Twilight zone

It's Wednesday, the third day of school, and our principal started crying during our staff meeting this morning. Through her tears, she lectured us: "I will not have a power struggle with you. You must stop. I will not have you undermining me and questioning my decisions. You need to work together as a team. You need to stop meeting together and talking about me. Your scores are not good. You may think you know what you are doing, but you are not the principal, I am. I will make changes here. I am stronger than I look. You will not get the best of me, I will get the best of you." We were all taken aback, as you might imagine. Certainly there has been a lot of confusion and conflict lately, as we got ready for school to start, in terms of scheduling and other logistic issues -- but a lot of it was caused by her lack of communication with us as to what was happening and why decisions were made. It's natural to question decisions that seem to come out of thin air! A thinks it's a snowball effect: she is aggressive and over-bearing because she is defensive, she is defensive because she is being challenged, she is being challenged because she makes poor decisions, and she makes poor decisions because she is so over-bearing that she doesn't ask for help. It's a big change from the other leaders I've worked with, who gathered information, explained their thinking, and built consensus. Anyway, I don't think the waterworks changed many people's opinions about how things are going -- if she wanted to make us feel guilty and repentant, it wasn't a success. And her crack about teamwork was just ridiculous. One of the reasons I love working at this school is the collegiality of this staff, and how well we all get along. In fact, every time I see someone in the hall since this meeting, we grin and say, "hey there teammate".