Leadership is essential in educational institutions.

Have you ever searched the internet for the word "leadership"? I have.

In the most recent search I performed to write this text (07.06.23), Google returned 159 million results associated with this term. Amazon showed me 90 thousand of books on the subject, and a search for the concept "leadership" on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) page showed 51 800 documents containing this concept.

The publication of technical articles by academics and researchers on leadership is also abundant. A search for this concept in the Scientific Information System of Open Access scientific journals (Redalyc), which contains specialized open-access journals from 31 countries, showed 40,488 papers published mainly in Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French. However, some articles are also in German, Catalan, and Italian.

Why does everyone have an interest in leadership?

The obvious answer to the importance of leadership is that the leader sets the direction, guides the team, and conveys the mission and vision; however, there are at least five reasons that no one disputes the importance of leadership in educational institutions.

First, leadership is essential because the person in the leadership position impacts the overall well-being of the institution.

The interest in understanding what leadership is and how it works lies in the possibility of understanding how human groups[i] function and hoping to influence them to achieve specific goals and objectives that may vary according to the field we are discussing. If you are reading this, it is because you share this hope. You are on the right track.

In the educational field, for example, the primary purpose is to contribute to the development of societies through learning for all. Authors such as Pont, Nusche, and Hopkins (writers for the OECD)[ii]pointed out that in the teaching process, there are two very relevant people: the first is, of course, the teacher, who mediates the knowledge and works directly with students. The second person is the manager, who has an indirect impact on learning outcomes, but a direct impact on school climate, school conditions, teacher well-being, and motivation, as well as on teaching. Therefore, if you are reading this and you are a principal, you should know that the areas in which you can impact and are highly dependent on your decisions are precisely these.

Second, leadership is essential because the actions of individuals influence teachers' decisions in their careers.

In a study conducted in 2015 on the motivations that school principals have for seeking promotion to a position, we identified that there are intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. The intrinsic ones were the most praiseworthy; we found the desire to help and learn and vocation among these. We also found outside causes such as, for example, the desire to improve salary. However, one of the motivations present was the desire to stop working with the current manager. In other words, bad leadership pushed teachers and managers without a leadership vocation to seek leadership to escape the oppression of a bad boss [iii].

Third, leadership is essential because the leaders shape the organizational practices that give continuity to the educational institution.

Like organisms, the institution seeks to persist over time and survive. The permanence of the institutions is given through the practices installed within the organization, the operating policies, the regulations instituted, and the changes or innovations promoted by the leaders. All this together articulates a historical characterization of the institution. Very often, new leaders try to destroy the work done by previous leaders precisely to restart this historical characterization of the educational institution.

Fourth. Leadership is important because it trains new generations of educational leaders.

In a study published in the COMIE proceedings on the transition of secondary school assistant principals from the role of teacher to that of school authority[iv], we looked for the elements that principals who expressed in their speeches a positioning and agency as school authority had in common with those who did not show such elements. We found that those positioned as authority figures within their educational institutions had started their leadership career working as assistant principals with principals who allowed them to develop their leadership. In contrast, people who expressed not recognizing themselves as authority figures in their institutions and having problems with their current bosses had started their careers alongside principals characterized by little transparency and discretionary decision-making; in this sense, the leadership shown by the participants and the development of their authority had been influenced to some extent by the good or bad principals with whom they had indicated their careers.

Fifth. Leadership is important because the actions taken by people in leadership positions promote work cultures that become normalized and replicated.

The decisions that managers make regarding their institutions impact the entire system. How people in leadership positions address challenges within the institution, even how they treat a single faculty or another staff member, contributes to the system's culture by encouraging specific ways of working and treating others to become normalized and replicated. Actions based on discretionally, injustice, and institutional violence establish practices that are difficult to remove in the future.

Given the great relevance of being an educational leader, not only for the present of the institutions but also for the legacy of the educational systems, it seems unthinkable that leaders do not have specific training for their functions; however, in many Latin American countries, this is the case. Managers and leaders must learn the way by themselves, holding on to the regulations and their talent to solve the urgent.

I want to say, in my most honest posture, that I admire leaders who are formed and who seek to improve things; if you are on that path, know that your decisions impact the present and the future, which is why your leadership is essential.

To see an example of a leader's impact on people, I invite you to read Case 6. Overcoming terror management, in the book CACE Method-Autoethnography for Educational Leaders (Spanish only).

Go to book

Do you want a deeper reading?

[i] Thieme, C. P. (2005). Liderazgo y eficacia en la educación primaria. El caso de Chile. Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [ii] Pont, B. Nusche, D y Hopkins, D. (2008). Improving School Leadership: Case Studies on System Leadership explores the emerging systemic role of school leaders (vol. 2) Paris: OCDE [iii] Navarro-Corona, C. y García-Poyato, J. (2015) ¿Por qué quise ser directivo escolar? Análisis de los motivos expresados por directores de escuelas mexicanas de educación básica. XIII Congreso Nacional de Investigación Educativa. COMIE. COMIE. [iv] Navarro-Corona, C., Cordero, Arroyo, G. y Negrete, T. J. (2013). XII Congreso Nacional de Investigación Educativa. COMIE.