Why Great Leadership Starts Below the Surface
- Chad Ransom
- 2 minutes ago
- 3 min read
“Knowledge of effective leadership practices is not the same thing as knowledge of the capacities required for enactment.” — Viviane Robinson
We don’t need another list of what great school leaders do. Leaders are inundated with “best practices” and theoretical frameworks.
We need a better understanding of what makes it possible for them to do it.
School leadership isn’t failing from a lack of information - it’s failing from a lack of capacity.
We know what strong leaders should be doing. The problem is that we haven’t invested enough in the cognitive and emotional foundations that make those practices possible.
If we want to build leadership capacity, we need to start below the surface.
In my work coaching principals across the country, ranging from first-year leaders to veterans navigating turnaround status, I’ve seen the same pattern over and over. A leader often knows the right move on paper but still struggles to make it happen in practice.
They know they should be spending more time as an instructional leader doing walk-throughs and providing teacher feedback, but they don’t realize that their time management skills or calendaring system are getting in the way.
They want to support the implementation of a new reading curriculum, but have not spent time thinking from a systems perspective.
We know leaders are critically important to the success of any improvement effort in schools. What I’ve found is that leaders need support with this underlying skillset as much or more than with the process of enacting effective leadership practices.
That’s what this three-part series is about, and what my dissertation focused on: understanding and building the underlying competencies that drive sustainable leadership.
The Leadership Capacity Gap
Despite clear research about which principal practices improve schools, we’ve seen little real-world improvement in implementation over the last 30 years.
Why? Because we focus too much on what leaders should do, and not enough on the internal competencies that make it possible to actually do it.
What’s Beneath the Surface
In my dissertation, I studied what made some principals more effective than others, especially in complex, demanding contexts. The answer wasn’t personality or experience. It came down to three key factors:
Cognitive Personal Leadership Resources (CPLRs) (Leithwood, 2012) These are the thinking tools that great leaders use every day:
Problem-Solving: Making sense of competing priorities
Systems Thinking: Seeing beyond isolated events to understand how systems interact
Instructional Knowledge: Knowing what effective classrooms look like—and how to support them
Self-EfficacyThe belief that you can lead improvement, even in the face of setbacks or resistance. Self-efficacy shapes how leaders respond to challenges—and how persistent they are in solving them.
Perception of ContextLeaders act based not just on reality, but on their perception of the demands and affordances in their environment. What they believe is possible or valued matters just as much as what actually is.
These three forces work together to create a leader’s theory of action, their internal model that drives the leadership practices they enact.
Why It Matters
These competencies aren’t just theoretical, they’re coachable.
They give us a roadmap for leadership development that may be antecedent to the effective practices we are trying to implement. Additionally, because they facilitate effective practices in general, improving competencies has the potential to improve many leadership practices. In fact, Leithwood (2004) posits that a significant amount of the difference between effective and ineffective leadership can be attributed to these underlying competencies.
And that’s the point: we don’t build leadership by telling people what to do. We build it by helping them think differently.
What’s Coming Next
In the next post, we’ll explore why building capacity starts with knowing yourself. If you don’t understand your own tendencies, triggers, and strengths, you can’t lead others effectively, and you definitely can’t coach them. We’ll look at what it means to be self-aware as a leader or coach.
What gets in the way of building leadership capacity in your district: more knowledge, or deeper competencies? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.