Beginning the journey of a school leader can lead you to have concerns regarding your own capabilities and performance. Hence, knowing and developing your skills as a school leader is essential. However, one question arises: How do I start to be a good school leader?
This blog outlines the key strategies to kickstart your school leader career successfully.
Strategies to Become a Successful School Leader
The following three strategies will help you succeed as a school leader.
1. Time Management
Time management is one of the critical skills that every school leader needs to inculcate, as running a school and managing its aspects can be overwhelming.
School leaders are responsible for multiple tasks, including administrative tasks, staff management, developing a safe and growthful environment, and more.
Below, we’ve listed some of the ways to manage time efficiently.
- Set realistic deadlines: The first rule for efficient time management is to set realistic deadlines for goals. It makes the process practical and increases your chances of getting it done.
- Break tasks into manageable chunks: Leading a school may lead you to face many big tasks. Thus, you should break it down into several small tasks. In this way, you won’t find it challenging to initiate the task.
- Prioritise difficult tasks first: Procrastination is the biggest killer of productivity. Therefore, as a school leader, you should take up the difficult task first. Once you complete it, you’ll get the confidence to complete others on time as well.
- Proper delegation: As a leader, it is your responsibility to delegate tasks and not do all the tasks yourself. You have to delegate the roles and responsibilities to deserving staff members to create an organisational environment.
- Leverage technology: In this modern era, you must adopt technological solutions like calendar reminders and email automation. These will allow you to automate varied repetitive tasks and increase your overall productivity. You can particularly use task management software to accomplish these tasks.
2. Adaptive Leadership
Education is a dynamic field with new changes and stuff coming every day. Hence, as a leader, you should be adaptable to new challenges and uncertainties. Adaptive leadership allows you to identify and address complex problems that don’t have any straightforward solutions.
Moreover, AI is also on its way to transforming the entire dynamics of traditional working methods. Those who are not adaptive and change with time won’t be able to survive and grow. Adaptive leadership quality makes you fearless and instead encourages you to learn, discover, and experiment with new things. It is the core foundation of learning from your failures and facilitates consistent improvement and flexibility.
3. Active Listening
School leaders have to manage various people, including staff members, colleagues, students, etc. Managing these people requires you to have active listening skills. The more you listen, the calmer you are and the better decisions you can make. If you feel that you’re not an active listener, just follow the three tactics mentioned below to optimise your listening skills.
- Avoid interruptions: Different people have different voice pitch and pace. As a potential leader, you need to calmly listen to the speaker and not interrupt in between. First, let them complete, and then only you should start speaking for the required topic.
- Portray positive body language: Small gestures like smiling and nodding make conversations more interesting and engaging without the need to listen to others. Avoid defensive moves like folding your arms, as they indicate a refusal signal.
- Be in an open-mind state: Being judgemental in between conversations will not allow you to properly understand the speaker’s point. Thus, keep your mind open, let them finish the topic, and only then conclude.
Conclusion
In summary, using these three core strategies within your personality will allow you to become a great school leader. These strategies will highly increase your productivity, help you adapt the leadership quality, and better understand other people’s concerns. We hope this blog helps you understand how you can become a great school leader.
