The Moment I Realized I Was the Problem
THE PRINCIPAL’S CHAIR
Leadership decisions from the real world of schools and organizations.
Welcome back to The Principal’s Chair. I’m Larry. Let’s get into it.
Issue #103
The Moment I Realized I Was the Problem
It was a Wednesday afternoon in my third year as a principal.
I was sitting across from one of my most experienced teachers — nineteen years in that building, someone I genuinely respected, someone whose opinion of the school I trusted more than almost anyone else’s. She had asked to meet with me. She’d been careful setting it up, choosing the words in her email the way you choose your steps on ice.
She told me morale was struggling. She gave me specific examples, named specific moments. And then, after about ten minutes of that, she said something I wasn’t ready for.
“I think people are afraid to bring you bad news.”
I almost defended myself right there. I could feel the response forming — I have an open door, I ask for honest feedback, I’ve never punished anyone for telling me the truth. I had evidence. I had a whole case assembled and ready.
Instead I put the case down. I looked at her and asked one question.
“What makes you say that?”
What she told me in the next four minutes changed how I led for the rest of my career.
She didn’t say I was mean or unapproachable. She said that when people brought me problems, I solved them so quickly and so completely that they stopped feeling like contributors and started feeling like they were just delivering bad news to someone who would handle everything from there. They’d bring me a problem, I’d fix it, and they’d walk out of my office feeling somehow smaller than when they walked in.
I was so good at fixing things that I had accidentally taught my team to be helpless.
Sit with that for a moment. Because it’s a hard thing to hear about yourself — harder still because on the surface it looks like a strength. Decisiveness. Competence. Action orientation. Those are qualities every leader wants. But deployed without self-awareness, at scale, in a building full of professionals who need to grow, those same qualities can quietly close people down.
After that conversation I started doing something uncomfortable. When someone brought me a problem, I would ask them what they thought we should do before I said a single word. Even when I already had the answer. Especially when I already had the answer. Because my answer wasn’t always the point. Their development was the point. Their ownership of the solution was the point. A problem solved by a leader produces compliance. A problem solved by a teacher, with a leader’s guidance, produces growth.
The building changed after that shift. Not overnight — it never happens overnight. But over the following months, people started bringing me half-formed ideas instead of fully packaged problems. They started showing me their thinking before it was clean, before it was certain, before they were sure I’d approve. That’s the signal you’re waiting for as a leader. When people trust you enough to show you their rough drafts, you’ve built something real.
The teacher who told me the truth that Wednesday afternoon did me a professional favor I never properly thanked her for. She had every reason to stay quiet — it’s not easy to tell your principal that his strength is becoming a liability. She said it anyway because she cared about the school more than she feared the conversation.
That’s the kind of person you want on your team. And the only way to get that kind of honesty is to earn it — by proving, over and over, that you can hear hard things without making the person who said them regret it.
THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK
The most dangerous blind spots in leadership are not your weaknesses. They’re your strengths operating without self-awareness. Ask someone you genuinely trust this week — not ‘how am I doing’ but ‘what do I do that makes your job harder without realizing it.’ Then listen without defending. What you hear might be the most valuable feedback you get all year.
Until next time — the chair is yours.
Next issue: What a seventh grader taught me about motivation that no leadership book ever did.
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