As a building principal/assistant principal, you may often be called upon to be the source of all information and demonstrate your skills to be the supreme problem solver at various times during a school day. While this may help boost your ego at times, if you are honest with yourself, there are times when you would prefer to postpone or set aside these requests in order to accomplish your own set of daily goals. Quite frankly, at times you may feel enough is enough and you just want to say “No” and then resume your tasks at hand. If you do this, will you be perceived as aloof and uncaring by your staff? Not really if you have a plan to say “No” in a professional manner.
A recent posting in Smart Blogs on Leadership provides some strategies to use as a leader when just saying “No” is necessary. The posting was written by Mary Jo Asmus and is in the April 3, 2013 edition and is entitled “The freedom to say “no.” You may wish to read this short blog as it may provide you with the strategies you may need to help deal with the requests that you really just need to deal with at a later time.
You may access the post at http://smartblogs.com/leadership/2013/04/03/the-freedom-of-no/
