Best Practice

Sharpening the leadership saw: Habits to form for continual renewal

Senior leadership Leadership/school profiles
With primary school leaders working 58 hours a week on average, it is vital that you consider carefully how you are ‘renewing’ yourself on a regular basis if you are to avoid burn-out. Robbie Burns offers some ideas
Image: Adobe Stock

A compelling analogy from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (2013) introduces the idea of sharpening the saw as an important habit of our working lives.

Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.

What makes everything we do as leaders possible is our ability to maintain and keep developing our greatest asset to our schools: ourselves.

If we burn-out, if we are exhausted, if we are worn through and utterly spent each and every day of each and every term, we are no good for our teams, we are no good for our students, we are no good for our governors or our parents.

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