How to Balance Management and Leadership as a Principal

Growing up in Montana, Erica Schnee spent countless hours at her parents’ shoe store, watching how they managed a business and also acted as “leaders in their community,” Schnee said.

Now the principal of Gallatin High School in Bozeman, Montana, Schnee still uses the management and leadership lessons she learned from her parents. “Positively impacting the lives of others is something that has always been on my mind,” Schnee said. “They modeled that really well for me.”

Influential thinkers have traditionally characterized management and leadership as totally separate functions and skills, carried out by people with distinct personalities and aspirations. “Managers and leaders are very different kinds of people,” former Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik wrote in a famous 1977 piece for Harvard Business Review. “They differ in motivation, personal history, and in how they think and act.”

In the ’90s and early 2000s, Harvard Business School professor John Kotter produced a number of well-read works on the same subject. He concurred with Zaleznik that “leadership and management are two distinctive… systems of action,” but he also referred to those systems as “complementary,” and gave managers their due. “Strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes actually worse, than the reverse. The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other,” he wrote in an article for the Review.

Kotter defined management as “coping with complexity,” adding that managing “brings a degree of order and consistency.” Put another way, management is action-oriented problem-solving. Leadership is “coping with change,” Kotter wrote: It’s all about direction-setting and “developing a vision of the future.”

In education, managing and leading are often part of the same job, and neither is necessarily worthy of prioritization over the other. “Both are important,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, the president of the California State Board of Education and the founding president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, where she now serves as chief knowledge officer. “You can manage in a way that enables you to better lead, and you can’t lead effectively without also dealing with management.”

The overlap between leading and managing is especially apparent for principals and other administrators, who are tasked with juggling a diverse set of responsibilities and relationships while interacting with adults and students alike. To get a clear sense of how managing and leading diverge and converge at school, I spoke with Schnee and Darling-Hammond, as well as two former principals who now serve at the district level: Dr. Neil Burti, the director of secondary education for Cherry Hill Public Schools in New Jersey, and Dr. William Jackson, the executive director of teaching and learning for the Bellevue School District in Washington.

A Management and Leadership Venn Diagram

Trying to maintain a wall between managing and leading won’t do school leaders and administrators much good. Schnee called it “a bit of an oversimplification” to think of her job responsibilities in two totally unique buckets.

That’s not to say there aren’t any differences between managing and leading. As Jackson sees it, leadership is “adaptive”; it’s relationship- and influence-building, reading the room, making adjustments through “crisis and excitement,” and doing so while “creating culture and climate,” he said. Management is slightly less abstract. It’s “creating systems, ensuring they are followed, and ensuring the people you lead are supported through the systems and structures that you created,” he said.

There are times when Jackson is managing more than leading, and vice versa. He and Schnee noted that the beginning of the school year typically involves a transition into additional managerial responsibilities. Schnee mentioned delegating the early stages of graduation prep, finalizing emergency drills, handing out parking passes, and sending out a series of important emails. But as the school year progresses, management and leadership “work hand in hand,” Jackson said. They’re both essential parts of a school or district leader’s job, and a strong, supportive school culture isn’t possible unless there are clear processes and norms for everyone to follow.

Burti believes managing and leading are “symbiotic,” and agrees that “you can’t get to effective, innovative, visionary leadership unless you first handle the managerial tasks of the job.”

Seeing the Value of Management Skills and Responsibilities

Burti acknowledged that managing sometimes gets a bad rap. Early in his career as a principal, he said, he would ask himself how he would ever advance to the “visionary side of leadership,” which seemed impossible. “There was a notion that management was bad and leadership was good, and ultimately leadership was the end goal, but we’ve come to realize that that is shortsighted,” he said.

In fact, Burti said that when he speaks to novice school leaders and administrators, he finds that they’re typically more interested in picking his brain about the managerial side of their job. They have questions about how to handle day-to-day operations: bus drop-off and pickup, security drills, lunch accessibility, etc.

Though some managerial tasks might not feel important, they’re more than deserving of serious consideration. As Burti reflects on his own career, he’s come to realize “that by getting good at those managerial tasks, I was actually demonstrating the first part of leadership.”

How principles and administrators demonstrate their management abilities is crucial—their individual choices affect students just as much as teachers. For instance, Darling-Hammond disagrees with the notion that principals can adopt any sort of discipline program, so long as it’s enforced by teachers and students pay attention to it. “That’s actually not true,” she said. “You also need knowledge about what is effective and useful for students.”

In other words, a well-structured but overly punitive discipline program “actually undermines learning,” Darling-Hammond said. It’s paramount for school leaders to maintain “an environment that is predictable and trustworthy,” where “students feel like they’re coming to a safe place,” she said—all of which stems from solid, trustworthy management more than anything else.

Leading Requires Prior Learnings

Managerial tasks like establishing a discipline program are a natural way for principals and administrators to improve their leadership skills, but visionary leadership also develops from other avenues—though some are easier to come by than others. A Learning Policy Institute study found that “a minority of principals nationally reported having had access to the authentic, job-based learning opportunities that the research has identified as being important to their development.”

Without job-based opportunities, all a leader has is “what you’ve done before you were a principal,” Darling-Hammond said. Such experience goes a long way—it’s more reliable than awaiting the arrival of an epiphany about how to lead, and it “actually gives you a lot of purchase, a lot of momentum, around instructional leadership,” Darling-Hammond said.

Schnee’s early days at her parents’ shoe store are an example: “While my parents were in a retail business and I’m in the field of education, I have still always approached leadership their way,” Schnee said. “Whether I was coaching the drill team or leading my own classroom, I was thinking about how I could make a positive impact on students, and how they could be empowered leaders and participants in their own lives. That’s something that especially resonated after I became an administrator.”

How Leading and Managing Both Help Develop Your Team

Darling-Hammong conceded that some school leaders are somewhat lacking in both personal and professional experience (or at least feel they’re lacking in both), but that’s overcomable too. The key, she said, is leaning into distributed leadership—a helpful concept for principals and administrators regardless of their backgrounds and skillsets. “It’s not only what you have learned how to do, but what your team has learned how to do,” Darling-Hammond explained. She encourages other school leaders to dig deep and figure out the strengths of their staff, “then tap those folks as part of your leadership team.”

That’s a far cry from the stereotype that leaders are supposed to be solitary, strong-willed, and decisive—that the buck stops with them, and they always know what to do. Burti thinks that stereotype is rapidly fading away in favor of a more collaborative approach. “The next generation of leaders understand the power of partnerships,” he said. “They understand the power of relationships. The days of sort of authoritarian, militant leadership styles are really becoming extinct.”

All of the leaders I spoke with said that developing a shared, common vision goes much further than unilateral decision-making. “Having good people in my corner to help me—as well as time to reflect and allow for feedback loops where my team could be open—was important,” Jackson said of his years as a principal. “I have only been successful on teams. When I worked and led change by myself, I went fast but sometimes ran into walls.”

Jackson suggested that principals and administrators focus less on trying to strengthen their perceived skill deficits, and instead put staffers in positions that highlight their own skillsets. “You’re building a team that has the skills in your gap areas,” Jackson said. “You’re almost going through a mentorship alongside them. And you’re taking pieces of them to grow as a leader as well, because there’s not enough time to become a master leader if you’re always focused on your gap areas.”

Schnee seconded Jackson. She described an endless list of tasks for principals to keep tabs on, and said “it’s not possible to do it all yourself, if you want to do any of it well.” She likes to pose questions to her administrative team, both to keep them involved and also because she’s genuinely seeking their input. She’ll tell her staff she doesn’t know what to do about a situation, and then solicit feedback. “I think just not being afraid to ask for help and model that learning process is really important,” she said.

That, to her, is an example of leadership in action. Burti views leadership similarly, and went a step further: The best leadership—and the best management, for that matter—stems from collaboration above all else. “I believe in order for an organization to be successful, it’s not that everybody can contribute, it’s that everybody must contribute,” Burti said.