Written by Andrew Murray

Schools increasingly talk about wellbeing and flourishing. We want classrooms in which young people can grow, workplaces in which staff feel valued, and communities characterised by belonging, purpose and hope. Yet there is a tension we do not always acknowledge: some of the people carrying the greatest responsibility for creating these communities are doing so while increasingly depleting themselves.

School leaders are expected to improve learning, shape culture, support staff, respond to families, manage complexity and navigate continual change. Much of the discussion about educational leadership therefore focuses on capability: what effective leaders know and do. There is another question worth asking, however: what is happening to the person doing the leading? The wellbeing of a leader is inseparable from their capacity to lead. It influences attention, judgement, relationships and the way difficulty is interpreted and responded to.

Experienced leaders can become exceptionally good at carrying pressure. They solve the next problem, take on another demand, compensate for staffing gaps and take responsibility when systems fail. The school continues to function, and that apparent success can conceal an important reality: functioning is not flourishing.

A leader can remain highly competent while becoming increasingly exhausted. Results may continue while patience, reflection and life beyond the role are gradually squeezed. Competence can even disguise the problem. When capable people repeatedly compensate for weak structures or excessive demands, those weaknesses become less visible. The organisation keeps moving because someone has become very good at carrying pressures that the system itself has not resolved. The work gets done, but someone is paying for it.

We should therefore be wary of any model of leadership that depends upon the person doing the leading becoming progressively less well. Organisational success cannot be judged only by whether the work continues to be completed. We also need to pay attention to what sustaining that success requires of the people responsible for it.

Leader wellbeing has intrinsic value, but it also shapes how leadership is experienced by others. A major review by Inceoglu and colleagues in The Leadership Quarterly found that leadership behaviour can influence employee wellbeing through relational, motivational and emotional processes. This reinforces an important point: the condition of the leader is not entirely private when leadership itself is relational work.

We see this in everyday school life. A difficult conversation, a parent concern or an unexpected staffing problem is not responded to by a leadership framework. It is responded to by a person whose internal resources influence their ability to listen, regulate frustration and respond thoughtfully. This does not mean leaders should always be calm, cheerful or energised; that would create another impossible expectation. Flourishing is better understood as having sufficient resources to live and lead well through the realities of a complex human life. Under pressure, the quality of a leader’s presence becomes part of the culture others experience.

Schools are human communities before they are organisational charts. Behind strategic plans, timetables and achievement targets are people who need to know that they matter. Leading through humanity means creating environments where dignity, trust, voice and belonging are experienced in ordinary working life. We see it in whether people feel heard, whether mistakes can become opportunities for learning and whether difficult conversations allow people to retain their dignity.

Leaders must also include themselves within that understanding of humanity. Many readily recognise exhaustion or unreasonable expectations in someone else while normalising those same conditions in themselves. Flourishing leadership therefore seeks to protect and enlarge human capacity, including the leader’s own, rather than continually drawing it down.

Hope is part of this way of leading. It is not an assumption that everything will turn out well, but a willingness to see reality clearly while recognising that meaningful action remains possible. A leader facing a staffing shortage, for example, may not be able to remove the pressure immediately. They can name the reality honestly, involve others in deciding what can be changed, and help the community distinguish between what must be carried now and what can wait. In this sense, hope is the capacity to locate agency within difficulty.

Purpose is one of education’s great strengths. The work offers an opportunity to contribute to young lives and to something larger than oneself. Research with teachers has shown that meaningful work can help buffer some of the effects of demanding working conditions. Yet purpose also contains a paradox: the work that gives leaders meaning can make it harder for them to protect themselves from the work.

When people care deeply, another hour can always be justified, another problem can be taken home and another person can be helped. Saying no can feel selfish, rest can feel undeserved, and boundaries can appear inconsistent with commitment. Purpose therefore needs to be held wisely. It should remind us why the work matters without becoming a measure of how much of ourselves we are prepared to sacrifice for it. Exhaustion is not evidence of commitment.

When leaders struggle, our instinct is often to start with the individual: become more resilient, manage time better or establish stronger boundaries. These responses can help, but they are incomplete if the environment in which leadership occurs remains unexamined. NZCER research has connected principal wellbeing with workload and role balance, while broader principal research also identifies autonomy, organisational support and relational trust as important resources.

This requires us to keep personal and organisational responsibility connected. Leaders have some responsibility for how they sustain themselves, while schools and systems have responsibility for the conditions within which leadership is exercised. Workload, role clarity, professional trust, autonomy and support all shape the experience of the role. So does the accumulation of responsibilities that seem reasonable individually but become unsustainable when combined.

This changes the question we need to ask about resilience. Rather than concentrating only on How resilient is this leader?, we should also ask: What are we asking this person to be resilient within? That question moves flourishing beyond individual responsibility and towards the design of leadership itself.

No leader can make another person flourish, but leadership can shape the conditions in which people work. Leaders can create cultures where people experience dignity, agency, belonging and meaningful contribution. They can build workplaces where high standards do not depend upon normalising exhaustion, while modelling that meaningful work can be taken seriously without allowing it to consume the whole person.

For leaders themselves, one useful practice may be surprisingly simple. Choose one recurring demand you have become accustomed to carrying and examine it. Is it necessary? Could it be shared? Could the process creating it be changed? Or have you simply become very good at absorbing its cost? These questions will not solve the structural pressures facing educational leadership, but they can make visible something that competence often hides.

Flourishing leadership does not mean retreating from demanding work or lowering expectations. It means creating schools in which important work can be undertaken without the success of the organisation depending upon the gradual depletion of the people who serve within it. If we are serious about creating schools where people can flourish, that concern must extend to the person doing the leading.

About the Author

Andrew Murray is an educational consultant, author and former secondary school principal from Aotearoa New Zealand. A PhD candidate at Australian Catholic University and a 2026 Boston College International Research Fellow, his work focuses on leadership, wellbeing and human flourishing - particularly how schools can create conditions in which people thrive.

THE HUMAN FLOURISHING SERIES EXPLORING EDUCATION, LEADERSHIP, AND HUMAN POTENTIAL. - PART 2 OF 4