Chaz Austin 
In this 2022 article, Chaz Austin, Ed.D., draws on more than 20 years in education and a doctorate in organizational leadership to set out ten rules from an approach Austin calls Humanistic Leadership, a people-first way of managing teams. A section added below sets Austin’s rules beside research on principal leadership and why teachers stay or leave.
Leadership tips for administrators: managing education staff in 2026
Chaz Austin writes above that leadership and management are less about theory than about how to deal with and empower an organization’s people. Leadership tips for administrators tend to be popular for that reason, and school leaders also have a growing body of research to check them against. This section looks at where Austin’s ten rules line up with published findings on principals, teacher retention and teacher workload, and where a leader may want to add some care.
What the research says principals do
The Wallace Foundation’s 2021 synthesis of 219 studies, How Principals Affect Students and Schools by Jason Grissom, Anna Egalite and Constance Lindsay, names four behaviors shared by effective principals: focusing their work with teachers on instruction, building a productive school climate, forging collaboration and professional learning among teachers and others, and managing personnel and resources well. Austin’s rules about hiring, training, involving the team and trusting people to do their jobs sit within the last three. The authors add a caution that the statistical methods behind the achievement findings have since been challenged, so the size of a principal’s effect on test scores is still debated.
Support, hiring and training
Austin’s first three rules ask leaders to hire well, involve the team in hiring and train people. The Learning Policy Institute’s 2017 brief Teacher Turnover: Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It, by Desiree Carver-Thomas and Linda Darling-Hammond, gives a reason to treat these as priorities. It reports that about 8 percent of U.S. teachers leave the profession each year and another 8 percent move schools, that turnover costs can reach $20,000 or more per teacher who leaves an urban district, and that teachers who strongly disagreed that their administration was supportive were more than twice as likely to leave as those who strongly agreed. These results show an association and not proof that a particular leadership style causes teachers to stay. They are still a practical reason for an administrator to ask staff, through a survey or conversation, whether they feel supported.
edCircuit’s 3 Strategies for Hiring New Teachers covers the hiring side of this in more detail.
Workload and wellbeing
Austin’s eighth rule asks leaders to watch their team’s body language and to encourage balance, and the ninth asks them to leave people alone to do their jobs. A 2024 RAND survey reported by K-12 Dive shows why both matter. Teachers reported frequent job-related stress or burnout at about twice the rate of other working adults, worked about nine more hours per week (a total of 53 hours), and named student behavior, low salaries and administrative tasks such as paperwork and evaluations as top stressors. Of these, administrative tasks are the one an administrator can most directly reduce, and Austin’s tenth rule, to let the team own the process while the leader focuses on results, is one way to do it. Austin’s wording about asking how little work the team can do is best read as a question about using time efficiently, as Austin says in the same sentence.
Where to add care
- Listening has limits. Austin’s seventh rule describes the leader as a combination of amateur therapist and priest. Listening is valuable, and leaders should also know when to point a staff member toward qualified help, such as an employee assistance program or a counselor.
- Autonomy and expectations go together. The Wallace behaviors include managing personnel and resources, so leaving people alone works best when expectations and goals are clear and agreed.
- Recognition should be fair. Thanking people every day, as Austin does, is easy to apply to everyone. Tangible rewards need clear and consistent criteria so that staff do not feel overlooked.
- Involve the team in a real way. Austin’s point about hiring, that a new colleague should be accepted by the people who will work with them, can be applied to other decisions, such as schedules and procedures.
Putting the rules to use
An administrator might choose two of Austin’s ten rules for the next term, decide how to tell whether they are working, and ask staff. Austin’s closing image of a gardener creating a safe environment, then protecting and nurturing it, is developed further in edCircuit’s Gardening Leadership: The Fourteen Principles.
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