How School Counselors Become Influential

It doesn’t work.

And if you’ve tried it, you know it's true.

The school counseling advocacy model most of us were taught was supposed to be simple: explain your role, show your data, cite the standards, make the case.

THEN we were supposed to be able to MAKE THINGS HAPPEN.

The problem is- information isn’t influence.

So in this episode, we’ll talk about how school counselors can become influential long before "advocacy" meetings ever happen.

We’ll talk about why your principal does NOT need to care about school counseling as much as you do, why constantly sharing information can keep you stuck, and how a little out-of-the-box school counseling thinking can completely change your situation.

There’s a HUGE difference between being the school counselor who's always asked for more effort, and being the person they stop in the hallway to ask:

“Hey- what do you think?”

One is asking for your labor, but the other is asking for your judgment.

THAT’S influence.

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Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us! 

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All names, stories, and case studies in this episode are fictionalized composites drawn from real-world circumstances. Any resemblance to actual students, families, or school personnel is coincidental. Details have been altered to protect privacy.

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This work is part of the School for School Counselors body of work developed by Steph Johnson, LPC, CSC, which centers role authority over role drift, consultative practice over fix-it culture, adult-designed systems and environments as primary drivers of student behavior, clinical judgment over compliance, and school counselor identity as leadership within complex systems.

Transcript

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Why Information Does Not Influence

Steph Johnson 0:07

It does not work. And if you've tried it, you know that's true. The school counseling advocacy model most of us were taught sounds pretty straightforward. Explain your role, show your program data, cite the standards, make the case, and then you ask for change. The problem is, information isn't influence, it's just information. And showing people more information does not magically change that fact. So what do you do instead? What if advocacy had less to do with convincing people in the moment and more to do with building credibility so that your judgment starts making the argument before you ever even make the ask? That's a very different goal. And if you do it right, instead of always being the one requesting the meeting or explaining the role or trying to get somebody to listen, your principal will stop you in the hallway. Hey, I've got a meeting with the superintendent this afternoon about attendance. You got a minute? Because I really want to run something by you. That's evidence that something about your influence has changed. They're seeking your judgment. And that's the effect of true inside out advocacy. And that's what I want to talk about today. Hey, school counselor, welcome back. Last week I asked our national organization a very hard question. Can you show us the impact? This week we're gonna go back inside your building because that leaves us with one more question. If information is an influence, what actually is? And maybe more importantly, how do you become the person people actually seek out before the decisions get made? Because there's a big difference between being allowed to state your case and being someone who's already influential. And that difference can completely change how your school counseling program looks and feels. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. We started this series a couple of episodes ago by talking about a school counselor who was standing at a copy machine. They had about 20 minutes before they were supposed to be in a meeting with their principal. They had the appropriate and inappropriate responsibilities list sitting in the copier tray. They'd rehearsed their talking points on their drive to work, and they were ready to explain the role, make the case, and ask for something specific to change. But here's the one thing I couldn't tell you back then when I was starting this story. By the time you are standing at that copier, most of what determines how that conversation goes down has already happened. Because influence is not the argument you make, it's the place from where your argument is heard.

Legitimacy Tactics And Their Limits

Steph Johnson 3:12

And there's some organizational behavior research that kind of helps us understand this a little bit better. When someone who does not have formal authority in an education, like a school counselor, is trying to influence somebody who does have formal authority, like a principal or a superintendent, there are different ways that people tend to go about it. And one of those ways is what researchers call a legitimating tactic. That is just a fancy way of saying you are trying to strengthen your request by pointing to some sort of outside authority, a rule or policy or standard or something that basically says, look, I'm not making this up. For school counselors, that might sound something like ASCA says this is an inappropriate school counseling duty. The ethical standards say I should be doing this instead. The national model recommends blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's legitimating. You're expecting the information itself to create change. It's a lot like expecting a diagnosis to cure the disease, right? The diagnosis tells you what's happening, but it doesn't make anybody act on it or cure it. And it's similar here. Information can help sometimes. Data and evidence and outcomes can all help. Researchers call that rational persuasion. But it tends to work better when the information that you're bringing connects to something that the other person already cares about. And that's an important distinction. It's not about what you think they should care about, it's what do they actually care about. You may think they should care that your school counseling program isn't aligned with the national model, or that you're spending way too much time in the cafeteria doing lunch duty. Meanwhile, your principal may be lying awake at night wondering how they're going to cover all the substitute jobs tomorrow, or thinking about chronic absenteeism or test scores or parent complaints. Those are the doorways. Information can support your influence, but it cannot substitute for it. So if the real work of school counselor influence is not happening in these kinds of informational meetings, where is it happening? Mostly it's happening on all the other days. The days when you're not standing there trying to convince anybody of anything. And this may be one of the hardest things in the last few episodes for you to hear, but I'm a straight shooter, so I'm gonna shoot straight. Your principal does not need to care about school counseling as much as you do. And indeed, they probably do not. I know, I know. You went to grad school for this, you believe in this work, and you know what a strong school counseling program can do for kids. And it is super frustrating when the person who controls your schedule and your job responsibilities does not seem nearly as invested in that as you are. But your job is not to make your principal fall in love with school counseling. And I think we waste a lot of energy trying to do just that. We explain, we educate, we send articles, we tell them about the national model, we tell them why small groups matter, why this duty doesn't belong

Start With The Problem They Feel

Steph Johnson 6:42

to us. We keep trying to sell them on the program. But what if you stopped starting with school counseling? What if you started with the problem? There's another concept in organizational research called issue selling. And basically, it's about how people who aren't at the top of an organization get decision makers to notice and pay attention to an issue. And part of what matters is how you frame it, when you raise the issue, and whether you actually understand what matters to the person that you're talking to. So instead of walking into your principal's office saying, I need more protected time for small group counseling, you might say, Hey, we've got 38 sixth graders whose attendance has dropped below 90%. I've been looking at the stats and I think there may be a piece of this we're missing. Can I show you what I'm seeing? Same school counselor, same skill set, but completely different conversation. Because now you're not asking them to protect school counseling because school counseling deserves to be protected. You're bringing useful thinking to a problem that's already fully in their awareness. And this is where things can get a lot more interesting. Because sometimes the best school counseling response to a problem doesn't look like traditional school counseling. I think personally we box ourselves in a lot. We see student problems and immediately start flipping through the usual options in our heads. Do I need a group, a check-in, a lesson, a referral? Maybe. But sometimes the most useful thing you can contribute is being able to see the problem differently enough that you can build a response that nobody else has thought of yet. Let me give you a couple of examples from my own campus. Last year, I tried something with attendance that I honestly wasn't really sure was gonna work. It was a peer mentorship program based off an approach from Lydia Larimore. I recruited some of the students on my campus with the biggest attendance concerns, and I paired them with younger students who were struggling with the same attendance issues. And I want you to really stop and see what's different about that. Because the traditional response would be to identify

Designing Better Responses For Students

Steph Johnson 9:02

those students as the problem, pull them in, talk to them, set goals, track them, basically do something to them. Instead, I gave them a meaningful role in helping to solve the problem. They became mentors. And when we piloted it, we saw tremendous gains in the stats. This year I'm trying something completely different with behavior. I'm putting together what I'm calling our super secret PBIS squad. And I'm intentionally looking for some of our most disconnected students, along with some of the students who have documented behavior concerns. Those are the kids I want. And their job is going to be to catch the other students doing things right. They'll be looking for students following our PBIS expectations, and they'll be awarding points on the fly. And again, look at what we're doing there. The students that we might normally identify only as the ones needing an intervention actually become the intervention. That's a different way of thinking about the problem, isn't it? And they don't look like traditional school counseling. There's no feelings charts or worksheets or check-in, checkout. But look at the threads underneath them: motivation, belonging, identity, peer dynamics. It's an understanding of why kids engage with school the way that they do. And that is another stream of school counseling expertise. So I think sometimes we accidentally make our role on campus smaller than it has to be. Because we assume that if something is legitimate school counseling work, it has to look like traditional school counseling. And I don't think that's true. Sometimes your greatest value to your campus is not delivering yet another cookie-cutter counseling intervention. Sometimes it's understanding your students well enough to help the campus respond differently. And this is where influence starts to change. Because if all your principal knows is the counselor runs counseling groups, okay, they know what service you can provide. But if they start thinking, she says things about kids that we're missing, or she comes up with ways to address these problems that I never would have thought of. Now they're valuing something different on top of your expertise. They're valuing your judgment and your ability to see patterns, and they're trusting you to design a response. They become aware that you can look at something really messy and say, wait, wait, wait, hold on. I think there might be a better way to approach this. And that is a very distinct and different professional position. Now, this is also where we can get ourselves into trouble. Because you might hear me saying, bring useful thinking to problems that your principal cares about and think, okay, got it. I need to be indispensable. And suddenly you're helping with attendance and behavior and

Useful Labor Versus Sought Judgment

Steph Johnson 12:11

testing and multi-tiered systems and discipline and parent complaints and teacher problems and whatever else walks through the door. No, that is not what I mean. There is a big difference between being useful and having influence. And schools are very good at using up all your counselor usefulness. You are competent, you care, you solve problems, and people figure out pretty dang quick that if they hand you something messy, there is a decent chance that you can at least make it a little bit less messy. And that makes you incredibly useful to the school. But it does not necessarily position you as a professional consultant. So here's the idea I really want you to hold on to. Influence means they seek your judgment, not just your labor. And you'll hear the difference in the way people talk to you. Because there's a big difference between can you handle this and what are you seeing? Right? There's a huge difference between can you take care of that versus what do you think we should do? Or we need you to run this instead of I wanted your thoughts before we made a decision. In each of these examples, one is asking for your labor, but the other is asking for your judgment. And that is why I don't want you attaching yourself to every single campus priority you can find just because you feel like it might matter. Campus problem plus counselor willingness does not equal advocacy. But combine campus priority with genuine school counseling expertise, and now you may be on to something. So instead of walking into your principal's office and saying, How can I help? maybe the better question is, what are your biggest challenges this year? And where might school counseling actually be able to help with that? There is a boundary built into that question. Because not every campus problem belongs to you. But some problems really do intersect with what you know about students. And those are the opportunities that I want you looking

Project Based Advocacy And Credibility

Steph Johnson 14:27

for. This is actually something that we are piloting inside the School for School Counselors mastermind this year. We're calling it project-based advocacy. And the idea on the surface is pretty simple. Instead of trying to convince everybody that school counseling matters in kind of an abstract way, we identify a real campus problem where your school counseling expertise genuinely shines. And then we help you build something useful around it, where the people on your campus get to experience the value of your role through your work. You don't have to tell everybody what school counseling can do because you're letting them watch it do something. And that to me is some of the most interesting school counseling work that there is. Because you're not just selecting something off an intervention menu, right? You're thinking, you're adapting, you're looking at your students and the context and the campus and the actual problems that are plaguing you right now. And you're figuring out what might fit and make a difference. And over time, if you do that consistently enough, people start to notice. So this kind of advocacy approach does not just happen because you say the perfect thing in one meeting. I'm not going to pretend that that is even a possibility, but you will start to notice when your influence is changing. You will start hearing about problems before somebody's already decided what to do and what your job in it is going to be. Your principal will start asking you things like, What are you seeing? instead of, can you go handle this? You get invited into conversations because someone truly wants your perspective, not just because they need another pair of hands. Your administrator might stop you in the hallway and say, Hey, I want to run something by you real quick. And that may sound small, but that is huge. That matters because you're no longer starting every important conversation from ground zero. So if you want help figuring out what some of this could look like on your campus with your own weird problems and constraints and personalities and priorities, that's exactly the kind of work that we do inside the School for School Counselor's mastermind. The full peer mentorship plans and documents are already in there. And these kinds of out-of-the-box interventions come up constantly in our consultation chats. You can find all the information about the mastermind in the episode description. So let's go back to

Back To The Copier And Next Steps

Steph Johnson 17:01

that copier. 20 minutes before the meeting, the appropriate school counselor duties list is sitting there in the copier tray. Do you take it with you? Maybe. I don't know. But before you pick it up, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions. What problem does my principal need help solving? Is this a place where I can actually contribute? And if it is, what am I seeing that might help us think about this problem really differently? Because you spend all this time trying to sell your program and your list of services and your professional judgment. But what I really want you to be selling is your ability to understand students and see the possibilities that nobody else on your campus can see yet. Build enough of that consistently enough. And eventually, you're not always going to be the one asking for the meeting. You're going to be the one there stopping in the hallway to say, hey, I've got something I want to run past you real quick. Would you mind? That's influence. And that's what I want for you. Take care.