Research and experience has led ISM to hypothesize that the School Head’s well-being significantly relates to school outcomes. ISM recently conducted a study of School Heads to extend our knowledge of executive leadership and investigate the relationship among our Tier 1 markers of the ISM Stability Markers®, School Heads’ characteristics and experience, and their well-being. In upcoming I&P issues, we will publish the more nuanced results of this study. The purpose of this article is to re-introduce our approach to the measurement of executive leadership and describe the general results and conclusions. Great leaders can transform a school and take it to new heights, whereas poor leaders can cause great challenges for schools. We have long asserted that, as the executive leader, your “style” does not seem to account for the differences in organizational performance. Nonetheless, you are a critical component of a school’s ability to deliver its mission with excellence. If it is not style, then what are the critical aspects of executive leaders that separate the best leaders from the rest?

ISM periodically re-analyzes, reconfigures, and updates its list of Stability Markers. The ISM Stability Markers® are in continual and widespread use in the private-independent school world as reliable guideposts in strategic planning and strategic financial planning. As Board President or School Head, you may find it helpful to consider the Stability Markers’ opposite extremes—private-independent school practices that, from ISM’s perspective, are likely to contribute to “strategic instability.” This article may be especially useful in teaching situations, such as in your annual new-Trustee orientation or in presentations to constituents outside the Board and senior administration.

ISM has written much over the years about Head evaluation. We now update and further explain the basis for the employer/employee relationship between the Board of Trustees and the School Head. An understanding of the critical distinction between the strategic plane and the operations plane resides at the heart of private-independent school governance. The Board lives on the strategic plane with its actions and focus encapsulated in the strategic plan/strategic financial plan. This vision of the school’s future, with its companion fiscally conservative assumptions, provides the guide rails to Board action through the annual Board agenda and to operations action through the annual administrative agenda. Thus, the strategic plane not only determines the school’s visionary future but, by direct implication, also determines the most important actions to take on the operations plane by the School Head and administration. The direction is inviolate—the Board decides the school’s direction and only the Board can change that direction. The School Head controls how to make that direction operational and has almost complete discretion over that, limited only by the strategic financial plan’s fiscal assumptions.

The ISM Stability Markers® comprise outcomes of ISM Consultants’ internal studies that periodically address the question: What variables are associated most strongly, according to ISM data, with a private-independent school’s ability to sustain excellence? This article—a snapshot of the larger array—provides readers with a self-scored estimate of the more comprehensive, 18-item set of ISM Stability Markers. This is designed to be used by the School Head, Business Manager, or other senior administrators in developing a preliminary, yet thoroughly data-driven, portrait of your school’s organizational and financial positioning for the long run.