Principal Profile coverI recently stumbled across a book on principal effectiveness that you’ll probably never find in your local bookstore. Based on research done in Canada in the 1980s, Ken Leithwood & Deborah Montgomery’s Improving Principal Effectiveness: The Principal Profile describes four levels of effectiveness:

1. Administrators are building managers who use positional power, personal preferences, and other idiosyncrasies to guide their leadership. Goals for student learning are not at the forefront, nor are strategies for advancing the work of the school well-considered, articulated, or implemented.

2. Humanitarians are leaders whose primary concern is the relationships and happiness of everyone in the school (especially the adults). Decisions are made largely on the basis of promoting a positive climate.

3. Program Managers are more skilled in using decision-making processes and strategies that reflect more widely shared priorities, and tend to base decisions on student learning needs.

4. Systematic Problem Solvers are skilled in a wide variety of strategies for decision-making, school improvement, and goal attainment, and ensure a high level of consistency and performance directed toward shared goals.

The chapters detailing each of these levels are the best part of the book; the remaining chapters describe how the levels were derived from research, and how they might be applied to school leader hiring, training, and retention.

I can’t strongly recommend the book, given the enormous change that has taken place since 1986 (Ken Leithwood’s more recent work is much more significant), but it was interesting to see the terminology used in Canadian schools at that time, and the four profile chapters are helpful. The book is not terribly readable, but you might find it worth looking over if you are interested in principal effectiveness.

Where Am I?
The most powerful part of my experience in reading the book was reading the specific descriptors of principal behavior and performance at each level, which included characteristic quotes from principals. It was impossible not to see myself in the descriptions – and not always in the chapter I’d like.

As a general leadership development practice, it can be helpful to read descriptions of practice, and see how you compare. I’d prefer more narrative forms – stories of real leaders – to the descriptions in this book, but the quotations were nonetheless helpful in describing the thinking and decision-making of principals at varying levels of effectiveness. If I’m not performing the way I need to be, having a clear vision of a more effective level of practice is essential, and The Principal Profile provides just such a vision.