Episode 26: How To Handle The 5% Of Parents That Are Trying To Destroy Your School

5% is a pretty small number.

If you lived in a place where it was cloudy only 5% of the year that sounds pretty good, right? What if I told you that your favorite team would only lose 5% of their games? You’d sign up for that, right?

5% is a pretty small number. That’s true most of the time, but it sure doesn’t FEEL that way when you think about the 5% of your parents that are trying to destroy your school community.

Most research on private schools shows that 95% of our parents are usually workable, or pretty good or even fantastic.

BUT, that 5% takes a disproportionate amount of your time and emotional energy. They take a disproportionate amount of your teacher’s time and emotional energy.

These are the parents that everyone talks about, but everyone tries to avoid. These are the parents that just the mere mention of their name causes your heart to speed up and your blood pressure to rise.

In their excellent book, Hopes and Fears: Working With Today’s Independent School Parents, Dr. Robert Evans and Dr. Michael Thompson refer to these parents as “The 5 Percenters” and they place them into three distinct groups:

• The Anxious and Incompetent
• The Unresponsive
• The Intimidators

On today’s episode of The Private School Leader Podcast, we are going to discuss the “5 Percenters”, look at the reasons they may act the way that they do and consider some strategies to work with these parents more effectively.

I know how busy you are. That's why I created a weekly podcast that you can listen to while driving to school, working out or running errands. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of inspiration, motivation and PD, all while doing something else! I hope that you will listen. More importantly, I hope that what you hear helps you thrive at your school.

Thanks for listening!

Mark Minkus

I want to give you a gift to say “thank you” for listening to the podcast. I have created a FREE guide for you called “5 Strategies To Help You Work With Difficult Parents”. We know that working with parents is part of the job and most of our parents are great, but some of them can be very demanding and emotional and difficult. This guide will give you the tools that you need to build better relationships and have better meetings with the difficult parents at your school. Go to theprivateschoolleader.com/parents to grab the guide. Thank you again for listening every week!

Please check out all of the free resources on my website that can help you serve and lead your school community. There are "Plug & Play PD's" (45 minute webinars with guided notes) as well as Top 10 Lists of Leadership Books, Productivity Books and TED Talks over at www.theprivateschoolleader.com/resources. You can grab the show notes for today's episode at www.theprivateschoolleader.com/episode26

Please write a review of this podcast and help push this content out to more leaders. I would love to get your feedback about the podcast, ideas for future episodes and hear about how you are implementing these strategies in your life and at your school. You can email me at mark.o.minkus@gmail.com Thanks!!

I’ve created a FREE RESOURCE for you called “The Top 6 Ways To Protect Your School From a Lawsuit”. This is a 10 page pdf that will help you to keep your staff and students safe and help keep your school out of court. Litigation is expensive, time consuming and extremely stressful. This common sense guide will help you to be more intentional and proactive when it comes to protecting your school. You can grab “The Top 6 Ways To Protect Your School From a Lawsuit” at www.theprivateschoolleader.com/lawsuit. Thanks!