Leadership Lessons They Don’t Teach You in Grad School

If you ask new school leaders, “How’s it going?” you’re likely to hear they’re feeling overwhelmed, along with a general complaint: “They didn’t teach us this stuff in graduate school.” The reaction is understandable. Graduate coursework provides a vital and necessary foundation, but it can’t offer the actual experience that comes with having your name on the letterhead. The move from classroom teaching to an administrator’s office isn’t simply a step or even a stride: It’s a leap into a whole new set of skills, challenges, and responsibilities.

One indicator of the hurdles that new principals face is the job’s attrition rate. The Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) conducted a study in 2025 that found that principals, on average, stay in the position for only three to five years. The research associated short-term tenure with poor performance ratings, low job satisfaction, and high stress—all common characteristics for principals who felt ill-equipped for the job’s demands.

In our decades of leading schools, teaching graduate-level educational leadership courses, and mentoring administrative interns and new school leaders, we’ve identified three important truths that new leaders need to understand.

1. Leadership is a Personal Journey

School leadership can be extraordinarily difficult, frustrating work, and as the AEFP study demonstrates, initiates are subject to early burnout. New administrators soon learn that leadership on the job is comparable to dark energy: a powerful force, its exact nature unknowable, and accompanied by responsibilities infinitely expanding. It’s not merely a professional endeavor that requires occupational knowledge and skills. It’s also a deeply personal journey. Just as emotional and physiological response to job stress is unique to each person, resilience is also highly individualized.

In a previous Edutopia article, we explained the concept of psychological ownership, a motivating sense of efficacy and control on the job. The three core components of psychological ownership are agency (“I got this”), identity (“This is who I am”), and belongingness (“I am a member of a community”).

Joining a meaningful support group nourishes the personal experience. Whether the group consists of countywide assistant principals or newbie administrators from the district, whether they meet online or in person for TGIF, support groups deliver a message that leads entry-level leaders to feel “I’m not alone in this journey.” Having the opportunity to converse with colleagues in similar circumstances and celebrating each other’s successes contributes to agency, identity, and belonging, and thereby nurtures self-confidence and psychological ownership.

Keeping a journal is another way to process your leadership expedition, where you can see the boulders obstructing the trail and the gorgeous views from the summit. This builds personal meaning, but the key to success is to acknowledge that leadership is more than the sum of actions that are targeted to achieve school goals. Rather, it’s an enterprise that simultaneously shapes the leader and generates a poignant sense of self.

2. Time is a Leader’s Most Valuable Commodity

There’s a perpetual competition among the tasks and priorities that require a school administrator’s attention:

• Phone calls from the superintendent’s office and leaders from the parent-teacher association
• Email beckoning from a burgeoning inbox
• A nonstop calendar of grade-level, department, team, and Committee on Special Education meetings; individualized education plan meetings; and district meetings
• A parade of visitors stopping by the office for “just a minute”
• Delicate post-observation conferences
• Student discipline
• Arrival, dismissal, and lunch duty
• Walk-throughs

How does a school leader control their time in a hectic schedule and not allow time to control them?

If we created a course for administrators, we’d name it Time Is of the Essence 101 and include the following elements:

Set priorities. With the Eisenhower Matrix, we advocate for decision-makers to spend time on objectives that are mission-critical, yet non-urgent: evaluation of instruction, feedback, and other instructional leadership responsibilities. In other words, it’s best for administrators to focus on strategic tasks that impact long-term school performance. Hiring and training excellent staff is another top-priority activity that makes a difference for years to come.

Time management. Since a day consists of a set number of hours, time can only be reallocated, not added. If an administrator’s day is like a pie, the trick is to reapportion the size of each slice: make some bigger and others smaller. Delegating tasks, careful use of a daily calendar, sending e-newsletters to communicate “administrivia” matters, and employing the “touch it once” principle (dispense with email and other paperwork on the first go-around) enable administrators to win at a zero-sum game.

First harvest the low-hanging fruit. Eminently worthy, ambitious goals require considerable time to secure adequate resources, change complex systems and recalcitrant habits, and gather a critical mass of capable actors. In the meantime, establish intermediate, achievable goals. An example of this is to first improve student attendance data collection as a foundational step to tackling the school’s perennially low attendance rate.

3. There’s a Lot of Gray Area

When we began our work as principals, we conceived of the job as pressing the right buttons. Driving into work, anticipating the day, and we’d plan: just talk to this person, send that memo, and presto, task completed, objective accomplished. It took a while to appreciate the complexity of school organizations. Human beings, organizational culture, and institutional memory are powerful forces. Leadership is less about pressing buttons and more like pulling a lever from one side to another, through a gray spectrum of complicated and often convoluted human behavior and organizational dynamics. Deep change requires systemwide interventions and sustained effort.

A new administrator’s assignment is to study the complexity and develop an understanding of how the school actually works. Keep your eyes and your mind open. Because every school is unique, this is yet another lesson that can’t be taught in the abstract. It requires a hands-on curriculum of speaking with actual stakeholders and examining real-time data.

It’s important for new administrators to learn to accept the paradoxes of leadership. Apparent contradictions can be true. Leaders are successful when they are confident but humble; support people while holding them accountable; project comforting stability, yet advocate for discomforting change.

Here are a few more to keep in mind:

Facilitating teamwork is the essence of effective leadership (even though the leader shoulders the responsibility for outcomes). The maxim “It’s lonely at the top” misses the point that no significant improvement is accomplished alone.

Mistakes are learning opportunities. This lesson applies to the individual administrator and to the school writ large. By demonstrating introspection and acknowledging error, the leader encourages staff to reflect on their practices, take risks, and grow. Another paradox similarly advises leaders to be thick-skinned enough to survive criticism, yet thin-skinned enough to hear it.

Administrators are part of the learning community. Contrary to the myth that you’ll master a job if you do it long enough, our experience was the opposite. Time taught us how complicated school leadership is, as well as the imperative of continuous professional growth. Lessons gleaned in graduate school are just the beginning.