Essential Skills for 
Effective School Leadership

Make this year’s administrative retreat a memorable experience that equips your Leadership Team with an expansive repertoire of critical skills and practical tools to inspire the confidence that staff and students need to succeed. Here are some of the learning outcomes you could achieve in the five essential skill areas.

Confidence. Leaders believe in themselves and their ability to mobilize others to act. 
  • Assess team strengths as well as development opportunities by studying best practices from high performing leaders. 
  • Learn to motivate and sustain the school community’s commitment to and confidence in your leadership vision and goals.

Communication. Leaders are able to articulate their goals; and transform words into deeds, and rhetoric into results. 
  • Enhance your ability to really listen to other people’s concerns and link these to your vision. Invest the time, patience and persistence necessary to develop a shared frame of reference in order to build mutual understanding and respect. 
  • Recognize and adapt to different communication styles, and apply this tool to improve team performance in areas including giving and receiving feedback, making decisions, and influencing others.

Collaboration. Leaders recognize that success is a team effort.
  • Develop the capacity to solve problems in a collaborative manner by implementing a four-step creative process designed to generate innovative yet actionable solutions. Forge alignment on a set of common goals while respecting diversity of needs and viewpoints.
  • Design a common framework for decision-making and consensus building. Negotiate a set of team agreements —also known as a “Declaration of Interdependence”—that clearly defines how the team will relate to each other and work together to ensure a safe, welcoming and enriching learning environment for both children and adults. 

Coaching. Leaders invest time and energy into developing their team.
  • Create a team of responsible leaders who hold themselves accountable when things don’t work as planned. Learn to attack problems, not each other; and to find solutions, not fault.
  • Practice giving and receiving feedback, and resolving issues in a responsible manner that enables you to move forward with increased trust and respect for one another.

Continuous Improvement. Leaders view change as opportunity. 
  • Balance the leadership challenge of retaining the big-picture while implementing detailed action plans. 
  • Identify leadership outcomes, leadership actions, and leadership interactions in order to successfully implement the school’s improvement plan.
Dr. Frank Siccone is a consummate professional and one of my most valued colleagues.   I have personally witnessed his presentations of workshops and training sessions many times and have consistently found him to be phenomenally well prepared, organized, insightful and creative.  His ability to “think on his feet” and respond creatively and in a focused manner to questions and responses from his audiences is remarkable. 

He is an extraordinarily brilliant thinker and designer of training experiences, drawing on a seemingly bottomless well of reading, research and practical experience.

Hanoch McCarty, Ed.D.
Educator/Author/Motivational Speaker
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