Chapter 3: Sustainable Leadership: A Framework for School Leaders

This chapter reframes school leadership in response to neoliberal perspectives, highlighting its pivotal role in academic success. Through an autoethnographic lens, the author draws on personal experiences and those of other leaders to explore the multifaceted roles and challenges school leaders face, including navigating neoliberal structures and building sustainable relationships. A key contribution is introducing the Objective Knowledge Growth Framework (OKGF), a decision-making model that leverages dialogue and interaction to improve relationships, enhance engagement and support rational decision-making. This chapter also integrates Bolman and Gallos’s five pillars of human resource leadership, emphasizing the strategic use of limited resources and acknowledgment of human complexity in leadership. Leaders are encouraged to foster creativity, satisfaction and productivity while cultivating school cultures aligned with instructional purposes, humanitarian values and educative missions despite the constraints of neoliberal agendas. Practical applications of the OKGF within this framework are illustrated through anonymized examples. This chapter underscores the importance of dialogue and collaboration in decision-making, offering school leaders tools to create environments that inspire innovation and support meaningful educational goals.