Here's the problem with bad principals: most of them don't know they're one of them.
Nobody tells the principal the truth. Teachers vent in the parking lot. Parents complain to the superintendent. The assistant principal smiles in the meeting and shakes her head in the car. The feedback loop is broken on purpose, because telling the boss the truth is a career risk almost no one is willing to take.
So if you're sitting with the question — am I actually any good at this? — that question alone puts you ahead of 80% of school leaders. Play-It-Safe Principals never ask it. Ruckus Makers ask it on purpose, every quarter, because they know the only way to lead a school well is to keep auditing themselves harder than anyone else will.
This post is that audit. Seven warning signs, with the Ruckus Maker move that fixes each one. Read straight through, then come back to whichever one stung the most.
A bad principal runs a school where teachers play it safe. The biggest predictor of team performance is psychological safety — the felt permission to take risks and be vulnerable in front of colleagues. When that's missing, innovation stops, hard conversations get avoided, and the culture rots from the inside. The principal sets the temperature.
In a multi-year internal study, Google's People Operations team analyzed 180+ teams and found that how team members interact mattered far more than who was on the team. The single biggest factor in effectiveness was psychological safety. The same logic applies to a school faculty: without safety, your best teachers stop sharing what isn't working, and your weakest teachers stop asking for help.
Todd Whitaker put it plainly: when the principal sneezes, the entire school catches a cold. You're a meteorologist. Your energy is the weather. If the building feels tense, suspicious, or quiet — that's downstream of you, even if you didn't intend it.
Seth Godin: "You get the culture you deserve." Either you're contributing to a toxic environment through your energy and choices, or you're absent from the work — not addressing the underperformance that's already there.
Run a single anonymous psychological-safety pulse this week. Five questions, three minutes. Then — and this is the part most principals skip — share the results back with the staff and pick one thing you'll personally change. Closing the loop is the trust-building move. Collecting the data and disappearing with it is the trust-killing move.
A bad principal runs meetings without an agenda, without a decision, and without an action. If the gathering could have been a memo, it should have been a memo. A meeting only earns its place when it accomplishes something async communication cannot — creative discussion, a real decision, or coordinated action on a shared project.
Parents, students, teachers, and principals are united in exactly one thing: they all hate meetings that go nowhere. And yet most schools default to the standing 2pm Monday grade-level meeting whether anything important needs to happen there or not.
Three things justify a meeting. That's it:
If your meeting doesn't pass one of those tests, kill it. Send a memo and give the time back.
End every meeting five minutes early — everyone will love you for it. And schedule meetings for half the time you think they need. This is Parkinson's Law working in your favor: a task expands or contracts to fit the time you give it. Schedule a 30-minute meeting and you'll get the 60-minute meeting's work done.
Audit your standing meetings for the next two weeks. Every meeting needs three things: an agenda sent in advance, named roles (facilitator, time-keeper, note-taker), and a WHO/WHAT/WHEN for every action item. Anything that fails this test gets cancelled or replaced with a one-page Loom.
A bad principal delivers PD the same way bad teachers deliver lessons: sit, get, lecture, leave. Effective adult learning requires the same three things effective student learning does — authenticity, belonging, and challenge. If your PD doesn't have all three, your teachers are tuning out by 8:15 a.m. and you're paying them to do it.
Educators spend their careers personalizing and differentiating instruction for kids. Then we walk into a faculty meeting and accept being talked at for 90 minutes about something we could have read in a 4-paragraph email. The disconnect is comical, and the cost is real: PD that doesn't move teachers doesn't move students.
Most school PD is, in plain terms, three things: too little too late, unhelpful, and disconnected from the work that actually drew people into education. It tends to circle the same three pillars — academics, attendance, discipline — without ever touching the questions principals are actually wrestling with at 9pm on a Tuesday.
Real questions sound like this:
Replace your next PD session with the ABCs of Powerful Professional Development®: Authenticity (real stories, real stakes, real names), Belonging (everyone contributes, no one hides), and Challenge (ask people to do something hard before they leave the room). One session built this way will outperform a year of compliance PD.
A bad principal lets a school drift. Vision is the job of leadership — not a committee, not the strategic plan binder, not the off-site retreat from three years ago. Without a clear, repeatable picture of where the school is going and why it matters, every teacher will move in their own direction and call it autonomy. That's not autonomy. That's a building without a leader.
One of the most common mistakes principals make with vision is trying to crowdsource it from day one. The instinct is generous — let everyone weigh in. The result is bland. Most teachers don't actually want to architect the vision; they want a voice in shaping it and the option to contribute. Those are different things.
You were hired to lead. So lead. Apple does not poll every employee when setting direction. Your leadership team drafts the vision. You watermark every page DRAFT in 60-point type. Then you bring it to the community and start collaborating in earnest.
Listen to your teachers, parents, and students. Reflect back what you heard. Revise. Reflect again. You're not done until your community is saying "that's right" — not "that's interesting," not "that's fine." That's right. That's the signal.
The Wallace Foundation's 2021 synthesis of two decades of research on principal effectiveness — drawing on more than 219 studies — concluded that effective principals have profound effects on student achievement, with effect sizes nearly as large as those of effective teachers. The mechanism in nearly every case includes a clear, communicated vision for instruction.
Write your school's vision in three sentences. The first names where the school is going. The second names the constraint you're choosing to push against to get there. The third names the kind of school — and the kind of staff — you're becoming. If you can't say it from memory in front of your faculty, they can't carry it for you. Draft it this week. Bring it to your team. Revise until you hear "that's right."
— Justin, High School Principal
A bad principal optimizes for compliance and outputs they can't actually control. Schools have no real control over end-of-year achievement scores, attendance percentages, or final discipline numbers — those are outputs. They have full control over the inputs: PD quality, curriculum strength, teacher feedback, student belonging, family engagement. Ruckus Makers measure inputs and let the outputs follow.
The most common version of this mistake is the weekly lesson-plan submission with no feedback loop. If you're collecting plans and not reading them — not having a real conversation with the teacher about how to make the unit better — you're running a compliance ritual, and your teachers know it. They start writing for the inbox instead of for the kids.
Teachers are professionals. Hold them accountable for what's happening in the room and the results they produce, but don't ask for paperwork that doesn't change anything. As the leader, your job is to articulate the WHY behind every system, and kill the ones whose WHY is just "we've always done it."
Want better student achievement data? Measure quality of PD offered, strength and cultural relevance of the curriculum, frequency of useful teacher feedback.
Want higher attendance? Measure how many students have at least one adult in the building who knows their name and cares about them, transportation barriers removed, the felt safety of the building.
Want lower discipline numbers? Measure restorative-circle implementation, PBIS fidelity, and how often you publicly acknowledge students making positive choices.
Pick one output you've been chasing. Write down the three inputs that actually drive it. Build your dashboard around those three. Stop reporting the output to your team weekly — report the inputs. The output is a lagging indicator. The inputs are the work.
A bad principal hides behind the role. Strict separation of personal from professional is folk wisdom rooted in fear — fear that establishing real human relationships costs you authority. The opposite is true. Teachers do not follow titles. They follow people. The principals with the most durable authority are the ones whose teachers know them as humans first.
The advice to "keep the personal out of the professional" sits in the same bucket as "don't smile until December." Both are designed to protect a power dynamic that doesn't actually need protecting. Both produce the same result: a leader who is harder to follow because they're harder to know.
This isn't a license to overshare or to dissolve every boundary. There's such a thing as too much. You're not trying to be a friend to every teacher or every student. You're trying to be a human being who happens to be in charge — friendly, present, and willing to be known.
"Is there anything worse than an out-of-touch, unrelatable leader?"
— Danny Bauer, Mastermind: Unlocking Talent Within Every School Leader
This week, share one true thing about your life with your faculty that you'd normally keep behind the door. Not a confession. A small fact — what you're reading, what you're cooking, who you're worried about. The smallest amount of vulnerability disproportionately changes how people relate to you.
A bad principal lets the joy leak out of the building. Disney calls itself the happiest place on Earth, but school should be — the imagination of a thousand kids in one place is a more potent fuel than any theme park. When school stops being fun for the adults and the kids, you've lost the plot. Test prep is not the mission. Imagination, courage, and belonging are the mission.
Pause and ask yourself: what are your top three memories from school? Not the ones that should be there. The ones that actually are.
For most people, those memories are not test scores. They're a sports moment, a drama performance, a science fair project that worked, a friendship, a first kiss, a teacher who said the exact right thing at the exact right time. That tells you something about what school is actually for — and most school cultures get organized around the wrong list.
Tony Hsieh, the late founder of Zappos, treated culture as priority number one. He believed that if you got the culture right, brand and customer service took care of themselves. School isn't a customer-service business, but the principle holds: get the culture right, and instruction, attendance, and behavior take care of themselves. Get the culture wrong, and no instructional initiative will save you.
Add one fun thing to your school's calendar in the next 30 days that has zero connection to assessment. A staff lip-sync battle. A student-vs-teacher kickball game. A book club lunch. Something. The principals who think this is a frivolous use of their time are the ones who don't understand what they're actually building.
The seven most common signs are: a faculty that doesn't trust each other or take risks, meetings that go nowhere, lifeless professional development, no clear vision of the future, focus on the wrong stuff (compliance and outputs instead of inputs), strict separation of personal from professional, and a building that's no fun for kids or adults. Most struggling principals show three or four of these at once.
Yes — and most great principals were average or worse for the first few years of the role. Leadership is a learnable craft, not a fixed identity. The principals who improve fastest do three things: they audit themselves on purpose instead of waiting for an evaluation, they pick one input to change at a time, and — the real differentiator — they don't try to do it alone.
Support is the variable. Almost no principal turns themselves around in isolation. The ones who change get help: a coach who pushes them, or a room of peers where the truth is allowed. If you want a Selfmentor guide you can use today, in private, no district approval needed, that's Digital Danny. If you want a room of school leaders you can be honest with — peers who will call you on the patterns you can't see yourself — that's the Ruckus Maker Mastermind. The principals who stay stuck try to fix everything at once and revert to compliance mode. The ones who get unstuck get support first.
Start with what you can control. First: communication. If your principal is genuinely open to feedback, share what you're experiencing in private and in specifics. If they're not — and most aren't, in any serious way — focus only on the inputs in your own classroom or team. Second: protect your energy. Don't waste it on the staff-room venting cycle, which trains your brain to expect powerlessness. Third: if the situation is structural and unfixable, plan a move for next year. Staying in a building led by a bad principal for years on end is a real career cost.
Selfmentorship is the practice of designing your own leadership development plan instead of waiting for the district to hand you one. Play-It-Safe Principals accept permission-based development — they only grow when someone signs them up for a workshop. Ruckus Makers do the opposite: they audit themselves quarterly, name the gap, and build the plan. This post is one example of a Selfmentorship audit. If you want the full philosophy in long-form, Danny wrote a mini-book on it: The Art of Selfmentorship. Digital Danny is the operational tool — a way to run Selfmentorship audits on demand, in private, without scheduling a workshop or asking your district for budget.
Digital Danny is a Selfmentor guide built on Danny Bauer's frameworks and 10+ years of coaching top-performing school leaders — through more than 500 episodes of the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast, his bookshelf of leadership titles, and the proprietary frameworks Ruckus Makers actually use day to day, like Sticky Core Values, the ABCs of Powerful PD®, and Selfmentorship. A general chatbot can answer principal questions in a generic way. Digital Danny answers them the way Danny would after 10 years in this work — with the same vocabulary, the same identity frame, and the same focus on inputs over outputs. It's coaching, not search.
Real culture change shows up in 60 to 90 days when the principal commits to one or two inputs and stays consistent. The signs you're looking for early: teachers raising harder questions in meetings, fewer parking-lot conversations and more in-room ones, staff volunteering for committees instead of being assigned. Full transformation — the kind where the building feels different to a visitor — typically takes 18 to 36 months, but the early signals come fast if the principal's behavior is actually changing.
If you read all seven signs and saw yourself in two or three, that's not a verdict. That's a starting point.
The principals who become great are the ones who run this audit on themselves on purpose, before anyone else does.
Founder, Better Leaders Better Schools · Host, BLBS Podcast