School leadership is highly complex and demanding, but could embracing the messiness of the role be key to success? Alyssa Gallagher and Rosie Connor are directors at the educational leadership nonprofit BTS Spark and co-authors of Embracing MESSY Leadership: How the Experience of 20,000 School Leaders Can Transform You and Your School (ASCD, 2024). In a recent episode of the ASCD Podcast, Gallagher and Connor discuss challenges leaders face in schools today and the importance of intentional coaching conversations to help leaders embrace the human side of their role.
One of the things you note early in the book is that many of the school leaders you've worked with express a need for help with relational issues within schools. Why do you think that is?
What we're finding is that the number one coaching need is around the relational, human side of school leadership. And that's because people are complex—because schools are people organizations.
And if you've been promoted into school leadership, you need a whole set of different skills to lead other adults, empower them, and bring the best out of your teachers. That's very different from working with children, and it's often something that school leaders are not prepared for. The professional development they've accessed hasn't helped to support them with the complexity and challenge of leading others.
You also note that the whole debate between instructional and transformational or relational leadership sets up a false dichotomy. What do you mean by that?
We've seen—I think globally, certainly in the U.S.—a real need for leaders to be strong instructionally. They need to know what good instruction looks like, how to coach teachers, and how to improve. So, there's this whole instructional coaching aspect to the job of being a school leader.
But we also see that there's another need: Leaders not only need to know good instruction but also how to inspire and lead people. That's the transformational leadership coaching that we provide.
Our schools need leaders who are strong and sound instructionally—who know how to help teachers improve. But we also need leaders who are really strong in managing, leading, and inspiring people. That's the transformational side of leadership.
We very much see it as not as an “either/or.” We see it as a “yes, and…” Both are needed.
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