Leading Beneath the Surface: Using The Iceberg Metaphor in School Leadership

Renée Prillaman, Ph.D.

May 2025

Navigating confusing conversations and defensive reactions in ourselves and others is a regular experience for any school leader. One tool I teach my clients to be effective in these circumstances is The Iceberg Metaphor developed by Virginia Satir. This strategy has been widely used in therapeutic settings, coaching, and business. Fundamentally, the Iceberg Metaphor is a way to approach what underlies specific behaviors such as defensiveness, withdrawal, or communications that just leave us wondering if there is more going on than what is being said. Applying questions from the Iceberg Metaphor, we can come to understand what is driving those behaviors in ourselves or someone else. The tool is useful as a standalone framework, and it is transformative in the context of a coaching conversation.

The Iceberg Metaphor as a Resource for Inner Development

The need for understanding the iceberg and developing the skills to apply it generally emerge early in the school year for most of my clients. Tom, a school leader whom I coach, found himself feeling defensive as he was receiving feedback from his faculty early in the year. While the majority of the feedback was positive, glowing even, he was stuck on two specific comments about how he ran faculty meetings. In Tom’s session with me, he began by saying, “I can’t believe–after all the work I’ve put into meeting agendas–that someone is upset about how our meetings are going. I mean everyone else is happy. I am pretty sure I know who these two people are, and they are people who just don’t like change. Plus, they undermine faculty meetings all the time.” As a coach, I knew that the blaming, defensive behaviors Tom was exhibiting were reactions that were likely driven by something beyond two sentences on a google form. And while the blaming and defensiveness were behaviors to cope with what Tom was feeling, they weren’t aligned with his aspirations to be an open-minded leader with a growth mindset.

As we explored his feelings about the feedback, Tom shared that he was frustrated, sad, and afraid that he was not seen as a competent leader by the more experienced and long-serving members of his faculty. This provided an easy bridge to move a tier deeper into the iceberg to examine the perceptions that gave rise to those feelings. Tom perceived his experienced faculty as a bit stuck in the past while at the same time seeing them as wise and knowledgeable beyond his own expertise. This awareness alone began to open things up and provided some sense that there could be a range of choices. When I coached Tom in moving to the next layer of the iceberg, he recognized that it was his belief and expectation that he could and would make everyone happy and that every aspect of the faculty meetings would work for every person, something we could both agree was unreasonable. So, what was Tom really yearning for? Tom deeply wanted to be successful to meet the needs of his faculty, and to facilitate meaningful meetings. The shift from blaming and defensiveness to being aware of his internal experience provided a pathway for reconnecting with his essential aspirations. From there, it was an easy step for Tom to authentically invite more feedback from faculty about their meetings and to seek out the advice of experienced faculty in one on one conversations. The result was that he slightly revised the agenda to include some of the “kid talk” time some faculty wanted. Tom was also transparent with them that he was grateful for the feedback that had made the adjustments possible. The impact for Tom was a sense that he was more trusted by his faculty. Through this coaching experience, Tom was able to move from defensiveness and frustration to a deeper connection to his aspirations and a more effective set of actions. In building this capacity, he now had the Iceberg Metaphor available as a way to work through challenges in future times.

The Iceberg Metaphor as a Resource for Communication and Problem Solving

A future occasion did arise in the early winter. Tom had emailed Annie, a faculty member who was chronically late to morning faculty and team meetings. Tom had already spoken to Annie once about her tardiness but now members of her grade team were complaining too. Annie did not respond to his email and simply started just avoiding Tom. When he tracked her down and insisted on a meeting, Annie was late for that too! When she did show, Annie didn’t really engage in the conversation, avoided eye contact, and offered short curt responses. While Annie responded that she understood she needed to be on time, her timeliness only slightly improved. In Tom's subsequent coaching session, his frustration and bewilderment were palpable. However, he had developed some facility with the Iceberg Metaphor and had already ventured into the first step as he wondered how to support his teacher–something had to be going on under the surface of Annie’s behavior and the problem wasn’t going to get solved until he understood more. Tom was able to see that the avoidance and the lack of communication were likely a stress related “flight” response; he hoped to work with Annie to uncover the feelings, perceptions, beliefs and expectations, and ultimately the yearnings that were beneath Annie’s surface behaviors.

After our coaching session, Tom set up another meeting with Annie having practiced how he might make use of the Iceberg Metaphor with her. This time, he did not begin with the fact that her tardiness was still problematic. Instead, he began with gratitude for Annie’s time and an expression that he was seeking ways to best support her success. Tom asked, with genuine care and curiosity, how Annie was feeling about their last conversation and how she was feeling about the issue of being tardy. She opened up, slowly at first, indicating that she was embarrassed but felt somewhat helpless to solve the problem. Her perception was that she was stuck. As she felt safer to share, Annie said she felt hopeless about finding a solution because she was living with and caring for her elderly grandmother when she wasn’t working, something she had never revealed to Tom before. Annie’s expectations of herself regarding her grandmother's care were competing with her expectations of herself at school, and she felt she was failing on both fronts–including being late to meetings. Annie yearned to be able to do it all. Just as Tom had been able to move beyond his own surface behavior (defensiveness) to greater alignment with his aspirations (meeting the needs of faculty), he could now use the iceberg to support a similar progression with a teacher. Tom and Annie reached an agreement that would allow her a little more flexibility for morning meeting arrival time. Tom encouraged Annie to share her challenges with her teammates, who were then able to better offer support because they understood the circumstances. In the end, Annie really couldn’t make it all fit, and she chose to leave the school. But–importantly–the skillful use of the iceberg as a framework for Tom’s work with Annie meant that her departure was one supported by compassion and clarity around her deeper yearnings rather than turning into an angry dismissal over problematic behaviors.

How to Make Use of the Iceberg Metaphor Yourself

Of course, the first step for using any strategy is becoming aware that you need to do something. I recommend becoming an observer of situations that create defensiveness in yourself. You may find yourself blaming others, feeling a need to justify your actions, or noticing that you are intellectualizing to prove a point. Use your awareness of what you are experiencing to get curious about what is driving your behavior. What are you feeling and what perceptions are leading you to feel this way? What expectations can you identify that you are having of yourself or of others in the situation? Finally, what is it that you really want? Understanding what you are yearning for can be quite powerful and can open doors to choices for addressing a challenge in richer and more effective ways than blaming, justifying, or intellectualizing.

Journaling can be an effective way to explore the Iceberg Metaphor. I also recommend engaging a thinking partner to practice with you. With a partner, you will both be served by practicing before you are in a real situation in which your thoughts and emotions make it trickier. If you have access to individual or group coaching, this is an ideal setting for developing Iceberg Metaphor skills.

Before you try out using this strategy with someone you’re trying to support, make sure you’ve practiced with yourself first. The iceberg will be much more tangible to you if you’ve experienced it personally.

Some Final Notes

From a coaching perspective, Tom’s increased skill in using the Iceberg Metaphor was exciting and satisfying to observe. More important though, was his overall increased facility for reframing challenges and transforming conflict into opportunities. Coaching exceeds other forms of professional development as a result of the sustained work over the course of a school year. In our work together, Tom had access to me as his coach in real time as problems and challenges emerged rather than learning some tools in a theoretical setting. Coaching has the potential to transform a leader’s capacity to navigate complexity with steadiness and align intentions with impact - consistently and authentically. In iceberg language, coaching offers the kind of support for growth that leaders yearn for.