Effective education leadership requires hard work. It’s a fluid position that changes frequently and needs you to possess patience, a grand vision, and unrivaled decision-making skills. Those who’ve been in leadership roles for decades but rebuff attending education leadership conferences, workshops, etc., to evolve or develop skills to be sustainable leaders have already lost their competitive edge.

It wasn’t long ago when an education leader just needed to keep the teachers away from rebellion, the kids from damaging the building, and parents happy. Since there wasn’t excessive pressure to perform, these leaders weren’t accountable for being marginal. But today, when we’re in the fourth decade of the accountability era, high-performance levels are expected of education leaders everywhere.

To handle new pressures, transformative education leaders have a proactive approach where they incessantly reinvent themselves, continuously build on their strengths, and stay up-to-date to ensure their leadership style remains relevant.

If you aren’t sure whether your education leadership style is outdated or relevant, below are four warnings signs indicating you need to think of altering your leadership approach and style.

1. You have become complacent: Complacency adversely affects your education leadership. When you become complacent, you don’t grow anymore, and your attention to the small details declines steadily. This is followed by a decrease in your risk-taking capacity, executive presence, and creativity.
2. You have become a lousy decision-maker: If you’ve started making unusually bad decisions consistently, encouraging people to begin questioning your judgment, you definitely need a change in your leadership style. You need to learn how things work at present instead of focusing on how they worked in the past. For instance, a principal with 30 years of administrative experience could be inclined to make gut decisions about resource or curricular adjustments, but it’s appallingly outdated. Today, education administrators make data-driven decisions.
3. People no longer like you: An excellent education leader must be liked by people. If they don’t, your leadership style needs to be modified. Typically, this happens when you don’t remember how to be a great leader. For instance, great leaders are assessed based on the number of leaders they create. If you seldom allot tasks and projects, your employees might get impatient doing what they believe is grunt work. Thinking you aren’t letting them grow, they’ll stop respecting you and your leadership. To become an efficient leader, you need to be approachable and help your employees grow.
4. You have stopped evolving and reinventing yourself: Unless you evolve and reinvent yourself continuously, you won’t remain an education leader in the long run and could stay stuck in a limited career path. If you can’t reinvent yourself, you will fail to reinvent your school or district when facing governmental and financial pressures. To become a thriving leader, you need to stay on top of the issues and trends in education and education leadership, be a voracious reader and student, and attend workshops, conferences, etc.

So, question yourself again – is your leadership style obsolete, or is it relevant?