In the same way, education leaders are quick to give their team credit; they are also ready to take responsibility for adverse outcomes. Great education leaders know that when they accept responsibility for their actions, they can positively affect the morale of the team.

Leaders who don’t hold themselves accountable are useless

Here is a sad truth; whatever negative outcomes occur in your school or school district, you have to take the blame. It doesn’t matter if you inherited an incompetent leadership team and a group of ineffective teachers, you have to take responsibility for their mistakes. Why? Because, by derivation of taking the job, you promise to take ownership of what happens, the good and the bad.

You are responsible for helping your employees to become effective and experience professional growth. You have to put them in the position to learn new skills and sharpen those that they struggle with. Remember, all of these things were covered in your educational leadership program. Somewhere along the way, your professors provided in-depth information and assignments that should help you grow your instructional leadership and school improvement skills.

You find me a leader that has trouble with taking responsibility for mistakes that they or their team make, and I will show you a selfish manager who can’t quite wrap their brains around the concept of serving others. Even it does not come naturally, you can develop the skill of extreme ownership. All you have to do is take full responsibility for mistakes and little credit for successes. Even if it is forced, after a little practice, it will be genuine.

Concluding thoughts

The inability to take ownership of failures and missteps is the number one thing that prevents people from developing true leadership character. They end up experiencing one failure after another, always finding a scapegoat to take the fall for them. Their organizations end up staying stagnant as the real issues are never addressed. Finally, all out of scapegoats, they must fall on their swords, and unfortunately, many of them just end up being recycled by another organization, and the cycle of mediocrity and failure just repeats itself.