The capacity of any public school in our jurisdiction to support and achieve improved student learning outcomes is not in doubt. Schools are blessed institutions endowed with gifted teachers capable of solving problems. But the question is, if indeed, there is no public school suffering from a drought of talent and expertise. Why do many schools continue to struggle to fulfill their purpose?

Their biggest undoing, it seems, stems from inability to build synergic relationships and harness the energies and wisdom of the individual constituents to serve a greater common good. Schools systems function effectively when all hands are on deck, united by a common desire to accomplish the critical mission. Silos must be avoided at all costs.

If entrenched silos can overshadow and undermine the big picture, facilitating synergy among the disparate elements within a school can be a daunting task. Yet this is a task that every person privileged and entrusted with the responsibility of presiding over a school should perform with distinction. Leadership is paramount in the health of a school. There is therefore every justification for this column to relentlessly offer useful tips to fresher and would be school principals. The guidelines are intended to equip school leaders with knowledge and skills while sensitising them on the pitfalls, which can potentially derail and throw off balance the uninitiated. It is the wish of every new school principal to start with a bang and avoid a false start as much as possible. They say first impressions last longer.

A false start can affect one’s confidence and ruin opportunities to harness the best from everyone. Under normal circumstances, a new principal would find on his desk a hand over note from his/her predecessor highlighting successes and challenges. The purpose of the hand over note is to shed light on dysfunctional practices (if any) that should be discouraged and discontinued and good and effective practices worth reinforcing. However, the hand over notes should never be treated entirely as the gospel truth. The safest thing to do is for new leaders to use sparingly and with extreme caution everything one is told. Treated as gospel truth, the hand over notes can be the reason for a false start.

At times a new leader can inadvertently have the unfortunate experience of perpetuating and reinforcing prejudices of the past and repeating mistakes that should be rectified. The right start is choosing to give everyone a clean slate - an opportunity for redemption for those who might have suffered prejudice and some reputational damage in the past. People make mistakes and look forward to opportunities to find and redefine themselves. The coming of a new principal presents a golden chance for a fresh beginning. And where possible a new principal should begin with an attitude of forgiving and forgetting.

Everyone deserves a fresh start. In his maiden interaction with a new boss, a colleague once had an experience of learning from the new boss that he was a difficult employee. The new boss had fallen hook, line and sinker for everything he had heard about the employee and this was very unfair. In addition to official notes, new school principals are usually confronted with unofficial, unsolicited reports on the health of the school from within and outside their schools. Some reports could be specific in nature dealing with the professional demeanours of specific members of staff.

This could be equally useful but once again should be treated with caution. New leaders should not deprive themselves of opportunities of getting to know their charges through interactions at both personal and professional levels. Getting to know their juniors better creates a spirit of mutual trust. Here I would like to draw from my own personal experience.

I recall an incident in which my former boss during our travelling experience to South Korea in 2016 expressed how different it is from what he had heard and gathered about me. It turned out that my boss had been fed with wrong information about me. But our interactions while journeying together enabled him to watch and know me more and better at personal and professional levels. Impressions formed based on insufficient and misleading data were altered. The right start for a new leader is to turn on a positive mode. Ushering a new dawn begins with a leader’s genuine demonstration of trust and faith in members of the team.

Believing everyone means well and has good intentions to offer everyone and the organisation a breath of fresh air and hope. Trust motivates commitment and challenges every team member to unleash their very best and to offer and sacrifice their time and expertise. New principals should avoid at all costs the temptation of choosing to go it alone and creating an impression of a super leader who has answers to all problems. No one has monopoly of wisdom and a knowit-all kind of attitude does not motivate others to debate and share notes and experiences. A school principal should always display eagerness to share his/her own wisdom while showing readiness to learn from colleagues. Leaders are mortals too, capable of making mistakes. Unlike the Pope, no leader enjoys Papal infallibility. It is therefore important for principals to encourage honest feedback from colleagues and to own up when mistakes have been made.

A principal should learn to accept criticism from any member of staff and encourage his charges to speak up whenever they think they can make a difference. The voice of dissent should be encouraged and not smothered.

Principals should have confidence and not treat seemingly rebellious attitudes as a challenge to one’s authority. The most fundamental task a school principal should never forget is that learning is the core enterprise and that the primary responsibility of a principal is to direct the energies of the collective to serve the core business. Teaching and learning should dominate the order of business. Whenever issues of instruction are discussed, relevant data should be made available to give the discussion perspective and focus. Discussions, which are not accompanied by data on learner performance, run the risk of skirting the real issues affecting performance. Every new principal must embrace data driven discussions to avoid generalisations.