Essential Characteristics of School Leaders for Effective School Improvement

Every school that thrives has one thing in common – strong leadership. Whether it’s a small rural school or a large urban institution, the quality of leadership at the top directly shapes the learning culture, teacher effectiveness, and ultimately, student outcomes. But what exactly makes a school leader effective? It’s not just about managing timetables and budgets. It’s about having the right set of characteristics that drive meaningful, lasting improvement across the school community.

Why leadership matters in school improvement 🔗

Research consistently shows that school leadership is second only to classroom instruction among all school-related factors that influence student learning. This finding, established by a landmark review by Leithwood, Seashore Louis, Anderson, and Wahlstrom, underscores that what leaders do – and how they do it – has a measurable impact on achievement.

The effect is even more pronounced in schools that face significant challenges. Schools serving disadvantaged communities or dealing with low performance benefit the most from capable leadership. In fact, there are practically no documented examples of struggling schools being turned around without the intervention of an effective leader.

But effective leadership isn’t about a single style or a fixed set of rules. Strong school leaders engage in three foundational practices: setting directions (helping the school community develop shared goals), developing people (supporting the professional growth of teachers and staff), and redesigning the organization (creating the right conditions for teaching and learning to flourish). Evidence also suggests that successful principals adapt their approach depending on school size, student demographics, and community context – there is no one-size-fits-all model.

Fullan’s five core competencies for school leaders 🔗

Michael Fullan, one of the world’s foremost authorities on educational reform, offers a powerful framework for understanding what school leaders need. In his influential work on the Cultural Change Principal, Fullan identifies five essential components that characterize effective leaders in a knowledge society: moral purpose, understanding the change process, the ability to improve relationships, knowledge creation and sharing, and coherence making.

These five competencies don’t work in isolation. They interact with and reinforce each other, forming a dynamic system that enables leaders to navigate the complexity of modern schools.

Moral purpose 🔗

At the heart of effective school leadership lies a deep commitment to making a positive difference in students’ lives. Fullan describes moral purpose as a leader’s sense of social responsibility – not just toward their own school, but toward the wider educational system. Leaders driven by moral purpose are focused on closing achievement gaps between high-performing and low-performing students, and they actively seek to improve conditions across all schools in their district, not just their own.

This is a critical point. Sustained improvement of individual schools is not possible unless the broader system is also moving forward. A principal with strong moral purpose asks not only “How are our students doing?” but also “How are students in neighbouring schools doing? What is our role in strengthening the entire community?”

Fullan’s concept aligns with what the research on moral imperative highlights: educational leadership is fundamentally a moral enterprise, and genuine school improvement must be driven by a deep commitment to equity and the well-being of every learner.

Understanding the change process 🔗

Having a strong moral purpose is necessary, but it’s not enough on its own. Leaders also need to understand how change actually works. Fullan is clear that moral purpose without an understanding of the change process leads to frustration and failure – or what he calls “moral martyrdom.”

Effective leaders recognise several key principles about change:

Innovate selectively, not excessively. The goal isn’t to adopt every new idea that comes along. It’s better to pursue fewer initiatives with greater coherence and depth.

Expect the implementation dip. No matter how well a change is planned, the first few months of implementation will be difficult. Leaders must prepare their teams for this bumpy period rather than abandoning the effort at the first sign of trouble.

Redefine resistance. Rather than viewing resistance as a problem to suppress, skilled leaders treat it as a source of valuable feedback. Doubters and naysayers sometimes raise important concerns that can strengthen the overall initiative.

Focus on reculturing, not restructuring. Structural changes – new committees, new timetables, new reporting lines – are often superficial. What truly leads to deep, lasting change is transforming the culture: what people value, how they collaborate, and how they approach their work together.

Accept complexity. There is no step-by-step checklist for transformation. It requires ongoing, day-to-day effort and a willingness to navigate ambiguity.

Cultivating relationships in schools 🔗

Fullan identifies a powerful insight from his research: the single factor common to every successful change effort is that relationships improve. When relationships get better, schools get better. When they stagnate or deteriorate, progress stalls.

This finding is supported by wider research on school effectiveness. Studies have consistently found that improvement efforts are unlikely to succeed without trust in the school leader’s skills and intentions. Trust is the foundation upon which all other school improvement efforts are built – whether it’s implementing new teaching practices, distributing leadership responsibilities, or fostering a culture of continuous learning.

Emotional intelligence and diverse connections 🔗

Building strong relationships requires what Daniel Goleman and his colleagues describe as emotional intelligence – the ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions while being sensitive and responsive to the emotions of others. Fullan notes that effective school leaders work hard to develop self-awareness, self-management, and empathy.

This is especially important in today’s diverse school communities. Leaders need to build connections not just with people who share their views, but with those who think differently. This includes teachers who may be sceptical about new initiatives, parents from varied cultural backgrounds, and community members with differing expectations for the school.

Relationships as long-term investment 🔗

Strong relationships aren’t just a means to short-term gains in test scores. They are the foundation for sustained improvement. A leader who invests in motivating disengaged teachers, bridging divides among staff, and creating a supportive professional environment is building a resource that continues to pay dividends year after year. As Fullan puts it, well-established relationships are the resource that keeps on giving.

Knowledge creation and sharing 🔗

In the information age, schools are flooded with data, research findings, and new teaching strategies. But Fullan draws an important distinction: information only becomes knowledge through a social process. Simply distributing a research report or sharing a set of data doesn’t create real understanding. Knowledge is built when people discuss, debate, apply, and refine ideas together.

This is why professional learning communities and collaborative inquiry groups are so essential. Effective school leaders foster a culture where knowledge is both sought and shared. It’s not enough for individual teachers to learn new things in isolation – the whole school benefits when there is a norm of contributing one’s insights to the collective knowledge base.

The leader as lead learner 🔗

Fullan describes the effective principal as the lead learner in the school – someone who models lifelong learning by sharing what they’ve been reading, engaging in action research alongside teachers, and setting up inquiry groups within the staff. When teachers see their leader actively learning and sharing, it reinforces the idea that teaching is both an intellectual and moral profession, and that everyone in the school is part of an ongoing process of professional growth.

This approach also aligns with international research on system leadership, which emphasises that effective leaders build professional capacity and capital in others, creating tangible impact that extends beyond their own school.

Creating coherence in school improvement 🔗

Perhaps the most challenging – and most important – characteristic of effective school leaders is their ability to create coherence. Modern schools face constant pressure from competing initiatives, shifting policies, and new mandates. The natural tendency of complex systems is toward overload and fragmentation. Effective leaders work against this tendency by acting as coherence-makers.

What coherence actually means 🔗

Coherence is not simply about aligning goals and structures on paper. According to Fullan and Quinn’s coherence framework, true coherence is the shared depth of understanding among the people in an organisation about the nature of their work. It exists in people’s minds, not in strategic plans or policy documents. And because it’s subjective, it can only be developed through purposeful, collaborative interaction over time.

Leaders who lack this awareness often fall into the trap of chasing too many external innovations and taking on too many disconnected projects. The result is initiative overload – a familiar problem in many schools where staff feel pulled in multiple directions without a clear sense of how everything fits together.

The four components of the coherence framework 🔗

Fullan and Quinn’s model identifies four interconnected components that leaders must work on simultaneously:

Focusing direction: This involves building collective purpose by establishing clear, shared goals and reducing the clutter of competing initiatives. Leaders need to narrow their focus to a small number of meaningful priorities and communicate them consistently.

Cultivating collaborative cultures: Creating environments where teachers and staff work together on shared problems, learn from each other, and take collective responsibility for improvement. This isn’t about making people feel good – it’s about building genuine professional expertise through focused collaboration.

Deepening learning: Going beyond surface-level reforms to create communities of inquiry that examine instructional practices and their impact on students in meaningful depth. This includes embracing new approaches to pedagogy, including those enabled by digital tools.

Securing accountability: Building strong internal accountability – where the school community takes responsibility for its own performance – before relying on external accountability systems. When the first three components are in place, accountability becomes a natural outcome rather than an imposed burden.

Why coherence is never fully achieved 🔗

One of the most important insights in Fullan’s work is that coherence is an ongoing process, not a destination. Staff members leave and new ones arrive. Policies shift. The community changes. Leaders must constantly tend to coherence-making, adjusting and reinforcing shared understanding over time. The goal is to achieve roughly 80 percent coherence – a critical mass of shared understanding – while accepting that some level of creative tension and diversity of ideas is healthy.

The ultimate measure of a leader’s success in coherence-making is this: can the organisation sustain its direction and improvement even after the leader leaves? If too much depends on a single individual, the whole effort collapses when that person departs. But if coherence has been genuinely built into the culture and distributed across many leaders at many levels, the school’s progress continues.

Sustainability and the bigger picture 🔗

Fullan extends his framework beyond the individual school to argue that effective leaders also think about sustainability – the ability of the broader system to regenerate itself toward improvement. This means developing the social environment, learning in context (applying knowledge to real problems within one’s own setting rather than relying solely on external workshops), cultivating leaders at many levels, and enhancing the teaching profession as a whole.

Research from the Royal Society of New Zealand supports this view, noting that the full effect of a principal’s leadership may take up to five years to become fully evident in student outcome data. This reinforces the idea that school improvement is a long-term endeavour, and that leadership succession planning is critical. Schools need many leaders at many levels, and organisations must intentionally cultivate the next generation of leaders who can carry the work forward.

Interestingly, Fullan notes that charismatic, high-profile leaders are actually a liability for sustained improvement. The leaders who build lasting greatness are those who combine personal humility with strong professional commitment – and who develop others rather than creating dependency on themselves.

Bringing it all together 🔗

The characteristics of effective school leaders are not a random collection of traits. They form an integrated system. Moral purpose gives leaders their direction and drive. Understanding the change process prevents well-intentioned efforts from failing. Strong relationships create the trust and collaborative culture necessary for progress. Knowledge creation and sharing ensure the school is continuously learning and improving. And coherence-making ties everything together, preventing fragmentation and keeping the entire community aligned around a shared vision.

None of these characteristics can work in isolation. A leader with deep moral purpose but no understanding of change will burn out. A brilliant strategist who neglects relationships will face resistance at every turn. And even the most collaborative school culture will drift without coherence. The strength of Fullan’s framework lies in how these five competencies check and balance each other, creating a robust foundation for sustained school improvement.

What do you think? Which of these leadership characteristics do you believe is most challenging to develop in practice? And how can schools better prepare their emerging leaders to build coherence across increasingly diverse and complex communities?

References

1. https://wallacefoundation.org/report/how-leadership-influences-student-learning
2. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/the-change-leader
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44832712_The_Moral_Imperative_of_School_Leadership
4. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED614324.pdf
5. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13632434.2023.2287806
6. https://www.aasa.org/resources/resource/coherence-making
7. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03036758.2019.1582075