We have built an extraordinarily demanding job around the school principal and then normalized the idea that the person doing it should figure most of it out alone. Principals are expected to be instructional leaders, culture builders, talent managers, crisis managers, family partners, community representatives, operational decision-makers, evaluators, strategic planners, disciplinarians, coaches, and the person ultimately responsible when any part of the school fails. Then we give many principals a supervisor who is responsible for dozens of schools and wonder why meaningful leadership development occurs inconsistently.
That operating model makes little sense because if the principal is one of the most consequential people in the school, developing the principal should be treated as core school improvement infrastructure. Executive coaching should therefore appear in the operating budget of schools, charter networks, and districts for the same reason instructional coaching appears in serious academic strategies: people responsible for complex performance improve when they have structured opportunities to examine their practice, receive feedback, challenge assumptions, and translate learning into action. The investment should be treated as part of the leadership system rather than as a professional perk reserved for moments when money happens to be available.
Research supports taking principal development seriously even while cautioning against exaggerated claims about coaching itself. The Wallace Foundation's synthesis of two decades of research reviewed 219 studies and found that effective principals influence instruction, school climate, collaboration, professional learning, and the strategic management of people and resources. The magnitude and breadth of those responsibilities alone should make the development of principals a central organizational investment rather than an optional professional benefit.
The principalship also creates a developmental problem that is different from many other positions because teachers usually work around other teachers, coaches frequently work with other coaches, and central-office staff operate alongside functional peers. The principal may spend most of the working day as the highest-ranking person in the building, which can reduce the amount of candid feedback the leader receives precisely when the complexity of decisions increases. A good executive coach creates a space in which the leader's decisions, habits, assumptions, communication, delegation, and use of time can be examined without pretending that the coach is simply another evaluator.
Coaching and Supervision Are Not the Same Thing
Principals need supervision because organizations need accountability. Somebody should evaluate whether a principal is producing strong results, following policy, developing staff, stewarding resources responsibly, protecting students, and meeting the obligations of the role. But evaluation and development are not interchangeable, and a principal who experiences every developmental conversation as an extension of evaluation will rationally become more guarded about uncertainty and mistakes.
A supervisor ultimately represents the organization, while an executive coach should primarily facilitate the leader's development against clearly established professional and organizational goals. There may be appropriate communication between coaching and organizational priorities, but principals need room to examine mistakes, uncertainty, interpersonal challenges, and leadership habits without every reflection becoming an evaluative record. Without that distinction, coaching can quickly become another performance meeting carrying a friendlier label.
The Wallace Foundation's Principal Supervisor Initiative is instructive here because participating districts deliberately redesigned the principal supervisor role to move it away from primarily administration and compliance and toward greater support for principals and instructional leadership. Wallace's reporting found that districts were able to shift the role and that principals gave higher ratings to supervisors after the work focused more substantially on supporting principal practice. That finding does not mean every supervisor should become an executive coach, but it does suggest that principals benefit when the people around them are organized to develop leadership rather than merely inspect it.
Coaching Should Improve Decisions, Not Merely Make Leaders Feel Supported
The strongest executive coaching is not therapy, friendship, cheerleading, or a weekly opportunity for a principal to vent. Support matters, particularly in an isolating role, but a coaching engagement should ultimately make the principal more effective in the real work of leading a school. The work should improve the quality of decisions, clarity of priorities, management of adults, instructional leadership, delegation, communication, problem diagnosis, meeting architecture, and the leader's ability to convert strategy into execution.
That requires a coach who is willing to ask difficult questions rather than automatically validating the principal's first explanation of a problem. A principal may insist that the leadership team lacks initiative when the deeper issue is that the principal has trained everyone to wait for approval, while another may say teachers are resistant to accountability when the school's expectations have changed five times in eight weeks. A useful coach helps the leader examine evidence, separate facts from interpretations, identify recurring patterns, and determine what the leader may be doing that contributes to the problem.
Coaching becomes especially valuable when it is connected to real work rather than abstract leadership theory. A principal should be able to bring an upcoming leadership-team meeting, a difficult personnel conversation, a culture problem, a data set, an instructional challenge, a delegation failure, or a strategic decision into the coaching relationship. The coach should help the leader think, prepare, act, and then examine what happened so that the conversation produces a cycle of learning rather than a one-time insight.
The Research Argument Should Be Precise
There is a temptation in professional services to claim that coaching automatically increases student achievement, but the evidence does not justify such a broad statement and school leaders should be skeptical of anyone who promises it. Leadership coaching is a mechanism for improving leader practice, and whether that improvement eventually influences student outcomes depends on the quality of the coaching, the leader, the organizational environment, the intervention, and the chain of actions connecting leadership behavior to classrooms. Responsible advocacy for coaching should therefore distinguish promising evidence from universal claims.
A useful randomized study illustrates both the promise and the limits. Researchers studied a principal executive development program and aligned coaching across hundreds of schools, and the What Works Clearinghouse concluded that a comparison of aligned coaching against the leadership development program alone produced a statistically significant positive English language arts result at one point, while mathematics effects were not statistically significant. Other comparisons involving the broader program and coaching did not produce statistically significant positive achievement effects, which is exactly why the responsible conclusion is that coaching can be promising without treating every coaching model as proven.
The same study provides useful information about what serious coaching can look like because participating principals were offered substantial one-on-one coaching at their schools, aligned to their leadership-development work and action plans, rather than occasional motivational conversations disconnected from the job. That alignment matters because coaching becomes more powerful when the leader is working on an actual organizational challenge, testing actions, and returning with evidence about what happened. Districts should therefore ask not simply whether a principal has a coach, but what the coaching is designed to change and how the organization will know whether leader practice is improving.
Principals Need Coaching Most When the Stakes Are Highest
The case becomes particularly strong in turnaround schools because a principal entering an academically weak, operationally unstable, or culturally unhealthy school is simultaneously diagnosing the organization and trying to change it. The decisions made during the first months can affect talent, trust, instructional expectations, family relationships, student culture, schedules, leadership structures, and whether adults believe this improvement effort is genuinely different from the last one. Those principals should not have to learn every lesson through avoidable mistakes.
A strong coach can help a leader distinguish urgent from merely loud, decide which problems should be solved personally and which should be delegated, identify when an adult needs coaching versus accountability, and prevent the principal from accumulating responsibilities that belong to other leaders. The coach becomes a force multiplier not by doing the principal's work, but by increasing the quality with which the principal thinks about the work. That distinction matters because the aim is not to create a second decision-maker above the principal but to strengthen the principal's own judgment.
This matters particularly during the first 90 days because a principal who is constantly absorbing work can unintentionally create a school in which adults become less accountable. Everyone eventually learns that the principal will rescue the situation, and the principal becomes indispensable in the least sustainable way possible. A coach should notice that pattern early and help the leader build an organization in which ownership moves toward the appropriate people rather than toward the principal.
Good coaching therefore creates independence rather than dependence. If a coach becomes indispensable because the principal needs the coach to make every important decision, the relationship has simply moved the bottleneck. Coaching succeeds when the principal becomes increasingly capable of diagnosing, deciding, communicating, delegating, reflecting, and adjusting without requiring someone else to supply the answer.
Coaching Should Be Budgeted Before the Crisis
Many organizations purchase coaching after a leadership problem has become severe. A principal is struggling, staff morale is deteriorating, achievement is weak, complaints have escalated, or the district is considering a leadership change, and coaching suddenly becomes an intervention. That is the equivalent of waiting until a teacher has failed before deciding professional development might be useful.
High-performing organizations should think differently because coaching belongs inside the leadership-development architecture before crisis. New principals may need more intensive coaching as they transition into the role, turnaround principals may need support around rapid diagnosis and execution, and experienced principals may benefit from coaching around organizational scale, strategic decisions, talent, succession, and sustaining performance. The amount and type of coaching can change over time without making the underlying investment disappear.
The investment should also be protected from the perception that coaching means weakness. If only struggling principals receive coaches, ambitious leaders will reasonably infer that coaching is remedial, while a system in which high-performing leaders also receive serious coaching sends the opposite message. Development becomes part of what excellence looks like rather than evidence that someone is failing.
Measure Whether Coaching Changes Leadership
A district should not evaluate coaching merely by asking principals whether they enjoyed it. Satisfaction can matter because trust affects whether leaders engage honestly, but the stronger question is whether anything changed in the principal's practice. Leaders should be able to point to improvements in delegation, leadership-team meetings, classroom presence, feedback quality, talent management, priority clarity, execution, or the resolution of persistent organizational problems.
Those changes should connect eventually to the school's improvement strategy. If the school's 90-day priority is strengthening Tier 1 instruction, coaching should help the principal lead the adults responsible for Tier 1 instruction more effectively, and if chronic absenteeism is the central challenge, the coach should help the leader build and manage a stronger attendance system. Generic leadership conversation has value, but strategic coaching should remain close enough to the school's actual work to influence decisions and behavior.
That does not mean reducing coaching to a spreadsheet because leadership development contains qualitative dimensions that matter deeply, including confidence, judgment, self-awareness, resilience, political acumen, and the ability to handle difficult conversations. The existence of qualities that are difficult to measure does not excuse organizations from looking for evidence that coaching is making leadership better. A mature system uses both qualitative judgment and observable changes in practice.
Put the Money Where the Responsibility Is
Schools routinely ask principals to carry enormous accountability. They are responsible for student learning, adult performance, culture, families, operations, compliance, safety, and the countless decisions through which those responsibilities become real. If the organization believes those responsibilities matter, it should invest proportionately in the person carrying them.
Executive coaching should therefore stop being treated as a luxury purchased when money happens to be available. It should become a deliberate line item inside serious leadership-development systems, with clear goals, qualified coaches, protected time, appropriate confidentiality, and accountability for whether the work is improving leadership. Not every principal needs the same intensity forever, and not every coaching relationship will be effective, but the answer to uneven coaching quality is stronger coaching design rather than abandoning leadership development.
The best coach will not run the school for the principal. The best coach will help the principal become clearer, more disciplined, more self-aware, more strategic, and increasingly capable of building an organization that does not depend on heroics. When the principal is one of the most consequential adults in the school, developing that adult belongs inside the school improvement strategy itself.
About the Author
Candido Brown is the founder and CEO of BetterEd Solutions, a school improvement, transformation, and growth firm helping our nation's underserved schools become happier, healthier, higher-performing places where every child can thrive. His work includes executive coaching, school turnaround, leadership-team development, and the design of management systems that help principals convert priorities into consistent adult execution. BetterEd's coaching approach emphasizes reflection, evidence, disciplined decision-making, delegation, and measurable improvements in leader practice.
Sources and Reporting Notes
This article draws on the Wallace Foundation's research on principal effectiveness and its Principal Supervisor Initiative, as well as the What Works Clearinghouse review of research on principal executive development and aligned coaching. The evidence does not support a claim that every coaching model automatically improves student achievement, and the article deliberately distinguishes leadership development from direct causal claims about student outcomes. The narrower argument is that principals occupy unusually consequential and complex roles, and organizations should build structured leadership development around that responsibility rather than waiting for crisis.
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