What is Leader Challenges

This chapter investigates how Heifetz's (1994) model, applied to the work of school leaders, has led to key insights. The framework helps practitioners and education leadership faculty who teach aspiring and practicing school leaders better understand the nature of adaptive and technical challenges that leaders encounter day-to-day and their approach to making sense of them, managing them, and helping other adults to do the same. The authors employ the adaptive-technical analytic framework to examine a case that is representative of real world problems that leaders have been wrestling with, based on their prior research. Through Heifetz's lens, the authors deconstruct the case to illustrate how framing the problem as adaptive and/or technical directly informs the leader's work. Embedded reflective questions create opportunities for readers to pause and apply this model to Principal Georgina's case. The authors encourage leaders to apply a framework and questions like this in their unique milieus.