Insights on Conflict, Leadership, and Governance
Practical perspectives for leaders navigating high-stakes situations. These pieces draw from three decades of experience in public school governance, executive leadership, and conflict mediation.
The First Conflict of the Year Sets the Tone for All the Others
It is rarely the biggest conflict of the year. It is just the first one, and how it gets handled sets the norm for every conflict that follows.
The Work of Repair: What Governance Recovery Actually Requires
Repair is different from resolution. It requires acknowledgment, structural change, time, and a way to measure whether the relationship is recovering.
Policy vs. Practice: Where Governance Actually Breaks Down
A policy manual is a record of what the board intended, not a description of what the board actually does. Mixing those up is where the trouble starts.
The August Reset:
There's a conversation that almost never happens in education governance, and it's not the one you'd guess. It happens between the board chair and the superintendent, sometime before September, with enough time and enough honesty to actually talk through what the year looked like.
The Call You Dread: What to Do Before a Conflict Escalates to Your Superintendent
Peer-to-peer board dysfunction is one of the most under-addressed governance problems in education. Here is a practical sequence for board presidents who need to address a difficult colleague -- before the problem lands on the superintendent's desk
When the Room Goes Quiet: What Silence at the Board Table Is Actually Telling You
The agenda item lands. Someone offers a tentative opinion and then pauses, scanning the table. A beat passes. The board president moves on. Everyone exhales just enough to suggest relief.
Nothing happened. Or so it seems.
In 33 years of educational leadership -- nine of those as a superintendent -- I have learned to read what silence in a governance room actually means. It almost never means what the people in that room want it to mean.
Bruce publishes regularly on conflict, leadership, and governance through the Conflict in Plain English series on Substack. Subscribe below to receive new pieces directly.