If you are an educational leader, I hope you lead with PASSION!  Highly effective leaders are passionate.  They know who they are, they know what they love, they know what they stand for, and they bring this with them to work in one way or another everyday.  The passion is contagious, and highly effective leaders have a knack for helping those around them ignite their own passions and capitalize on them.  I love walking into schools where passion is evident.  There is a hard to describe energy that radiates within the walls and around the campus, and it takes a passionate leader to create this.

One of the early mistakes I made as a leader was believing that what I was passionate about would quickly be what everyone else was passionate about.  I actually thought that when I got excited about a new and better way of doing something and…