10 Vital Skills for Effective School Leaders
Are you new to a school leadership position, or looking to progress into one in the near future? If so, you’re probably here wondering what skills and personality traits will hold you in good stead.
Identifying and developing the correct skills will not only lead to you making it into school leadership faster, it will also allow you to hit the ground running and make your new position a success.
In this piece, we’ll highlight ten of the most important skills for success school leadership.
How to be a leader in school: 10 Essential traits
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Good listening skills
A whole lot of the most important skills you’ll need in your school leadership position revolve around how you’ll manage your immediate team. Schools are a unique workplace, merging business professionals, local government officials, parents in the community, passionate teachers and, of course, children.
You’ll need to draw the opinions of each of them to make a success of your leadership role. The only way you can find out what each of these groups think about the school, their ambitions and their troubles, is to open your ears and listen.
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Emotional intelligence
School environments are tough on everyone. With lots of hard work to be done, stress levels can increase and tensions can run high. That’s why, as a leader, you need to show the emotional intelligence required to stay level headed and work to find solutions to problems.
That extends to displaying an ability to emphasise with your colleagues too. Wellbeing and mental health are, rightly, more heightened than ever before in the workplace. Your ability to acknowledge their feelings and help them out if needed will be an important factor to maintaining your team.
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Time management
As we’ve already touched on, schools can become high stress environments. One of the most significant factors contributing to that stress is high levels of workload.
To help you keep it all under control, you’ll need to well organised and able to balance a number of tasks at any one time. This feeds into all the other skills we’ve listed here too. If you can free yourself of burdens you’ll have more time to dedicate to other areas like listening to colleagues and outlining your vision.
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Collaboration and inclusivity
One of the best things you can do to ease the burden on yourself is to put your trust in the wider team. Schools are filled with passionate, dedicated and highly skilled professionals, all working towards offering a better experience for pupils in your school.
Avoid the pitfalls of micromanagement and ensure you working collaboratively and inclusively with the rest of the team. Appreciate their skills and experience and empower them to make decisions and drive projects in the direction they see fit.
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A visionary
Momentum and motivation are incredibly important tools to driving a school staff team forward. Your ability to decide upon and effectively communicate the goals and objectives of the school will play a huge role in this. One of your first duties will be to communicate a vision to your team.
Couple this with other traits like passion and collaboration and you’re well on you’re on the right track to achieving those goals.
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Passionate
Education is full of incredibly passionate individuals. Every day they strive to make the lives of children a little more hopeful. Bringing that level of passion and dedication to your role will be of vital importance to getting them onboard with your vision and objectives.
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Patience
There are bound to be setbacks along the way. With so many stakeholders, internal and external pressures and expectations placed on schools, a considerable injection of patience is going to go a long way. In this industry, things don’t change overnight.
If you’ve got persistence and can dig deep in times of difficulty, you’ll go a long way to riding out the bumps in the road and making a big difference to the lives of children in your school.
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High-level team management
The majority of traits outlined in this piece add up to team management. It’s a broad term that includes many different aspects, but pulled together it adds up to you excelling in high-level team management.
You’ll need to learn how to handle different personalities, have difficult conversations, provide and take on feedback (positive and negative), provide support and make challenging decisions that won’t please everyone. You won’t get it right every time but it’s part and parcel of being an outstanding leader in schools.
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Lifelong learners
Every day is a school day – quite literally for you and the other staff members in your school. Far from your days of learning ending when you left school, college or university, the cycle of developing skills and learning new things continues for us all.
An attitude of lifelong learning will help you accept that you can always improve. There are new skills to learn and traits to hone that in turn will feed back into your role as a school leader. Give yourself personal goals that pinpoint areas of improvement and commit to making progress that will support your career.
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Relationship builder
This is another that will contribute to keeping everyone pulling in the same direction, keeping the school on track to achieve their goals. For you that means pulling together a lot of what we’ve discussed above: outlining a vision, listening to team members, collaborating and empowering individuals. It will all add up to building relationships in school.
It doesn’t end with staff members either. Parents are an imperative part of the school’s operation. Attaining their support is going to be an incredibly importance piece of the jigsaw. To do that, you’ll need to draw on a lot of the same principles in this article. A good starting place to open lines of communication and listen to their thoughts.
