Building systems for principal success: 3 key lessons for district leadership

It’s no secret that effective principals lead to better student outcomes and happier teachers. The Wallace Foundation found that when principals perform at an above-average level, students in their schools gain more than three additional months of academic progress each year. High-performing principals also tend to hire high-performing teachers, making the quality of principal leadership the top factor influencing teacher retention.

But how can districts identify – and develop — that kind of leadership? Our research study on Preparing Principals to Lead analyzed five meta-analyses and identified two key areas that positively impact student achievement: strategic thinking and interpersonal skills. Yet, many principal preparation programs still miss the mark, focusing on industry-specific knowledge rather than these essential competencies, resulting in a critical skill gap. Principals can’t cultivate these skills in isolation; districts need to establish systems that actively support their development.

Our research study provides 15 best practices that districts can use to foster strategic leadership competencies among principals, hire candidates with the right aptitudes, promote continued development for experienced school leaders, and focus principals’ time on the highest-value activities. But since publishing that research, we’ve uncovered three additional lessons that reveal how districts can better support their principals’ growth and success.

Lesson #1: Successful districts hardwire strategic thinking into a process

Most successful districts don’t just train principals in strategic thinking – they hardwire specific practices into their school improvement cycles each year. For example, every year district leaders at Mansfield ISD ask each principal to identify the one issue that, if solved, would have the greatest positive impact on their schools. Principals are then required to conduct a root-cause analysis for the issue, craft a strategy to address those root causes, and report on progress made in implementing that strategy regularly. This ensures that all leaders work through the same process annually and the development of strategic thinking skills becomes an integrated part of the role.

Learn more about how to hardwire your district for change

Lesson #2: Case studies clarify why principal development initiatives fail

By analyzing more than 500 case studies of district strategic initiatives, we’ve identified several common causes of initiative failure. Conflicting priorities, actions without analysis, and failure to secure support are just a few of the obstacles that can derail a strategic initiative. But these obstacles are not just limited to district-wide strategies – they are also evident in principal development efforts. When principals lack the resources or backing to implement new initiatives or their goals conflict with district priorities, their development is stunted, leading to broader systemic failures. To address these challenges, we developed the Eight Hallmarks of Successful Strategic Initiatives, which are central to building high-performance organizations at any level, whether it’s the district or individual school.

Lesson #3: No one leader can excel in all requirements

Perhaps the most crucial lesson we’ve learned from working with over 200 districts to craft and support strategic initiatives is that no single leader excels at all the competencies required to lead complex organizations through strategic change. Dr. Deborah Ancona, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, supports this view. Her analysis of what it takes to be a high-performing leader shows that successful organizations help their employees make sense of their environment, explain why certain decisions are made, paint a compelling vision of the future, translate that vision into concrete plans, and work with individual employees to secure support and commitment to change. But no single leader can master all these skills. It’s always a team effort.

What’s the takeaway for district leadership?

We need to move beyond the idea of developing principals in isolation and focus on building leadership systems that enable principals to learn, grow, and lead through collaboration. To accomplish this, district leaders must focus on three goals:

1. Define exactly what strategic thinking looks like within the context of school improvement and establish a concrete set of requirements that principals can use each year.
2. Ensure these requirements help principals develop strategic initiatives with a high likelihood of success.
3. Establish a set of activities that principals can conduct together to meet these requirements, making school improvement a team sport rather than an individual exercise.

To help district leaders through this work, we’ve developed a series of resources including the School Improvement Framework, Strategic Prioritization Exercises, Root Cause Mapping and Analysis trainings, and more. These resources are all available to District Leadership Forum partner districts, and we are guiding a cohort of district leaders through them step-by-step this fall as part of our Preparing Principals to Lead Change workshop series.

To learn more about our research on principal development, these resources, and upcoming workshops you can reach out to your EAB account advisor or contact us at eab.com/k12.