The Value of Quiet Leadership

Posted on May 27, 2025 Written by

School administrators sometimes mistake volume for value. While progress is often noisy, that doesn’t mean that the opposite is true. Simply put, a leader’s value does not come from always knowing the most or speaking first.

This article offers eight tips on how powerful leaders lead with their presence, not forceful (or even threatening) rhetoric. In the words of the author, effective leadership comes from “discernment, consistency and the ability to hold complexity without amplifying it.” And as he reminds us, “Teams don’t need another source of stress — they need a point of reference. Quiet leaders become that reference.”

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Your Leadership Style Matters!

Posted on April 15, 2025 Written by

A recent Gallup Poll on “what people need most from leaders” highlights the importance of your leadership style and the impact it can have on your faculty and staff.

When the Gallup team disaggregated the data from over 70,000 responses, they found four key areas that followers valued most. The underlying concepts that emerged from this study remind us that great leadership is not defined by authority alone. And these findings carry a significant message (and challenge) for educational leaders … providing insights that can help good leaders become great!

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Nine Rules to Correct Culture

Posted on March 18, 2025 Written by

Here’s a fascinating article from the business world about “fixing” a distorted corporate culture. In many ways, it’s essentially an expansion of the “You can lead a horse to water, but …” mantra that we’ve all heard before, but with specific tips on getting that horse to drink!

Executive coach, Art Petty, posits that in struggling organizations (or in our case, schools), we should never assume that the culture is broken. Instead, we need to realize that it’s simply been distorted … possibly by poor leadership or flawed decisions. And the job of any new leader is to respect and leverage the existing culture, not to “fix” it by attempting to force immediate change.

Creating a supportive, effective school culture takes time. But by focusing on key issues and leading by example, you can move your school culture towards a climate of renewal and positive growth.

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The Alpha Leader Lie

Posted on March 4, 2025 Written by

Decades ago, many people believed that a leader had to be pushy, aggressive, and sometimes even mean to be successful. Leaders were often envisioned as strong, pugnacious warrior types. Although extensive studies on productivity and workplace culture have long disproved that idea, the last few years have seen a reemergence of this false concept.

In this article, Eric Solomon (who has held leadership roles in major social media companies) takes a closer look at the “Alpha Leader” phenomenon, and shares three research-based characteristics that are commonly found in most truly successful leaders and the organizations they serve. While this was written primarily for a business audience (and featured in SmartBrief), the basic principles that he describes are directly applicable to educational leadership as well.

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