Administration and leadership must go hand in hand. They are not the same thing. But they are necessarily liked, and complementary. Any effort to separate the two is likely to cause more problems than it solves. Leaders motivate their followers to set high, attainable standards that result in successful product outcomes. In education we have higher roles within school districts that require people with leadership skills. These roles must be filled with competent, confident people that understand true effectiveness of being a leader, not just a warm body filling a supervisory position.
The IoE (The Institute of Education) academics - professors David Woods and Chris Husbands and Dr.Chris Brown – went further. Through a study of reports by school inspectors, they came up with a set of characteristic shared by successful school leaders
Hargreaves (1994) points to the effects of the post-modern paradoxes where
“globalization can lead to ethnocentrism, decentralization to more centralization, flatter organizational structures to concealed hierarchical control”(p.47). He note that “the main educational response to this social crisis has been to resurrect old cultural certainties” (p.54). Contemporary interest therefore in “strong”, “outstanding” or “visionary” educational and school leadership can be interpreted as a partial return to old cultural certainties. School need strong leadership.
Effective principals also need to have a high level of emotional intelligence and
Interpersonal skills. Often, the power of school leaders is vested in their capacity to persuade and influence, rather than to direct.
Of course, every school leader will have a different list. Many will echo these characteristics, many will emphasise different aspects and some will add their own characteristics.