standards that you are willing to enforce can only contribute to your credibility as a leader, and to school culture as a whole.

Of course, effective administrators spend much more of their time supporting staff than pressuring them. Teaching is an incredibly difficult job, and inspiring teachers to do their very best every day is almost entirely accomplished through humility, appreciation, and compassion for the people who bring learning to life in your school. As you build your reputation as a fair-minded and student-centered leader, you will find that the hours you invest in supporting teachers pay big dividends. Don’t let the occasional need to apply pressure lead you to conclude otherwise.