New Principals Can Make Or Break A School Depending On One Factor, Study Finds

When a New Boss Shows Up, Watch Out: How School Leadership Transitions Can Benefit or Hinder an Entire Staff

A new principal walks into an elementary school in the fall, full of energy and ideas, pulling teachers aside to coach them, rallying the staff around a bold vision for the future. It sounds like exactly what a struggling school needs. But according to a new study, that same behavior could backfire if the school was doing just fine before the new leader arrived.

Leadership transitions happen in roughly 10% to 20% of organizations every single year. Yet for all the attention paid to leadership, surprisingly little research has asked whether a brand-new boss and a long-standing leader have the same impact on the people they manage. A new study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology takes a hard look at that question, and the answer should give any organization pause before assuming a fresh face at the top is the fix it needs.

Researchers tracked outcomes across 113 U.S. elementary schools over three years, comparing schools that got a new principal in the summer of 2015 with similar schools that kept the same principal. What they found upends some basic assumptions about what it means to have a strong leader.

A Blank Slate, For Better or Worse

When a new boss arrives, employees pay close attention. Every action gets scrutinized in a way that a familiar leader’s actions simply do not. People become more sensitive to signals that things are about to get better or worse.

Employees also tend to give credit or assign blame to whoever was in charge when things went right or wrong. A long-standing leader carries that history. If the school was underperforming, teachers may have already lost faith in their principal’s ability to turn things around, meaning encouragement may fall on deaf ears. A newcomer arrives without that baggage: someone who can be seen as a fresh opportunity or an unwelcome disruptor, depending on the circumstances. That combination, heightened attention and a history-free reputation, is what gives new leaders their unusual power to change things. And it cuts both ways.

Tracking 113 Schools Through a Leadership Shake-Up

The team worked with six of the largest school districts in the United States. District officials identified 59 elementary schools expected to get a new principal in the summer of 2015. Researchers matched each with a similar school in the same district keeping its existing principal, for a final sample of 113 schools.

Teachers at all 113 schools were surveyed three times: at the end of the 2014 to 2015 school year, a few months into the next school year, and again at the end of that school year. Surveys asked about coaching behavior, engagement, and whether teachers felt their school needed to improve. School performance was measured using students’ pass rates on state-mandated math and reading tests, standardized within each district. About half of each school’s full-time classroom teachers completed each wave, averaging roughly 20 per school.

Coaching a Thriving School Into the Ground

Of the two leadership behaviors examined, only one actually moved the needle: coaching. Vision communication, the inspirational talk about where the school is headed, had no significant effect on staff engagement or school performance from either a new principal or a returning one.

Coaching, defined in the study as a leader’s one-on-one communication of feedback, suggestions, and goals to help individual teachers improve, was a different story. When teachers already believed significant change was needed, a new principal’s coaching produced meaningful gains in staff engagement, which in turn drove improvements in student test scores. The new leader’s hands-on involvement was read as a welcome signal: someone is finally paying attention.

But when teachers felt their school was running well, extensive coaching appeared to send an unwanted message: that teachers weren’t good enough, that the new boss didn’t respect what had been built. Staff engagement declined, and school performance followed. The effect showed up in objective performance data the following school year.

Established principals’ coaching showed no such dramatic effects in either direction. Familiarity, it seems, neutralizes both the upside and the downside of a leader’s actions. As the study’s authors write, “for good and for bad, successors’ coaching changes their organizations in ways that incumbents’ leadership does not.”

The Lesson That Goes Beyond Schools

The researchers argue the lessons may extend beyond schools, though they caution that the findings need to be tested in other kinds of organizations. Hospitals, nonprofits, small businesses, and corporations all experience leadership transitions regularly, and new leaders often arrive eager to make their mark regardless of whether the people they manage actually want that change.

When employees believe their organization is doing well, a new leader who charges in with heavy coaching may trigger resentment and disengagement. But for organizations genuinely in need of a turnaround, a new leader who gets personally involved in developing their people may revive things in ways an incumbent cannot, simply because that incumbent has already been tried and judged. Succession is often treated as a routine management event. This research makes a compelling case that who’s coaching, and whether anyone actually wanted to be coached, matters more than almost anyone assumed.

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