What I Wish Someone Told Me Before My First Year as a Principal

New principal? New assistant principal? Congratulations — and also, brace yourself. Nobody hands you a manual for this job, and the one everyone quietly expects you to have already read doesn't exist. What you get instead is a keyring, a master schedule nobody fully understands yet, and about six weeks before the building fills up with kids who need you to already know what you're doing.

I don't have that manual either. What I have is a first year I survived, a few since then that taught me more, and six things I wish someone had grabbed me by the shoulders and told me before I walked in on day one. So consider this me, grabbing your shoulders.

1. Slow down and listen first

You are excited. You have ideas. You've been waiting for this seat for a long time, and now that you're in it, every inefficiency you see feels like something you could fix by Thursday.

Don't.

Your first few months aren't for launching — they're for listening. Sit in the meetings you don't have to run. Ask the front office staff what actually breaks down every September. Ask the custodian what nobody else notices. The changes you want to make will still be there in November. The trust you need to make them stick has to be built first, and it isn't built by moving fast.

2. Don't over-schedule your first few weeks

You will be busy soon enough — busier than you think possible. Which is exactly why the first few weeks matter so much: they're the only stretch of the year where your calendar isn't already full of other people's emergencies.

Use it on purpose. Walk the halls between classes instead of hiding in your office catching up on email. Learn names — kids, staff, the parent who's always early for pickup. Every relationship you build now is a deposit you'll need to draw on later, usually on a day you didn't see coming.

3. People are watching what you do, not just what you say

Credibility isn't just about being correct — it's about being human while you're correct. That's the whole job in one sentence, and nobody tells you upfront that you have a hidden audience now.

Staff are watching how you handle the hallway confrontation, not just what your vision statement says. Kids are watching whether you remember their name the second time, not the first. You don't earn trust with a mission statement. You earn it in the ordinary five minutes nobody thought you were paying attention to either.

4. Build your third space now

Here's the part nobody warns you about: the job doesn't turn off. You need somewhere that's entirely yours — independent of the title, the building, the role — where you can play, create, or just recharge without being "the principal" for an hour.

Mine is the gym and pickleball court. Yours might be something else entirely. It doesn't matter what it is. What matters is that you find it before you need it, not in the middle of the year you're burning out.

5. Build your circle of trust before you need it

Find your person — or people — now. A mentor, a fellow admin a few years ahead of you, a veteran teacher who'll tell you the truth even when it's not what you want to hear. Don't wait until 9 p.m. on the worst day of the year to figure out who that is.

The best leaders I know aren't the ones who never needed to make that call. They're the ones who already knew who to call.

6. Preplan your breadcrumbs

Tough days in a school building aren't a possibility — they're a guarantee. The only real defense is leaving yourself breadcrumbs ahead of time: a meal in the freezer for the night you have nothing left to cook, a snack drawer that's actually food and not just crumbs and expired gum, water bottles staged where you'll actually grab them, an outfit laid out for the mornings you need five more minutes of sleep more than you need to pick an outfit.

Do the prep work the night before, or earlier in the week, whenever you can. It won't stop the surprises — schools always have surprises — but it takes the crunch off the weeks when they land on top of everything else.

None of this makes the job easier, exactly. But it might make it a little more survivable, and a lot more honest. That's really the whole idea behind Lead Anyway — leadership isn't about having it figured out before you walk in. It's about showing up real, imperfect, and present anyway, and finding out you were more ready than you thought.

Welcome to the building. Lead anyway.

Dr. Lauren Young is the author of Lead Anyway: The Glow-Up Guide to Leadership That's Real, Not Perfect and founder of the GRL Initiative. Follow along for more.