Fighting Fires and Building Relationships

In my eleven years as principal of Martinsburg High School, I have realized that it does not matter what my plan is when I walk in the door at 7:00 a.m., it is always going to change based on the myriad situations I am faced with throughout the day. If you ever find a professional development session for administrators that starts out with a heading like “time management for administrators in order to get everything done,” you should be very skeptical as to whether this leader has ever worked in a school as an administrator. What normally happens is I spend 80 percent of my day putting out fires and prioritizing which of those fires need my attention and which of those fires can I delegate to an assistant. Which brings me to my question for all of you: How should school leaders manage their time to make the most of their day?

In the beginning of my career as an assistant principal and as a principal I found it very hard to leave the office and go home when there were still tasks to be accomplished. It would often leave me stressed to the point that my time at home with my family could not be enjoyed.

I attribute a lot of this to my father, who was a carpenter by trade. He was a stickler for making sure the job was done right. One of the things that I did not understand was that my father always cleaned up the job site before leaving for the evening. Now that would not have been as hard to comprehend if we were working in a house that was lived in daily, but most of the houses he worked in were second homes or weekend places. So why do we cleanup a place that we are going to come back to tomorrow and dirty up again? One day I got up the nerve to ask him that question, and he responded, “Chances are these people will not be here tonight, but what if they did show up unannounced? They would judge my work based off the way this place looks, and I don’t want them judging me based on a dirty worksite.”

Well, early in my career that was my attitude. I did not want to leave any messes that I could be judged by till the morning. In about year five as principal I realized being an administrator is a little different when it comes to those messes. It was probably the loss of my mom in April of 2018 that helped me to realize that leaving some things unfinished until the morning is probably not an issue that is going to bring about the end of the world. I still need to be the instructional leader of my building, but the relationship piece of this profession is so much more important. I still try to make instruction important through some of the schedules that I make for myself to ensure that I get into classrooms and give teachers feedback.

Here is the takeaway, though. When you get to the end of your career – or even deeper, the end of this ride we call life – you are not going look back and think about that year your school had those great test scores or the year your teams won the state championship. You are going to reflect on the relationships you built with students, staff, and colleagues. Don’t feel bad about putting off dealing with that fire if you have an opportunity to build a relationship. In the end, relationship-building is going to bring more dividends than putting out the fire, and chances are the fire will still be burning in the morning.