The Decision Nobody Trains You For

THE PRINCIPAL’S CHAIR

Leadership decisions from the real world of schools and organizations.

Welcome to The Principal’s Chair. I’m Larry — a former teacher, High School Principal, and small business owner who spent decades making real decisions in real buildings with real people. This newsletter is about leadership — the kind you learn not from a textbook, but from the moments that test everything you think you know. Twice a week I’ll bring you a scenario, my honest take, and one principle you can carry into your week — whether you lead a school, a team, or business organization . Let’s get into it.

Issue #101

The Decision Nobody Trains You For

It’s 6:52 AM on a Tuesday.

You’re in your office before anyone else arrives, like always. Coffee’s still hot. The building is super quiet in the way it is before the day starts — before the buses pull in, before the hallways fill, before the noise of four hundred decisions come at you all at once.

You’ve got seventeen things on your agenda. You’re already sorting them by urgency.

Then your phone rings.

It’s your head custodian. His voice is flat in a way that tells you before the words do. There’s a message written on the bathroom wall in the boys’ locker room. A name. A threat. A date.

Today’s date.

You hang up and sit there for exactly four seconds — because that’s all you get — and then you must become someone who knows exactly what to do.

The problem….nobody trained you for this moment! I mean, Not really. Your certification program gave you school law and curriculum theory. Your mentor told you to build relationships and stay visible. Your district handed you a crisis binder two years ago that’s been sitting on a shelf you haven’t touched since the day you put it there.

But right now, at 6:52 AM, it’s just you.

So, what do you do in the next ten minutes?

Most people freeze — not because they’re incompetent, but because the weight of the decision lands before the training kicks in. I’ve been in that room. I’ve made that call. And what I learned that morning has shaped every high-stakes decision I’ve made since, in schools and in every leadership role that came after.

Here’s the principle that carried me through it: clarity before action, but never clarity instead of action.

What that means in practice is this. You don’t need to know everything before you move. You need to know just enough. In a crisis, the leaders who perform best aren’t the ones with the most information — they’re the ones who can identify the three things they know for certain and build their first move around those three things alone. Not four things. Not a full picture. Three solid facts and a direction.

That morning, here’s what I knew for certain. There was a credible written threat. There was a name on that wall. And I had a building full of kids arriving in less than an hour.

That was enough. I called the school resource officer. I called my superintendent. I secured the locker room and positioned staff. I made a decision about that student before the first bus pulled in — with incomplete information, under real pressure, in real time.

Was it the perfect decision? I’m not sure perfect exists at 6:52 AM. But it was a sound decision, made with the information available to me, executed with enough confidence that the people around me could follow it. And that confidence — the willingness to act decisively even when you don’t have everything you wish you had — mattered as much as the decision itself.

The leaders who struggle most in a crisis are the o nes who confuse caution with waiting. Don’t misunderstand me. Caution is smart. Waiting for perfect information when people are depending on you is something else entirely. Learn to tell the difference, and you’ll make better decisions than most people around you — not because you’re smarter, but because you’re willing to move.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

In any organization, when a crisis hits, most people wait for someone else to have clarity first. The leader’s job is to manufacture enough clarity to take the first right step — even when the full picture isn’t there yet. Identify the three things you know for certain. Build your first move around those. Urgency and soundness together. Never one without the other.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: The conversation every leader avoids — and why avoiding it always costs you more than having it.

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