Alligators. Snakes. Do not feed the wildlife. Three instructions by a lake — and three lessons every leader needs to hear.
I was in Florida when I spotted it.
A danger sign, planted in the grass beside a lake, doing exactly what danger signs are supposed to do. Clear. Direct. Unambiguous. No room for misinterpretation, no softening of language, no corporate disclaimer hedging the risk.
DANGER. Alligators and snakes in area. Stay away from the water. Do not feed the wildlife.
I stood and looked at it for longer than was probably normal for a man on a family holiday. Because somewhere between the alligator pictogram and the instruction not to feed things, I found myself thinking about leadership.
Not about Florida. Not about wildlife management. About leadership.
The best frameworks are often the simplest ones. And tucked inside a warning sign beside a Florida lake are three leadership principles I wish someone had shown me before I started doing this job. Not as a metaphor stretched too thin — as a genuine, practical set of instructions for anyone who leads people, organisations, and cultures through complexity.
Alligators and snakes in area
Every organisation has them.
Not people — I want to be clear about that. I am not talking about difficult individuals, although every leader encounters those too. I am talking about dynamics. The hidden tensions that have been simmering for years before you arrived. The unspoken conflicts that everyone knows about and nobody names. The cultural undercurrents that shape what is possible in an organisation long before any new leader turns up with their vision and their values and their carefully prepared first-hundred-days plan.
The alligators are the things that will hurt you if you don’t know they’re there. And here is the uncomfortable truth: most of them are visible, if you’re willing to look. The mistake most leaders make is not that they can’t see them. It’s that they choose not to. Because naming the alligator makes it real, and making it real means you have to do something about it.
But here is what I have learned, leading schools across three sites on the Isle of Man: the alligators don’t disappear because you’ve decided not to look at the water. They just get bigger. The dynamic you step around today becomes the crisis you manage in six months. The unspoken conflict you allow to persist becomes the culture you inherit permanently.
Great leadership starts with an honest, rigorous audit of what is actually in the environment you are leading. Not what you hope is there. Not what the last leadership team told you was there. What actually is. The alligators and the snakes. Named, assessed, and dealt with — not ignored until they surface on their own terms.
Stay away from the water
This one, I’ll admit, is the most counterintuitive.
Leaders are drawn to the water. It’s where the action is. The crisis, the conflict, the urgent problem that needs resolving right now — these things call to a certain kind of leader with an almost magnetic force. The instinct to wade in, to fix, to resolve, to be useful in the moment of difficulty, is not a weakness. In many contexts it is exactly what is needed.
But the sign doesn’t say “be afraid of the water.” It says stay away until you understand what’s in it.
Experienced leaders — the ones who have been bitten, who carry the scars of wading in too fast, too early, without reading the environment — know that situational awareness is not the same as hesitation. It is not timidity. It is intelligence. It is the difference between a leader who acts with clarity and a leader who reacts with noise.
Stay away from the water means: resist the pull to move before you understand. Do the diagnostic work first. Ask the questions that feel uncomfortable. Sit with the ambiguity long enough to see what is actually there, rather than what your first instinct told you.
In school leadership, this lesson is particularly important. New leaders — new to a school, new to a trust, new to a role — are under enormous pressure to demonstrate impact quickly. To be visible. To act. And sometimes, the most important thing they can do in the first weeks and months is to stay away from the water. To listen before they speak. To understand the system before they try to change it.
The crocodile you didn’t see is the one that gets you.
Do not feed the wildlife
This is the one that stopped me.
Because this isn’t a warning about something external. It is a warning about something you do. Actively, repeatedly, often unconsciously. It is a warning about what you choose to sustain.
Leaders feed things all the time. We feed the behaviours we tolerate — and tolerance is a form of feeding. We feed the cultures we allow to develop unchallenged, the narratives we don’t contest, the dynamics we step around because confronting them feels harder than letting them persist. We feed the learned helplessness when we solve problems that others should be solving. We feed the blame culture when we accept it as a given rather than naming it as a choice. We feed the passive aggression when we mistake it for mild dissatisfaction and move on.
And what we feed grows.
The wildlife that seems manageable today — the low-level conflict, the quiet disengagement, the drip of cynicism — becomes the alligator in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge. Not because it arrived overnight, but because it was fed, incrementally, over months and years, by small acts of avoidance and tolerance that each seemed reasonable in isolation.
Do not feed the wildlife is perhaps the most important leadership instruction I have ever found on a danger sign in Florida.
Because it requires leaders to be honest about their own role in the conditions they are leading in. The environment you inherit is shaped, in part, by what previous leaders chose to feed. The environment you leave will be shaped by what you chose to feed. The question is not whether you are feeding things — you are. The question is whether you are being intentional about what those things are.
In schools, this is a question about culture. Culture is not what you say your values are. It is what you feed. It is the behaviour you reward and the behaviour you ignore. It is the story you tell about what this school is, and who is allowed to confirm or contradict that story, and what happens when they do.
Intentional leaders build intentional cultures. And intentional cultures require leaders who are honest about what they are feeding — and disciplined enough to stop feeding the things that undermine the environment they are trying to build.
The sign nobody puts up
The thing about the Florida sign is that it is explicit. Someone took the trouble to name the risk, plant the sign, and make the instruction visible to anyone who chose to read it.
Leadership rarely comes with that kind of clarity. Nobody plants a sign at the entrance to a new role that says: “Warning. Hidden tensions in area. Understand before acting. Do not sustain what you are trying to change.” The alligators are not labelled. The water is not cordoned off. The things being fed are not named until they have grown large enough to be unavoidable.
Which means that the leader’s job — one of the most important and least celebrated parts of it — is to do the sign-reading themselves. To develop the awareness, the honesty, and the discipline to see what is in the environment, to approach it with appropriate intelligence, and to be rigorous about what they choose to sustain.
I lead schools on the Isle of Man. The water looks different there — no alligators, considerably fewer snakes — but the leadership lessons are identical. The environment you lead in is never neutral. It is always telling you something, if you are willing to read it.
Three instructions on a danger sign beside a Florida lake.
Not a bad brief for anyone who leads.
