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Seven Principles of Sustainable Leadership

Hargreaves, A. & Fink, D. (2004). 'The seven principles of sustainable leadership.' Educational Leadership, 61(7), 8-13.

Hargreaves and Fink (2004) propose seven principles that define sustainable leadership.

1. Sustainable leadership lasts, going beyond temporary gains in achievement scores to create lasting, meaningful improvements in learning and planning for succession.
2. Sustainable leadership spreads, ensuring that others share and help to develop the leader's vision, distributing leadership throughout the school's professional community.
3. Sustainable leadership is socially just, benefiting all students and schools.
4. Sustainable leadership is resourceful, providing intrinsic rewards and extrinsic incentives; allowing time and opportunity for professional development; being thrifty without being cheap; and carefully husbanding resources to support all.
5. Sustainable leadership promotes diversity, enabling people to adapt and prosper in increasingly complex environments by learning from one another's diverse practices.
6. Sustainable leadership is activist, engaging assertively with its environment in a pattern of mutual influence, activating personal and professional networks and forming strategic alliances.
7. Systems must support sustainable leadership. Hargreaves and Fink conclude by saying that leaders don't usually let their schools down; the failure often rests with the systems in which they lead … (S)ustainable leadership cannot be left to individuals, however talented or dedicated they are. If we want change to matter, to spread and to last, then the systems in which leaders do their work must make sustainability a priority.