Leaders Seek Wisdom, Not Validation

As a school leader, it is much more important to seek wisdom than validation.

And validation seeking, I think, is a particular trap.

Because in general, we're so starved for validation as leaders, you might face criticism for every single decision you make in a day.

And it's understandable that people would seek some validation.

And I see a lot of leaders seeking validation for little nice things that they do for their staff and really offended when other people say, like, why are you even in the situation where you're doing that?

Like, jeans passes is a big one.

It's like, oh, I gave my staff a jeans pass and told them they didn't have to turn in their lesson plans this week.

It's like, well, maybe you shouldn't really be messing with any of that stuff in the first place.

Like, don't make teachers turn in lesson plans and let teachers wear jeans whenever they want to.

That's the reaction from a lot of other principals.

And people find that very upsetting.

They came seeking validation and got offered wisdom, which was not what they asked for.

And as a result, they reject it.

And I think that's just understandable, but a trap for us as leaders.

I think we have to be very careful about seeking validation because if we're looking for validation, we're going to get it through unfortunate means.

And this is the classic leadership trap of, of surrounding yourself with yes men.

I don't know if we have a more inclusive term for that now, but historically the problem of yes men has been that as a senior leader, you have the power to surround yourself with people who are essentially sycophants, who just tell you what you wanna hear, who agree with all of your ideas and tell you how smart you are, instead of doing what advisors are supposed to do, which is give you good advice.

You're supposed to surround yourself with wise people, with experts, with people who have knowledge and experience that you may not have I was listening to an audiobook about how Marcus Aurelius kept on many of his father's advisors when he became the Roman emperor, and he wasn't especially young.

But that need for wisdom, for input from someone who is not just here to pat me on the back and tell me what a great job I'm doing, that is a timeless need.

aspect and principle of leadership that I see a lot of people ignoring in favor of seeking validation.

And I think one fortunate feature of the internet for us, like people complain on the internet a lot, right?

Like people complain on TikTok, people complain on Twitter.

You can find a lot of teacher complaints on social media.

if you want and you could probably find complaints about every good thing but you can also find some patterns and it's not too hard to figure out like actually where is the wisdom in those complaints because in an organization people are afraid to complain to you right if you evaluate someone if you sign their paychecks they're not going to complain to your face if you do something that is like nice on the surface but insulting at a deeper level like giving people like one piece of candy for teacher appreciation They may not complain to your face.

And I see people say all the time, oh, we did this in my school and my teachers loved it, so it must be a good idea.

Well, we need to have a little bit more perspective than that.

We need to have a little bit more wisdom than that and realize that sometimes we need to listen to criticism from the outside because the criticism from within, the criticism from the actual people that you work with, that feedback of...

what you're missing as a leader, how you need to be thinking differently about something in your school is never going to get to you.

The people around you are not in a position where they can be honest with you and tell you what you might really need to hear.

And of course, as a leader, you always have to take feedback with a grain of salt because again, will complain about everything people will criticize every decision you make but the nice thing about social media and the nice thing about being part of a profession is you can learn from other people's mistakes you don't have to personally make every mistake and then sift through the criticism that you get and figure out did i actually make a mistake or is this just people doing what they always do and complaining about everything you can look at the experience of other people and the patterns in those complaints and find the wisdom in them and learn from them Without having to personally go through that experience.

And yeah, it's very crushing.

Like I get it.

I've made mistakes as a leader.

It's crushing to realize that you did the wrong thing or that you did something really well, but it was still the wrong thing.

that's a difficult lesson to learn.

That's, that's a tough pill to swallow, but I think we've got to have the humility as leaders to learn from, from criticism, to learn from opposition, to learn from resistance and to, you know, to not just seek validation all the time.

So I, you know, this one is especially for principals and, you know, I hope, you know, as many complaining comments as I get from, from teachers, I hope, It's obvious that those are valuable feedback to the profession.

And we are in a profession.

Part of the reason we're doing this is not just to vent, but because we are in a profession where there are some good ideas and there are some bad ideas.

There are some best practices and some not so great practices.

And I think everybody gets better when we're willing to develop and articulate and learn from that collective wisdom rather than just seek validation.

Let me know what you think.