Are You a Leader, a Manager, or Both? What the PSEL Standards Require

Every leadership conference has a version of the same throwaway line: leaders do the right things; managers do things right. It plays well in a keynote. It is also quietly corrosive — because it teaches educators that management is the lesser craft, the work you tolerate until you are promoted into real leadership. The actual job description for school leaders says otherwise. The Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL), adopted in 2015 by the National Policy Board for Educational Administration (NPBEA), codify both dimensions into a single standard of practice — and the leaders who struggle most are usually the ones who leaned hard into one mode and neglected the other.

The Classic Distinction — and Where It Breaks Down

The modern framing comes from John Kotter (1990), who argued that management and leadership are distinct but complementary processes: management copes with complexity — planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, and controlling — while leadership copes with change — setting direction, aligning people, and motivating and inspiring them. Neither substitutes for the other. Organizations with strong management and weak leadership become orderly but stagnant; organizations with strong leadership and weak management become visionary but chaotic.

In the business literature, that symmetry collapsed into a hierarchy — leaders above managers — and the distinction drifted into education. The problem is that a school does not tolerate the collapse. A principal who cannot manage produces a campus where the master schedule is broken, the substitutes never arrive, and the fire drill fails — and no amount of vision survives that. A principal who cannot lead produces a campus that runs on time while achievement flatlines. Leithwood (1994) found precisely this in his study of school restructuring: successful restructuring leaders attended simultaneously to setting direction and redesigning the organizational structures — scheduling, staffing, and program arrangements — that made the new direction possible.

What the PSEL Standards Actually Say

In 2015, the NPBEA released the PSEL standards, expanding the previous six standards (the 2008 Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium, or ISLLC, standards) into ten (National Policy Board for Educational Administration, 2015). The ten standards define what effective school leaders should know and be able to do:

1. Mission, Vision, and Core Values

2. Ethics and Professional Norms

3. Equity and Cultural Responsiveness

4. Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

5. Community of Care and Support for Students

6. Professional Capacity of School Personnel

7. Professional Community for Teachers and Staff

8. Meaningful Engagement of Families and Community

9. Operations and Management

10. School Improvement

Read as a job description, the set is deliberately balanced. Standards 1 through 3 and Standard 10 are unmistakably leadership work: mission, ethics, equity, and improvement are direction-setting, change-driving responsibilities. Standard 9 — Operations and Management — is unmistakably management work: budgeting, scheduling, facilities, safety, and the operational systems that protect instructional time. And the remaining standards fuse both modes: Standard 4 demands a vision for instruction (leadership) plus coherent assessment systems (management); Standard 6 demands sound hiring and evaluation (management) plus growing the professional capacity of the adults (leadership); Standard 8 demands communication systems for families (management) plus genuine partnership and trust (leadership).

The standards make no provision for a leader who does only half the list. Murphy and colleagues have documented that the research base behind the PSEL standards deliberately weaves the two traditions together rather than ranking them (Murphy, Yitzchak, & Shobaki, 2017).

The Research Trail: From Effective Schools to the Principal Effect

This is not a new insight — it is the field's oldest one. The historian Larry Cuban (2018) traced the lineage: in the late 1970s, researcher Ron Edmonds and a small band of colleagues launched the Effective Schools movement to prove that urban schools enrolling low-income students could achieve at levels family background did not predict. The correlates distilled from those schools by Edmonds and Larry Lezotte read, fifty years later, like an early draft of both modes at once: instructional leadership and a clear, focused mission — leadership — alongside a safe and orderly environment, frequent monitoring of student progress, and time on task — management. The movement's brand faded, Cuban notes, but its DNA was nationalized: from A Nation at Risk (1983) through systemic reform and the No Child Left Behind Act (2002), the same recipe kept reappearing under new names. The PSEL standards are its most careful descendant.

The rigorous modern evidence lands the same way. In the Wallace Foundation's systematic synthesis of two decades of research — 219 studies — Grissom, Egalite, and Lindsay (2021) found that principals are second only to teachers among school-based influences on student achievement, with effects realized across an entire school rather than a single classroom. The behaviors that distinguish effective principals: engaging teachers around instruction, building professional community, leading instructional organization — and managing personnel and school resources effectively. Management is not the lesser work; it is one of the named pathways. And the effects are largest precisely where the stakes are highest: in high-poverty, low-performing schools, where an effective principal moves outcomes more than anywhere else.

The newest synthesis pushes the point further. In May 2026, the Learning Policy Institute released The Principal Effect (Darling-Hammond, Fitz, Giani, Gordon, & Wechsler, 2026), which concludes that principals are the single most influential school-based factor shaping student learning, teacher retention, and school climate — and that principal turnover depresses achievement and drives teacher churn, with the heaviest damage falling on the high-poverty schools that can least afford it. The report's equity finding deserves emphasis: effective principals have even larger effects in schools serving historically underserved communities, which makes leadership development — leaders who can do both modes of the job — one of the highest-leverage investments a district can make.

Which Mode Does Your Moment Demand?

The practical question is not which one you are. It is which one your current situation requires — and whether you can deliberately shift. Consider the same leader in the same week:

Presenting a new instructional vision to a skeptical faculty is leadership. Rebuilding the master schedule so the vision has common planning time to live in is management. Responding to a campus crisis is management — systems, protocols, calm execution — until the community needs someone to stand up and make meaning of what happened, which is leadership. Passing a bond is both at once: the vision and the why for the community, and the procurement, compliance, and sequencing that deliver it. In my own career, the proudest outcomes came when the two modes were fused — a graduation rate that climbed from 72 to 93 percent at Dallas ISD's largest high school required a college-going vision, and it required budgeting, staffing, and scheduling discipline that made the vision operational.

A Self-Audit for School Leaders

Use your calendar as the data source — Kotter's (1990) point was that leaders who grow treat their time allocation as a deliberate, improvable system. Ask four questions:

1. Audit two weeks of your calendar. Roughly what share of your time went to direction-setting (vision, culture, developing people) versus complexity-coping (operations, compliance, logistics)? Neither answer is wrong — but you should know your number.

2. Map your weakest PSEL standard. Which of the ten do you naturally avoid? For most strong leaders, it is Standard 9 — and unmanaged operations eventually consume the credibility the vision earned.

3. Name your last deliberate mode shift. Can you recall a moment this month when you consciously chose the other mode? If not, your default is choosing for you.

4. Check your bench. Are your assistant principals and department heads being developed in both modes — running operations while learning to lead change? Leadership talent that is only managed never compounds.

Actionable Insights

Stop treating leader-versus-manager as an identity and treat it as a repertoire. Three moves help:

Pair every vision with its operational twin. Before announcing any initiative, name the schedule, budget, and staffing changes it requires. If you cannot, the vision is not ready.

Protect management time from leadership drift — and vice versa. Block recurring time for the mode you naturally neglect; if you are a visionary, calendar the operational reviews the way you calendar the leadership work.

Grow leaders who do both. The assistant principal drafting the bell schedule today should also be leading a small improvement effort this semester, with coaching. That is how the next generation of principals — the ones who can hold all ten PSEL standards at once — is built. Given what Grissom and colleagues (2021) and Darling-Hammond and colleagues (2026) document about where principal effects concentrate, districts serving high-need communities cannot afford leaders who do only half the job.

Pro Tip Question

When your successor reviews your tenure, will they describe a leader who was built to last — or one who was too busy doing things right to do the right things?

References

Cuban, L. (2018, June 3). Whatever happened to effective schools? [Blog post]. Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice. https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/whatever-happened-to-effective-schools/

Darling-Hammond, L., Fitz, J., Giani, M. V., Gordon, M. F., & Wechsler, M. (2026). The principal effect: How investing in school leaders is key to solving education's challenges. Learning Policy Institute. https://doi.org/10.54300/644.197

Grissom, J. A., Egalite, A. J., & Lindsay, C. A. (2021). How principals affect students and schools: A systematic synthesis of two decades of research. The Wallace Foundation.

Kotter, J. P. (1990). What leaders really do. Harvard Business Review, 68(3), 103–111.

Leithwood, K. (1994). Leadership for school restructuring. Educational Administration Quarterly, 30(4), 498–518.

Murphy, J., Yitzchak, R., & Shobaki, A. (2017). Positive school leadership: How the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders can be brought to life. Journal of Educational Administration, 55(4), 454–477.

National Policy Board for Educational Administration. (2015). Professional standards for educational leaders. Reston, VA: Author.

Develop school leaders who master all ten standards — leadership and management: Explore the Mentoring Administrators program.

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