What wise counsel protected before I even knew I needed it.
Years ago, I worked as an assistant principal under a leader who represented, almost point for point, everything I had promised myself I would never become. She blocked me at nearly every turn from pursuing other positions, quietly, persistently, in ways that were difficult to name directly to anyone who might have helped, but impossible to miss once you had experienced the pattern enough times to recognize it.
It rarely looked like outright refusal. It looked like delayed recommendation letters. Vague answers when other principals called to ask about my performance. A particular kind of faint praise in front of district leadership that damaged more than it helped, delivered with just enough warmth that I could never quite prove what it had actually cost me.
I want to be honest about what working under that pattern did to my confidence over time. I began to wonder, quietly, whether I was actually as capable as I believed myself to be, or whether her lukewarm assessments were closer to the truth than my own. That particular kind of doubt is corrosive precisely because it does not announce itself. It just accumulates, meeting by meeting, until you no longer fully trust your own read on your own competence.
I remember specific nights lying awake, replaying conversations, trying to find the version of myself she seemed to see, wondering if I had simply been fooling myself about my own abilities for years. That is the particular damage a withholding leader does. It does not just block opportunities. It slowly convinces you that you may not have deserved them in the first place.
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Then a call came for an interview at another campus, a genuinely good opportunity, the kind I had been quietly hoping for without letting myself fully believe it would arrive. Before I did anything else, I called a principal friend of mine, someone whose judgment I trusted completely, to ask her advice on how to navigate telling my current principal.
Her counsel was immediate and specific. Do not tell your principal anything about this. Not yet. Not until it is done.
Every instinct trained into me by years of professional courtesy told me that advice was wrong. I had always given notice. I had always extended the heads up, the courtesy conversation, the professional transparency I believed good employees owed their leadership, regardless of how that leadership had treated them in return. Withholding that felt, in the moment, almost like being someone I did not want to be.
I trusted my friend more than I trusted my own instinct in that specific moment, which was its own kind of quiet act of humility. I stayed silent. I went to the interview without a word to my current principal. I do not think I fully understood, at the time, why that particular piece of advice felt so necessary to follow exactly as given.
I got the job. Human resources handled the notification process on their own timeline, not mine, the way these transitions usually work. By the time my principal found out, weeks had passed and the decision was already fully made, the offer already accepted, the paperwork already moving through channels she had no access to.
She was furious when she finally learned. More than irritated, genuinely angry, in a way that confirmed everything my friend's advice had quietly protected me from. But by then, there was nothing left for her to block. The door was already open, and I was already walking through it.
Wise counsel sometimes protects you before you even fully understand what you needed protecting from.
I did not fully grasp, in the moment I followed that advice, how much it actually mattered. I only knew it felt right to trust someone whose judgment I respected over my own well-worn instinct toward transparency. Looking back, I understand now that my friend could see a pattern I was still too close to see clearly myself, that this particular leader would use any advance notice not to celebrate my next step, but to quietly interfere with it, the same way she always had.
I have thought since about how much of leadership wisdom is not about grand strategy at all, but about small, specific pieces of counsel offered at exactly the right moment, from someone who has enough distance from your situation to see the pattern you are still living too close to name. My friend did not solve the underlying problem, the fact that I was working under someone determined to hold me back. She simply made sure that particular attempt to hold me back would not work, and that was enough.
Here is what I want to say to the leader currently working under someone who has shown, repeatedly, that they will not champion her next step, someone whose praise has always come with a quiet asterisk attached. You do not owe full transparency to someone who has already demonstrated they will use it against you. Protecting your own advancement in that specific circumstance is not deceptive. It is sometimes simply wise, especially when the counsel to do so comes from someone who has already seen the pattern you are still learning to name for yourself.
And if you are the one in a position to give that kind of counsel to someone else, do not underestimate how much a single, well-timed piece of specific advice can matter. You may never fully know how much it protected until years later, if you ever find out at all.
I think of my friend often, still, and the particular kind of courage it takes to give advice that goes against someone's instinct, especially when that advice could easily be misread as cynical or overly cautious. She risked our friendship a little, in a small way, by telling me something I did not want to hear in the moment. I am grateful, now, that she cared more about protecting my future than about being the comfortable voice in that conversation.
I do not know what would have happened if I had followed my own instinct instead of hers, if I had given my principal the courtesy notice I believed, at the time, I owed her. I suspect I will never fully know how close that door came to closing before I ever reached it. I only know I am glad I did not have to find out.
I have since become the person other leaders call before making a similar move, and I try to give the same kind of specific, sometimes uncomfortable counsel my friend gave me. Not generic encouragement. Not vague reassurance that everything will work out. The particular, sometimes inconvenient truth about what a specific person in a specific position is actually likely to do with information they are not obligated to receive. It is a larger kindness than it sounds, and I have watched it protect more than one door that someone else would have quietly closed first.
-- Dr. Rhonda
The Next Step: If you are working under leadership that has never fully championed you, take The Close the Leadership Gap Diagnostic™. It is built to give you honest, confidential clarity on your next move, without needing anyone else's permission to seek it.
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