Leadership Lives in the Middle Ground Between “Best Practices Fit All” and “Context is Everything”

This letter examines a long-standing tension in school leadership: the view that effective leadership rests on a generic set of practices, versus the view that leadership is contingent on context. Accountability policies, combined with an enduring human desire for certainty, have pushed leaders to search for practices that work everywhere. The contextual leadership perspective, by contrast, holds that there is no one-size-fits-all model, and the effectiveness of leadership depends on the broader context, the specific situation, the tasks at hand, and the people being led. This letter argues that navigating this tension is not a matter of choosing one side, combining both, or applying them in sequence. Instead, successful leadership is a continuous process of inquiry and reflective practice that begins with problems in context, draws on evidence-based practices as resources, and through this process, leaders actively work to improve and transform their contexts. The letter also identifies five misconceptions that get in the way of this understanding.