The Private School Leader Podcast

I want you to imagine that it's February. You're sitting in your office, looking at your enrollment numbers for next school year and you're getting a little nervous. Your re-enrollment numbers aren't where you'd like them to be. A handful of families have indicated that they're considering other schools. Your admissions director tells you that inquiries are down compared to last year. Unfortunatel...

Back in the fall of 1992, my wife and I purchased the last empty lot in a housing plan. Over the next six months, we worked with a general contractor and built the house that we still live in to this day. We did a lot of the work ourselves, including: plumbing, siding, painting, insulation and landscaping, including all the grass. I watered the grass. A lot. It would have been pretty silly of me t...

I have a nephew named Kevin. He used to be a professional firefighter in North Carolina. One day, Kevin was inside of a burning building when the floor collapsed. As he was falling into the basement, Kevin grabbed a floor joist and was just hanging there. Kevin then pulled up his entire body weight with one arm and was able to escape the burning building. Unfortunately, he tore up his shoulder so...

We will call her Julie.  Julie walked into my office, closed the door and said, “Do you have a minute?” Julie sat down and told me about a serious personal crisis. It involved a family member experiencing a significant health problem. Julie was trying to take care of this person, continue working and keep the rest of life from falling apart. My heart went out to her. I remember thinking, “I d...

I know a few things about you: You care deeply about people.  You want your teachers to feel supported.  You want parents to be happy.  You want students to feel safe.  You don’t enjoy conflict, and you certainly don’t want anyone to think you are mean, unreasonable or difficult. Those are good qualities! But sometimes our desire to “be nice” prevents us from doing what leaders...

Goldilocks. You remember the story. One bowl of porridge was too hot. Another was too cold. The third was just right. One bed was too hard. Another was too soft. The third was just right. School leaders need that same Goldilocks mindset when it comes to legal risk. On one extreme is fear. That leader imagines the worst possible outcome in every situation. Fear begins making decisions. Every conver...

I don’t like surprises.  I know some people love them. They love walking into a room and hearing everybody yell, "Surprise!" They love mystery trips where somebody else packs the car and refuses to tell them where they are going. Not me. I think most private school leaders don’t like surprises either.  We do not like walking into school on Monday morning and discovering that the heating...

Have you ever been in a meeting and heard one of these phrases? “We need to circle back on that.” “Let’s put a pin in it. “We need to think outside the box.” “We need to find the low-hanging fruit.” “Let’s make sure everybody is on the same page.” “We need to touch base.” “We don't want to leave any money on the table.” That last one actually matters a lot. There is a good chance that you might be...

I think that there’s a pretty good chance that this has happened to you: You finally get to Friday afternoon. You’re exhausted. You tell yourself, “I just need the weekend to get back on traffic.” And then somehow you get to Sunday night and think... “Wait a minute. Where did the weekend go? And why am I still tired?” Or maybe you leave school at 5:00 on a Tuesday… but mentally, you never really l...

In the corporate world, there are many recognizable acronyms that are thrown around pretty freely. CEO, ROI, MBA, CFO, EOD, R&D and PTO are known by most employees and leaders in the business world.  A company’s COO is the Chief Operating Officer. Their job is to make sure the organization keeps running. But, for private school leaders, I believe that COO has a second meaning. You're also...

You probably already know that I love a good list and I especially love a list that is a countdown. During my teen years, I would tune into Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 Countdown every Saturday night. Of course, I had my cassette player and a blank tape at the ready to record my favorite songs. On last week’s episode, we celebrated the 200th episode of this podcast by counting down the Top 20 Lea...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, billions of people worldwide were stuck in their homes. Some learned how to make sourdough bread and some people got a pet for the first time. Indoor houseplants had a moment and lots of people finally learned how to keep a plant alive.  During my time at home I decided that I wanted to start a podcast.  I had spent a lot of time reflecting on my career and...

Has this ever happened to you? You are out and about in the school and you come back to your office. While you were out of your office, you expended emotional energy and now you are feeling some decision fatigue and some physical fatigue. You sit down at your desk. Because of the physical and mental fatigue, your brain is screaming for a hit of dopamine. You click on the tab for your inbox and you...

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming returned from vacation to find that one of his petri dishes had accidentally become contaminated with mold. Normally, that would have meant throwing the dish away and starting over. But, Fleming noticed something unusual. The bacteria surrounding the mold had died, while bacteria farther away continued to grow. He became curious and asked, "Why?" That...

Has this ever happened to you? You looked at your to-do list in late July or early August and thought: "There is absolutely no way I'm going to get all of this done." You walk into the school and there are boxes of new curriculum stacked in the hallway, waiting to be unpacked, an employee handbook that needs to be revised, welcome back emails that need to be sent, two more teachers that need to be...

I love countdown clocks and I hate countdown clocks. I love countdown clocks like the one in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. I hate countdown clocks like the scoreboard in the 4th Quarter when my favorite football team is losing. I believe that every private school leader has an invisible countdown clock that nobody else can see. The countdown starts somewhere around the Fourth of July. It speeds...

One of the things I hear from my coaching clients every July is this:  "Mark, I had all these plans for the summer...and somehow it's already half over." You know what I’m talking about. You had big plans this summer. You were going to: exercise every morning, spend more time with your family, take a few days completely off, sleep in, organize your office and think strategically about the com...

On June 22, 1984, I was sitting in a movie theater. I love 80’s movies and there were so many good ones. Top Gun, Footloose, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Rocky IV and The Goonies were some of my favorites. I was lucky enough to see most of them the day they came out in the theater. On June 22, 1984, I was sitting there watching Karate Kid. Daniel LaRusso moved from N...

I want to begin with a prediction. I believe that over the next two years, one of the biggest conversations in independent and private schools will be answering the following question: “How much technology actually belongs in the classroom? For almost twenty years, schools have raced toward more technology. We have become 1:1 and we have purchased iPads and online curriculums and apps and other ty...

As you read this, it is late June and July is just over the horizon. During my career as a private school leader, this was always my favorite time of the year.  Most of the reasons are pretty obvious: My annual vacation with my family in Ocean City, NJ My favorite holiday is the 4th of July! Warm weather and lots of fun outdoor activities But if I am being honest, there is another reason that...

It's mid-June, the students and teachers are gone and the building is pretty quiet. Many private school leaders are sitting down with a bottle of water, last year's Employee Handbook, and a red pen. For better or for worse, this is handbook season . This is the time of year when we review policies, update language, make revisions, and prepare for the upcoming school year. Unfortunately, when handb...

You probably have a garden hose at your house. If you take a look at the spray nozzle at the end of your hose, you are very likely to see five words. Mist. Shower. Flat. Cone. Jet. When your hose is on “Mist” , the water kind of goes everywhere, but it is a weak stream and pretty scattered and not very powerful.  It is a whole different story when you rotate over to “Jet.” A very powerful str...

Who said these four famous quotes?: Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” “That’s one small step for man, one giant step for mankind “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” If you said JFK, Neil Armstrong, Maya Angelou and Fra...

I have never run a marathon. My right knee gets sore when I drive 26.2 miles. That said, I have a lot of respect for people who have finished a marathon. My wife’s side of the family lives in Northeast Ohio and many of them have finished multiple marathons. They have even driven to other states to run in marathons in other cities. Inexplicable to me. Fun for them. Whether in person or on TV, you h...

Have you ever had one of those days where you leave school completely exhausted and yet somehow also wondering if you did enough? You solved problems all day. You answered emails. You handled parent concerns. You dealt with student behavior. You encouraged a teacher. You sat in meetings. You made decisions. You put out fires. And then you get in your car and your brain starts replaying everything...