School Leadership 2.0
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Research Says / A Principal's Success Requires People Skills
April 2013 | Volume 70 | Number 7
The Principalship Pages 79-80
Research Says / A Principal's Success Requires People Skills
What makes for a good boss? In 2009, executives at Google turned the company's knack for data mining and pattern finding inward, sifting through thousands of performance reviews, surveys, and other data looking for keywords and insights to answer that question. For Google, finding the answer was crucial: Analyses had shown that the single biggest reason its employees quit the company was having a bad manager.
After more than a year of data analysis, interviews, and reanalysis, Google identified eight traits of good bosses that it incorporated into its training programs. The result was immediate and significant improvement in the quality of supervision (Bryant, 2011).
For much of the company's history, Google had assumed that programmers needed a supervisor with great technical skills to serve as a sounding board when they got stuck. So it was surprising when technical skills turned up at the bottom of Google's list of what makes a good supervisor. What topped the list were soft skills—being a good coach, meeting regularly with employees, expressing personal interest, and asking thoughtful questions to help them puzzle through problems (Bryant, 2011).
This insight, as it turns out, mirrors what education research suggests about the make-or-break traits for successful school principals. The lack of these qualities appears to contribute to the current high turnover rate among school leaders.
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