How to Harness the Multiplier Effect as a Principal

For years, Liz Wiseman has provided counsel and feedback about multipliers—leaders who bring out the best from everyone they work with—and diminishers, who do the opposite. Sharing her careful research and finely honed insights, Wiseman has become a best-selling author, sought-after speaker, and thought leader.

She’s the CEO of the eponymous Wiseman Group, a Silicon Valley–based organization focused on talent development, and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review and author of four books about leadership. Brené Brown said of one of Wiseman’s books: “If you could see my copy, you’d see a lot of highlighting.”

Brown clearly isn’t alone on that front: When Edutopia recently asked a dozen principals to send along their all-time favorite books about leadership, only Wiseman was invoked on multiple occasions. Two of her books—Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter and The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools—were recommended by the principals we polled.

Both books center on the differences between multipliers and diminishers. Wiseman wants to help leaders recognize their behaviors and understand whether they’re multipliers or diminishers, and then guide them as they grow and improve. Not all diminishers are intentionally making work (and life) harder for their colleagues and employees, Wiseman says: Some have the best of intentions but move too quickly or set standards too high without providing adequate support.

Having researched and interviewed leaders in both for-profit companies and schools, Wiseman is able to take powerful ideas from divergent sectors and tailor them to the needs of principals and administrators, and she spoke to me about a few high-level takeaways she’s uncovered for those leaders.

Seek a Diversity of Thought and Experience

There are inherent tensions in every workplace between the old guard and the new. Veterans bring institutional knowledge, wisdom, and, sometimes, complacency; newbies might be inexperienced, but they contribute fresh ideas and a burst of energy.

"Sometimes we do our best thinking and make our best contributions when we’re new to something,” Wiseman said, adding that “there are a lot of advantages to being in that honeymoon stage when we come at new tasks,” including a willingness to “take better risks.”

Wiseman believes the best leaders create an environment where both factions and skill sets are appreciated. Hard-won insights are worthy of respect and recognition, so long as they’re not overvalued to where leaders are “playing the seniority game,” Wiseman said. In education, that means not reserving leadership opportunities exclusively for longtime staffers.

“One of the things I see play out in really well-run organizations is there is not this dividing line between the experienced and the inexperienced,” Wiseman said. “They don’t pretend that those differences don’t exist—they value them, and the best-run school districts draw upon all of those different perspectives.”

Ensuring that there’s a mix of backgrounds and experience levels on the leadership team and among department heads is only half of the equation. Wiseman also advises school leaders to read widely to get different perspectives: “Some portion of your reading portfolio should include researchers, authors, and practitioners who have a deep knowledge of your industry,” she said. “But I think we can learn a lot more when we reach outside of our industry. There are some principles about how people learn and contribute in organizations that are applicable anywhere.”

Wiseman cited a business professor she worked with who, despite his own experience as a businessman, never used business-oriented examples when he taught. When she asked him why, he told her he believed that people learn more when they’re processing information from outside their industry or expertise.

“When things are just a little bit off from what we normally experience—when the terms are a little different, the examples are a little different—it frees our minds to be able to learn, rather than to criticize,” Wiseman said. “When it’s just within our own field, we’re like, ‘Well, that’s not quite right,’ or, ‘I wouldn’t do it that way.’”

The Leadership Learning Curve Is No Joke

Interestingly, Wiseman’s research indicates that the benefits of newness she sees in rank-and-file staff aren’t universal—they don’t translate as well to the highest echelons of leadership. “People who are new to management tend, on average, to be really bad at management at first,” Wiseman said. “There isn’t a rookie advantage.” 

That isn’t to say that principals and administrators are destined for failure right off the bat, or that promotions into leadership should be avoided—after all, the only way to develop the next generation of leaders is to put new people in leadership positions. Wiseman just urges caution: Whether you’re a superintendent monitoring a new principal’s performance, or a principal worried about proving your worth, you need to be patient because great results can only come with time.

“It takes stumbling around and bumbling around a little bit,” Wiseman said, estimating that a principal will have six months of struggles before things begin to click. That’s how long it took her, too, when she started as a manager at Oracle Corporation in her 20s. “I figured out what my job really was—how it wasn’t about me, my to-do-list, and my performance anymore,” she said. “It was about getting good thinking and good work done through other people. And most of us don’t flip that switch overnight.”

Wiseman suggests that new school leaders looking for reassurance and a reference point as they settle in think back to their teaching days, because the best school leaders and teachers share a number of professional traits: “They don’t spoon-feed people, they don’t hover over people, and they’re not punitive,” she said. “They create an environment where people want to learn and contribute. They ask good questions and they spotlight people’s good work.”

Eternal Optimism Isn’t the Answer

Counterintuitive as it might sound, optimism has limits for a leader—it can easily turn into accidental diminishing, Wiseman said, which she called the “biggest surprise” of her research for Multipliers. 

Wiseman expected to discover that diminishing leadership mostly comes from micromanaging, being a know-it-all, or taking a tyrannical approach. Those are all types of poor leadership, to be sure, but Wiseman also called out the “well-intended leader, the good person who’s trying to be helpful and supportive, but is overplaying their strengths to the exclusion of other people.”

Imagine a principal setting an ambitious goal. It’s great for them to convey how much they trust in their staff to achieve that goal, but if their messaging is only, “we can do this,” it will eventually start to rub some staffers the wrong way. Wiseman raised the hypothetical questions she’d anticipate from teachers in response: “Does my principal know how hard this goal is? Do they have any sense of what we’re up against?”

Left unaddressed, those questions can fester and turn into resentment, annoyance, and frustration—especially if a leader continues their too-optimistic messaging. Wiseman said leaders shouldn’t lose sight of how victories come with losses and setbacks. “It’s OK to normalize the struggle, the difficulty, the mistakes,” she said. 

To drive her point home, she again brought up the lessons leaders can take from high-quality teachers, who don’t sugarcoat things. They tell their students how hard it is to learn a new language, for instance. They let students know they’re going to spell words wrong, and conjugate verbs wrong. That’s OK—it’s just part of the process. “The best leaders do the same thing,” Wiseman said. “They demonstrate belief, but they balance that with acknowledging the imperfect path toward achievement.”