The house manager role is built on authority. Not authority in an autocratic sense, but the professional standing to direct staff, coordinate vendors, and make operational decisions on the household’s behalf. When that authority is intact, a household runs efficiently because everyone in it knows who to go to and what to expect. When it’s compromised, the role becomes difficult to perform effectively regardless of how capable the person in it is.
What most principals don’t realize is that authority gets compromised through ordinary, well-intentioned behavior. The principal who texts the housekeeper directly about a preference rather than routing through the house manager. The one who reverses a scheduling decision the house manager made because it’s more convenient in the moment. The one who has separate ongoing relationships with individual vendors that the house manager doesn’t have visibility into. None of these feel significant individually. Cumulatively, they tell every other person in the household that the house manager’s authority is conditional, which changes how everyone in the household relates to her.
The Bypass Problem
When a principal bypasses the house manager to give instructions directly to other staff, several things happen simultaneously. The staff member who received the direct instruction is now uncertain whose direction takes precedence. The house manager has lost visibility into something affecting her operational area. And the implicit message communicated to everyone in the household is that the chain of communication can be skipped when it’s inconvenient.
Staff notice these bypasses. Over time they learn to go directly to the principals when they want something, rather than working through the house manager, because the direct route has been shown to work. The house manager’s coordination function gets gradually hollowed out without anyone making a decision to hollow it out.
The fix is straightforward but requires consistency: all direction to household staff goes through the house manager, and when principals communicate with individual staff members directly, the house manager is informed. This isn’t bureaucratic formality. It’s the operational infrastructure that makes the role function.
The Public Reversal
A principal who reverses a decision the house manager made, in front of other staff or vendors, has done something that takes time to repair. The house manager’s authority is visible to everyone in the household, which means undermining it is also visible to everyone in the household. A vendor who sees a principal override the house manager’s decision on a service matter now knows that the house manager’s word isn’t final. A staff member who observes the same thing recalibrates how much weight to give the house manager’s direction.
This doesn’t mean principals can’t disagree with or change decisions the house manager has made. It means that disagreement and course correction should happen privately, with the house manager, rather than in front of the people whose professional relationship with the house manager depends on her being seen as authoritative.
The Information Gap
Principals who maintain separate relationships with vendors, handling certain service providers directly, making household purchases without telling the house manager, scheduling contractors through their own contacts, are creating information gaps that make the house manager’s coordination job harder and less effective.
A house manager who doesn’t know about a vendor relationship can’t manage it. She can’t track the household’s history with that vendor, can’t consolidate vendor management to get better service and pricing, and can’t represent the household’s full vendor picture to the principals when they’re making decisions about service levels and costs. The information fragmentation that comes from principals managing some vendor relationships directly undermines the operational visibility that makes a house manager genuinely valuable.
At Seaside Staffing Company, we raise this with families before placements begin precisely because the patterns that undermine house managers tend to be habits that predate the placement and that nobody has named as a problem.
