Make The Call

 I was watching the World Cup when I found myself paying more attention to the referee than the players. Clément Turpin, working the England-Norway match, had just made a call and was standing there while a few players continued to argue it. He didn't raise his voice to compete. He didn't try to win the exchange. He simply waited, silent, until the players ran out of things to say, and only then did he speak.

I thought immediately of the classroom, where the same instinct shows up in teachers who stop talking rather than shout over a noisy room, trusting that silence will do what volume can't. But watching Turpin longer, I found myself thinking less about classroom management and more about leadership itself, and about what it actually asks of the person responsible for the whole field. A referee has to track everything happening around him while staying fixed on what matters most. He has seconds to decide what needs action and what can wait for review. He has to listen without letting every voice steer him, and he has to accept that people will question his judgment in real time, sometimes furiously, and that the match will keep moving regardless.

Leaders talk often about the value of deliberate decision-making: gather the information, consult the people affected, weigh the consequences, reflect, then decide. That process is real and it matters. But leadership doesn't always grant the time it requires. Years ago I overheard a parent cursing out my office manager on the phone. I had a standing expectation for my staff that no one was required to absorb verbal abuse as part of their job, not from colleagues, not from students, not from parents. When I understood what was happening, I had the call transferred to me, explained my expectations for how we would communicate, and told her I wouldn't allow anyone, including myself, to be treated that way. When the profanity continued, I ended the call.

I still don't know if that was the ideal decision. Some people afterward suggested I should have let her vent it out. Maybe. But I'd made a commitment to my people, and in that moment the choice in front of me wasn't really about one angry parent. It was about whether the boundary I'd set for my staff held up once enforcing it became uncomfortable.

The situation didn't end there. She came to the school to finish the conversation, and it escalated into threats, which meant another call: a soft lockdown, a request to bring in our school resource officer. Some in the community disagreed with involving law enforcement, given the history between residents and police in that area, and that perspective mattered too. It still does. Making a decision under pressure doesn't exempt it from being examined afterward, and it shouldn't. Referees have review systems because the speed a decision requires and the clarity a decision deserves aren't always available at the same time. Leaders need that same kind of review, whether it comes from trusted colleagues, community voices, or our own honest reflection once the immediate pressure has passed. There's a version of leadership that mistakes decisiveness for an obligation to defend every call forever, as though admitting a decision could have gone differently were the same as regretting it. I don't think it is. I can look back at that day and know I'd make some different choices with what I know now, without pretending I had that knowledge at the time.

When the officer arrived, the parent, now furious that police had gotten involved, turned her anger on him. I could have jumped in immediately to explain, defend myself, or direct how he handled it. Instead I stood there quietly, let her say what she needed to say, and trusted him to make his own assessment. He escorted her out. I think about how easily that moment could have gone differently if I'd matched her energy instead of holding mine. That, more than any single decision I made that day, might be the harder discipline of leadership: refusing to let the chaos around you dictate the chaos inside you. Calm isn't passivity. Waiting isn't the same as indecision.

The parent called the next day to apologize, and over time she became one of the people most supportive of my work. It would be tempting to treat that ending as proof I'd handled everything correctly, but I don't think leadership resolves that neatly. Sometimes people come around. Sometimes they never do. The real measure isn't whether everyone eventually agrees with the call, but what was guiding it when it was made, whether that was fear, ego, the need to be liked, or something steadier: a principle, a responsibility, a commitment to the people you're entrusted to lead. I didn't know how any of that day would end when I hung up the phone. I knew only one thing clearly enough to stand on it: I take care of my people. That didn't give me certainty. It gave me somewhere to stand when certainty wasn't available, which might be the closest thing leadership offers to solid ground.