by Calsue Murray

Created on: September 10, 2009

School principals are often perceived to be too strict, or not strict enough. Often these perceptions are accurate appraisals of the management styles of the school administrators being observed and reacted to. Seemingly, few school principals succeed in achieving a balance between strictness and leniency that satisfies most of those with whom they work, most of the time. Ergo, there are consistently debates about workable ways to deal with principals who are deemed to be either too strict, or too lenient.

As strange and as surprising as it may seem, school principals who function at the opposite ends of the strictness-leniency continuum are likely to be reacting to identical motivational and causative factors.

The common denominator behind the behaviors of these two apparently disparate groups of school administrators is likely to be fear of failure. It is likely to be fear of failure that engenders the management behavior styles of both overly-strict and overly-lenient school principals. In both sets of circumstances, these school principals are so strongly desirous of succeeding in their endeavors that fear of failure causes them to be either over-controlling or so overly anxious to please that they abdicate their responsibility to exert proper control over situations.

Overly strict school principals tend to fear that the students and co-workers under their jurisdiction simply cannot be trusted to behave properly without constant supervision and constant demands for strict adherence to prescribed rules and regulations. These are school administrators who are convinced they, themselves, must be the ones to provide the supervision and constant reminders of expected behavior that is needed to keep everyone behaving properly.

Among the things that these overly-strict school administrator fail to recognize or acknowledge is that, Self discipline is the only truly effective form of discipline. These school administrators do not realize that the most desirous situations are those wherein students, teachers and others function in harmonious cooperation because that is exactly how they, themselves honestly desire to function.

Overly-lenient school principals tend to fear that they are in danger of losing the respect, trust and admiration of the persons for whom they have responsibility if they, come down too hard on them. These are school administrators who are convinced that they just have to please everyone and keep 100 percent of the persons under

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