Managing teachers and staff who are difficult or marginal is one of the most challenging and least rewarding aspects of a school leader’s job. In this Best Practices segment, John Eller, a former principal and assistant superintendent, and co-author of the book Working With and Evaluating Difficult School Employees, provides some very specific techniques and strategies to identify, work with, and evaluate both difficult and marginal school employees.
Q: Managing teachers and staff who are difficult or marginal is one of the most challenging aspects of a school leaders’ job. Your book offers a step-by-step model to help school leaders manage this process and provides positive steps to improve the performance and behavior of problem employees. Let’s start out by asking, “What are the most problematic traits of difficult and marginal employees?”
John Eller: We have had experience working with both the development of principals and also helping principals who are in the field, so our ideas are going to be coming from that. One of the first things we have noticed is that employees, and especially teachers, tend to have a lot of defensiveness or resistance to change; that goes back to the way that people were developed. We have a concept called frames of reference that explains how people got their attitudes and practices and beliefs. When an administrator tries to confront those, sometimes that causes a lot of resistance.
Another thing we have noticed is that people tend to have, what we call, external locus of control, so they look at ‘what are all the factors outside of my control that are causing the issue?’ so that when they are being confronted or they are being asked to change, they want to go back to the good ole’ days and not really focus ‘what is it that I am doing?’, but they do things like blame the parents, blame the students, blame the system, you know, that type of thing.
Another piece that we have noticed is that people have become really good at practicing resisting, and sometimes that happens because of the changeover of administration, so they know ‘if I can survive three to five years, there may be a new principal, a new superintendent, who brings a whole other set of things’; so they have kind-of learned how to dig in and not focus. Finally, a lot of times people have had poor experiences in the past with feedback or change, so someone has given them some ideas that don’t work really well or they are ill conceived, and that also promotes the resistance or negativity.
Q: Why can it be so difficult to manage people with these characteristics?
John Eller: Well, again, they have had good practice at this, and I refer back to this idea of frames of reference because what that does is that taints how they view the world or how they made meaning of the world. For example, if they have learned that teachers are supposed to be more independent and then a principal works with them and tries to get them aligned with others, that is in conflict with their view of the world and so they become more resistant.