As Leader, What Is Your Job?

By Ren Siebenga | December 3rd

So you are the leader of the school. What is your job? The simple answer is that you should spend the majority of your time on that activity that only you can do. Everything else is delegated and should be whenever that is possible. There are some duties however, that no matter where you are as a leader you cannot delegate and those are your duties/activities and they involve the organization's health and building the future of your school. They are as follows:

Building a cohesive executive/leadership team. No outsider consultant can do that for you. Keeping the group of men and women at the top of the organization healthy and functional is critical. Nothing can mess up a school more than dysfunction at the top. Regular time and energy is required.
Developing clarity of purpose on the executive team about the most important things, from the school story and culture to strategies to priorities. The leader must work hard to eliminate fundamental differences and address counter stories.
Over communicate the internal clarity. Only the leader can credibly convince teachers, boards, and community that the school is aligned and moving in the same direction. The leader has to do this over and over again.
The leader has to establish human processes and systems that reinforce the clarity: systems related to recruiting, hiring, performance expectations of teachers, compensation and recognition. Human relations departments can help but no body can insist it is done like the leader.

Unfortunately, many leaders fill their schedules with appointments and meetings, based on requests from endless number of people who want their attention. That is a problem. Leaders have to be about the above activities. For example, often teachers have a favourite activity in which they developed competence, i.e. coaching basketball, the teacher is then promoted to a leadership role and they hang on to the coaching. That is a problem.

Your job is spending most of your time doing activities that will impact the above four areas either directly or indirectly.

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