What to Do When Veteran Teachers Push Back

👋 Welcome back to Harper Haven, your weekly blueprint for building a joyful and high-performing school for students and staff… without burning yourself out. This is where you can get practical tools and have honest conversations about what it actually takes to lead schools that are excellent and sustainable.

I’m glad you’re here.

😃 I’m on a mission to help 10K turnaround school leaders so please… SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend to tell a friend.

🦄 In this this issue…

💜 The Leadership Reality: Staff pushback is not the same as staff rebellion.

💜 The Leadership Move: It’s your job to create the conditions that’ll minimize doubt and maximize belief.

💜 Field Notes: Once you understand staff resistance as discernment, you can develop a clear plan for how to respond to it.

#LetsDoThis #ForTheCulture
— Alicia Harper

One of the most dangerous things a turnaround leader can do is mistake pushback for rebellion.

No one warns you about how uncomfortable it is the first time a veteran staff member challenges you.

And it won’t be privately. It' won’t be after the meeting.
It’ll be in the meeting and in the moment.

In front of other staff. During the classroom observations. During the walkthrough. In the middle of PD.

And to add a little razzle dazzle while you’re fighting for your life, they’ll hit you with the:
“I’ve been here for X years, and we’ve always done ______.”

(Umm… okay. We’ll how’d that work out for ya, huh?!)

If you’re a newer leader, walking into an already established building, it can shake you.

It almost shook me because I was trying to balance so much — respecting their experience, holding my authority, keeping the room calm and focused, and not loosing control of the situation.

In those moments, I thought I only had two choices:
(1) Back down to keep the peace?
(2) Or… Get defensive and overcorrect?

I’ve done both.
And let me tell ya’… they don’t work.

That’s the reality you walked into, and if you mishandle it once, staff will notice and they will take note of how you responded.

If you treat resistance like a rebellion issue… if you get defensive… if you respond with the because-I-said-so authority… if you respond out of frustration… then you’ll just confirm every fear they’ve already had about you.

You can’t mandate belief, but you CAN create the conditions where doubt becomes harder to hold onto.

When veteran staff push backed, I had to learn the hard way that my job was not to try to “win” the argument, but reinforce the standard without getting pulled into the emotional rollercoaster.

Every time I said something along the lines of “I understand what you’re saying, but this is what we’re doing now,” I thought I was being understanding while holding the bar. I mean… that’s what my training taught me to do.

But I wasn’t.

I was being dismissive. It was a weak argument. And, real talk: it made me easy to resent because no one likes when someone says, “I understand your concern…” but immediately follows it up with all the reasons they’re wrong.

One time, I hit ‘em with, “But, I was chosen to be the Principal of this school.”

Bad move, sis. Bad move.

It temporarily shut down the back-and-forth, but it was also a surefire way to kill trust and make compliance performative. Also… nobody cares about your credentials so listing all the reasons you were chosen to lead does not work.

Don’t fall into the trap of over-explaining yourself.

Truth is: the more defensive I got, the more I communicated insecurity, and the more people started to disengage.

If I stayed down that path, people would’ve started to get frustrated by my leadership, and eventually, write me off.

Lissen… ignorance was not bliss in those situations. I needed to know what people were thinking in order to do my job well.

And while avoiding hard conversations temporarily felt good, it unintentionally widened the wedge between staff and me.

The faster I learned to lean into those hard conversations, the better I became at building partnerships with staff.

The move is not to avoid the tension, but address it directly while also building connection with staff. Below are real scripts that I’ve found useful in situations of resistance.

Try this script:

“I want to meet with you because you’ve been in this building longer than I have and it matters to me to hear from people who’ve had success. I respect what you’ve built here and I value your experience. I also noticed some hesitation in our last meeting, and I wanna talk about that.”

If they push back or if they’re guarded, try this script:

"I can understand that. I see what you mean by _____ and that makes sense to me. I am going to push you a little — lovingly — because I know there’s something here that we can work through together. Are you open to hearing that?”

If they say, "We’ve tried ____ before," try this script:

"That’s hard. It’s hard to try something that you know hasn’t worked before. I'm not here to defend what happened before I got here — I believe you and I trust your experience. And… I need to understand what failed, because I don’t want to repeat it. Can you walk me through that from your perspective?”

If they say, "Nothing ever changes here," try this script:

"I know it must be really hard to stay the course when, in your experience, you’re doing all this work, but things aren’t changing. I take that seriously. I’m here for us to try something differently so I am going to change things. But I want those changes to be built on what you know. That's why I'm here."

And, eventually, you need to re-center the expectation so try this script:

“The instructional expectation at our school is _____. We do need everyone to be aligned so that our students can have the same experience across all our classrooms, and I know you care about that. I’m gonna share the non-negotiables and those ideas are the floor. I know you can upgrade those ideas and make them even stronger so let’s work together on what that’ll look like in your classroom.”

Let’s breakdown what I did:
— Asked questions before making statements
— Listened for the history under the resistance
— Named what I was seeing without making it an accusation
— Talked to them like a person, and not like the Principal who had all the answers

Let’s breakdown why it worked:
— It honored their expertise without giving up my authority
— It created a pathway for us to work together
— It shifted the focus back to strong systems
— It positioned me as the leader who did what other’s didn’t do: show up

I didn’t have to mandate belief. But I did create the conditions that minimized doubt.

And that, my friend, is what I call ⭐ a win. ⭐

Staff resistance is actually discernment, and you have to treat it as such.

I remember hearing one of my staff members say, “I’m not gonna let someone come into MY school and … push me and my ideas out. This is MY community.”

Not gonna lie. That stung a little. Because I thought of it as MY school and MY community too.

But, then I realized that, sometimes veteran staff are not resisting because your idea is bad. They’re resisting because your leadership is new.

They’re watching to see if you’ll fold under pressure, if your expectations are negotiable, if your confidence will stay in tact when challenged, and, most importantly, if you’re really there to build with them, or if you’re just another person passing through.

Instead of writing the person off who resisted everything, I kept meeting with them. I kept asking questions. I kept listening. We began partnering together and we turned out to be honest mirrors for each other. They knew things about the school’s culture that I didn’t know; I knew things about successful turnaround work that they didn’t know.

That’s when I learned that one of the most effective ways to navigate staff resistance is by proving myself through consistency.

Veteran staff don’t need you to be perfect, but they do need to believe you’re steady, you’re there to build with them, you have clear expectations that’s grounded in what’s best for kids, and you mean what you say.

The veteran who’s pushing back the hardest right now? They just might be the one standing next to you at the end. So keep showing up and leaning into those hard conversations.

You got this.

Each week, I share tips and tricks on how to build strong schools through sustainable systems and real-life case studies that you might have missed. Take five minutes to get caught up!

Everyone’s talking about these posts so join the conversation:

💜 Learn from my mistakes! These are the 5 things I stopped doing as a Principal in Year 1 that took our school from 35% proficiency to over 90% proficiency. Check it out here.

💜 I’m running my 5th half-marathon on my birthday and I’m only training for 20 days. Who told me to do this?! 🤯 I’m documenting the entire journey on LinkedIn. Follow along here and here.

💜 I ruffled a few feathers with this one, but it needed to be said: some of the worst instruction I’ve seen was during “test prep season” and ion like it! Join the conversation here and then check out my rebuttal to ignorant comments response to comments here.