[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. William Summers. William Summers, PhD, is the author of 10 books and a former board member and president for the National Staff Development Council, now known as Learning Forward. And he was a school administrator for over 35 years. And we're here today to talk about his new book, Responding to Resistance, 30 Strategies to Manage Conflict in Your School.
[00:39] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:42] SPEAKER_00:
Dr. Summers, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Well, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. So as you sat down to address the topic of resistance, what were some of the common patterns you saw school leaders dealing with? I know you coach school leaders.
[00:56]
You were a school leader for many years. What are some of the common patterns that come up that either prompted you to write the book or informed the design of the book?
[01:08] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I think one is a friend of mine from 3M, who's a parent of mine, said, why do you have 25 strategies to reduce conflict? I said, because I had 24 and they didn't work. So I started looking for 26, 27, et cetera. I think a pattern, though, is one, and I'm an old physics teacher, so you've got to define the problem. Einstein and others have said a problem half defined is half solved. And many of the young press coming in, they're trying to serve every master, all kinds of parents.
[01:46]
And I get that. But it takes a lot of time and takes a lot of energy out of you. So I started the book with some foundational things about define the problem. So that's one pattern. Second is I believe that leadership in today's world is having a repertoire. So if you only have one way to do something, you're really in trouble because the world is getting more diverse, will continue to get more diverse, different kinds of learners and different kinds of parents, all kinds of things are changing.
[02:21]
So the wider your repertoire, the better able you are to respond. And I think the third pattern is Susan David wrote a book called Emotional Agility. And so not only do you have to know that stuff, you've got to be able to do it. So one of my favorite quotes that I think I developed was, knowledge is important and insufficient. You've still got to be able to do it on your feet in real time with real kids, real parents, real staff.
[02:52] SPEAKER_00:
And it seems like there's almost a filtering effect that guarantees that a disproportionate number of the people who reach our door, who come to us, are parents. upset about something, have some sort of difficulty that they're dealing with. So that emotional side or that kind of personal, you know, maybe agitated side is often part of the package of what we need to deal with as leaders. So you say in the book that there are five primary causes of conflict. What are some of those causes of conflict, if we can get into them?
[03:25] SPEAKER_01:
Number one is change. Change causes conflict. Look what's happening right now with the COVID virus. It's changing families. It's changing how we deliver learning, administrators, et cetera. So change causes conflict.
[03:42]
And we've got to be able to understand and listen to people's concerns. Another one is power. I always know if I've got 10 or 15 kids coming to me about an issue, they think I have a lot of power.
[03:57]
Otherwise, as a kid comes in and says, hey, doc, what about this? And we work it out. So when there's a power differential, if it's administrators and teachers, if it's administrators and kids, parents think you have power. I love the one parent who once said, why don't you just tell the teachers what to do? Oh, well, God, I wish I had thought of that. And sometimes you have to tell the teachers what to do, but generally leadership is influencing.
[04:25]
You better have enough political capital and trust built up. A third one, and every principal gets into this, is scarcity. For instance, I get a number, I get two numbers from central office. One is staffing, one is budget. Neither one is going to be enough for what I want to do for kids and parents. So you're immediately into a conflict because English wants more staff, math needs books.
[04:55]
You've got to balance the budget. You've got to figure out how do you navigate through that because there's never going to be enough money or staffing. So if you give English more money, or more staffing, then science is mad, or vice versa. So you're always dealing with not enough money and not enough staffing, and you've got to figure out how you keep the system moving forward. Another one is diversity. And a lot of times, as soon as we say diversity, we think about race or ethnicity.
[05:24]
I'm going to suggest that We have to think about what is our thinking process? When I am called in as a consultant, I want to go to an administrative team leader meeting and see if somebody says something off the wall, do people roll their eyes and get around and go, oh, God, there goes Harry again? Or is it, geez, tell me more about that. Why do you think that way? So diversity of ideas is one. But then again, you have to consider all the cultures.
[05:54]
You know, in 20 years, we're going to have more people of color than we have from whites. So I want to say to the whites, get over it. You know, we need to bring everybody's thinking. Plus, I just finished the book, Inclusivity, where she has all kinds of research about the more diverse you are in your team and gender and ethnicity, the better decision you're going to make. And the final one is civility. Sometimes we don't treat each other very well.
[06:26]
And one of my strategies in the book is mobbing. I've seen teachers mob on some porch. And they may have done things to contribute to this. However, when you get groups starting to mob on a person, that's not healthy. And it makes, you know, sometimes a person will leave. But, you know, do we honor people who have diverse thinking?
[06:52]
And How do you protect the rogues who might have the answers? It doesn't mean they do, but you better listen because everybody's got probably some positive contribution to this. So those are kind of the five that I look for as a start. There may be personality issues in there. But at least it gives me a framework to operate on.
[07:18] SPEAKER_00:
One idea that I want to pick up on from what you just said, Bill, is this idea of power and maybe kind of mobbing. And I want to think especially about perhaps age differentials or power differentials. One of the things that I recall... happening when I was a principal is that if there was a more shy or timid staff member who wanted to bring a concern to me, often they would not come alone.
[07:43]
They would go to their team and say, hey, I really want to talk to Justin about this. I really feel very strongly about it, but I don't want to get into a situation where You know, this is just not a, you know, not a good situation. I don't want to like I want to make a good case. So they would bring their colleagues. And, you know, I never felt like it was, you know, ill intended or anything. It was just, you know, kind of a personal kind of emotional safety kind of kind of step.
[08:07]
that people would take, but it can catch you very off guard as a leader. You know, suddenly three or four people are sitting in my office presenting this united front about an issue that I was not even aware of until just now. So what are some recommendations that you have for for leaders who maybe find themselves in that situation where they are being mobbed a little bit, in an attempt to maybe level the playing field between a principal with more power and an individual teacher who maybe perceives that they have less power. If the team knocks on the door, where do we start? What are some of the strategies? And I know there are 30 in the book, but what are a few that jump out that might help someone who is in that kind of caught off guard situation?
[08:50] SPEAKER_01:
Number one, Are you, as a principal, getting into classrooms and building trust? Because if a person trusts you, even if they feel like they don't have any power, but they feel like they can walk in your office and you will listen to them, take them seriously and have a genuine interest in what they're saying to go a long way to reduce that kind of resistance. Number two is that there's a book called Quiet, and there are people who are more reflective. I happen to be one that's out there and ready to knock down walls and whatever. At the same time, there are people who are a little bit more reflective. Even though I did my dissertation on reflectivity because I needed to work, you find people who are really good thinkers and deep thinkers.
[09:44]
So the second thing is that you have meetings where it's okay for a reflective person to get their voice in the room. Because a lot of times it's get it done, because that's the way schools are. So you can, how you manage meetings, how you manage staff meetings to open up space for someone who's more reflective to say things. And that can be as simple as saying, you know, Fred, I haven't heard a word from you. I'm really curious what you're thinking right now. Now, they may not come forward, but at least make the opportunity to make space.
[10:24]
One of my rules for meetings is not at a staff meeting of 200 teachers. I was a principal of a 3,500-seat high school. But in smaller meetings, I want to make sure everybody has a chance to speak. I didn't say they have to, but I want to make sure they have a chance to speak. So that's number two before you even get to that point. Number three is when you do have those meetings, you've got to actually make sure you honor their state.
[10:54]
Listen to, paraphrase so that they know you've listened to them. Paraphrasing is a really good strategy to make sure they know you've listened and you're taking it seriously. I'm going to go back to what I just said earlier. Stephen Glenn said this years ago. Listen to. Think it seriously and know that they have a genuine interest in what you're saying.
[11:17]
That goes a long way. So when there's mobbing going on, well, here's an example. I was in this very large high school. I had a teacher come in in tears saying that she was just caught an asshole by another teacher.
[11:37]
Guess what? I walked right down to get that other teacher. We're in a room. Ha! I can't have teachers calling each other names like that. Within a week, I took all 20 teachers out with subs in their classrooms and said, I don't know what's going on in this department.
[11:53]
We're going to get to the bottom of it now. And we're going to get some arrangement, some agreements on how we treat each other. And that's in the book under Chadwick conflict of consensus. It's a process that you go through. It can be one, you know, two teachers. It could be me and a kid.
[12:12]
But in that instance, I wanted to send the signal to the department that we're going to treat each other as professionals. And we're not going to call each other names and go behind your back. The problem is you've got to monitor that. So I put the department chair in charge. I said, I want to know if there's anything going on because I'll pull you all out again. But we're going to get a handle on this and people are going to be treated respectfully.
[12:38]
So again, a quiet person may have the answer. We have to honor that. How do we get them into the conversation?
[12:46] SPEAKER_00:
That's a great point to return to the, you know, the diversity idea that people have a diversity of ways that they contribute to meetings that they process. And I think we've probably all experienced the phenomenon in a staff meeting of the fact that some people process verbally, some people talk before they think or talk as they think, and some people think long before they talk. Some people put that sharing or that contribution well after the meeting. So I appreciate that about ways to get input from people who may otherwise not speak up in faculty meetings and just have a different way of processing things.
[13:26] SPEAKER_01:
Let me take it one more step. When they got mobbing, they're watching you. You're the principal. You're going to set the tone. So when I see that going on and somebody who has mobbed or started to mob on somebody, I go right to that person. We're going to have a conversation because they need to know that as a supervisor, as a principal, I do have positional authority, but I am not going to stand back and be a bystander when there's mobbing going on or bullying going on.
[13:59]
So if you confront mobbing, it really does reduce that because people are going to say, well, if that's a problem, I know Bill and he's going to go down and get both people, get them in a room and we're going to deal with it. So get over it. And so you have to set the tone. If you're not willing to take, to have the courage to model that, it could be a long year or a long career. You can't, one thing you can't do is try to make everybody happy. But you can set the tone on what are, the mottos on how we're going to treat each other.
[14:34]
There's an old book that says if you don't treat the teachers, they'll eat the kids. So however you treat the teachers, if I can kick in their ass, they're probably doing the same thing to kids.
[14:44] SPEAKER_00:
So Bill, I think for a lot of leaders, you know, we tend to see conflict as just a negative, just a problem to solve, just something we need to get rid of. In the book, you say that if we have a repertoire of strategies for dealing with conflict, it can actually be a productive force. Why is that?
[15:02] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I think, you know, conflict is something that scares a lot of people. But if you reframe it as conflict, you want really smart people who don't. with each other and see if you can benefit kids and parents and staff. So, you know, the first five, ten years, oh, God, I don't want God to do it. I don't want people to go to the board. I don't want to do it.
[15:26]
Screw it. Here's my card. Spell my name right.
[15:30]
Bring it on. It really is a source of energy if you reframe it and feel like you have repertoire to deal with it. It can be very positive. So if we think of it as negative, I'm going to suggest reframe it as an energy source. And that takes a little courage and a little bit of experience because a lot of people don't want to get into conflict. But sometimes you have to take it on.
[15:58]
And the story I started with, I got from Suzanne Bailey. She says the buffalo on the prairie knows of the season thunderstorm coming. And he turns and walks away from it. It's going to last a long time. A buffalo knows that he sees a thunderstorm coming.
[16:17] SPEAKER_00:
He turns and walks toward it. It will pass more quickly. So the book is Responding to Resistance, 30 Strategies to Manage Conflict in Your School. And Bill, if people want to learn more about your work or find your website, where's the best place for them to go online?
[16:32] SPEAKER_01:
www.learningomnivores.com I post new rules for education, book summaries, and that's where you can contact me.
[16:43] SPEAKER_00:
Well, Dr. Summers, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Justin.
[16:49] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
