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Session 5. Wellbeing, Ethics and Your 90-Day Leadership Plan
Objective. Protect your own wellbeing with concrete habits, use a simple test on everyday ethical dilemmas, and write a one-page 90-day leadership plan with priorities, evidence and review dates.
A leader who is exhausted cannot lead well, and a plan that ignores the leader's own energy usually fails by the second month. This lesson goes beyond the key ideas. It shows how to turn your time log into a keep, hand over and stop list, how to ask for help from the system as well as from yourself, and how to write a 90-day plan that still works after the first crisis arrives, as it will.
Key ideas
Leader wellbeing is a school resource
- Katina Pollock, writing for Education Canada, notes that school principals find deep meaning in the work, yet many still experience burnout as workload grows. A leader who is exhausted decides worse, listens less and sets the tone for the whole staff.
- A 2026 report on school principals in Ireland by Dublin City University found workload to be the leading driver of burnout and that support networks, relationships with staff and a sense of making a difference help principals to cope. Conditions differ in Uzbekistan, but the pattern is a useful prompt for your own reflection.
- Pollock also stresses that personal habits are not enough: many stressors come from structures, so leaders should ask for systemic support, not only try harder.
Practical habits that protect you
- Protect two 'thinking hours' a week with the door closed. Choose one reliable peer, another head or deputy, and meet every two weeks. Set a rule for messages after the evening (for example, none after 20:00 unless urgent) and tell staff.
- Watch early signs: sleeping badly, snapping at colleagues, avoiding the staff room, forgetting promises. Treat them as information, not weakness. Talk to someone before a holiday, not after a collapse.
- Reduce load, do not only endure it: use the stop list from Session 1, delegate with the ladder from Session 3, and do not launch two new initiatives at once.
Ethics in everyday decisions
- Most leadership ethics is not dramatic. It is whom you hire or help, what you report to the district, how you treat private information, and whether a rule applies to your friends. Typical areas: fairness, confidentiality, conflict of interest, honest reporting, use of school resources.
- A four-question test: Is it fair, would I do the same for someone I dislike? Does it serve pupils first? Could I explain it openly to staff, parents and the district? What do the rules and my code of conduct say?
- When a rule is unclear, ask the district in writing and keep the answer. Do not invent a rule, and do not hide behind one you have not read.
A 90-day leadership plan
- Feirsen and Weitzman, writing in Edutopia, advise new principals to write a plan with objectives, benchmarks, deadlines and strategies, to make an entry plan, and to join a peer community. The same works for any leader starting a new role or a new term.
- Three phases: days 1 to 30 listen and learn (conversations, data, lesson visits, one small visible fix); days 31 to 60 diagnose and align (draft vision, choose priorities, form the team); days 61 to 90 act and show (one visible improvement, review with staff).
- Limit the plan to three priorities. For each: the outcome for pupils, the evidence you will look at, the owner, the first step this week and the review date. Add one line for your wellbeing and one for ethics.
90 days in three phases
From time log to stop list
Take your time log from Session 1 and sort every line into three columns: keep (only I can do it or it is central to pupils' learning), hand over (someone else can do it with the ladder from Session 3) and stop (no one would notice or it duplicates something). Duplicate reports and meetings without decisions are common candidates for the stop column.
Individual habits are not enough. Pollock notes that many stressors come from structures, so a leader should also make a short, factual request to the district: three lines with data from the log, for example the number of reports requested in a month and the hours they took. Presenting data, not complaints, is respectful and harder to ignore. Keep a peer, another head or deputy, who will listen without advising for the first ten minutes.
A 90-day plan that survives a crisis
Crises will come: an inspection, a sick colleague, a flood in the corridor. Build the plan with space. Leave a visible buffer each week and mark one priority as the one that continues even in a bad week. Choose a small, visible first success in the first 30 days, such as fixing a repeated annoyance, because early credibility makes the later, harder changes easier.
Share the draft with one critical friend and ask, 'What is missing and what is too much?' Review at day 30 with evidence, not feelings, and be ready to change a priority if the conversations show something different. Add an ethics line: whom you must not favour, what information you will keep private, which rule you will check in writing. Keep the plan to one page so that you will read it.
Examples from the classroom
The stop list
Scene. Deputy head Malika in Tashkent writes down a week's tasks and finds that she compiles the same attendance table three times for three different forms. She asks the district whether one table can be accepted for all three. The answer, in writing, is yes. She also stops reading circulars aloud in meetings. Together these save about two hours a week, which she spends visiting Grade 1 and 2 lessons.
Insight. A stop list gives back time, and asking in writing turns an assumed constraint into a fact.
A 30-minute peer talk
Scene. Two heads from neighbouring schools near Samarkand meet every second Friday for 30 minutes. One describes a problem for 10 minutes without interruption. The other asks questions for 10 minutes, not advice. In the last 10 minutes they agree one next step. Both say it is the only half-hour in the fortnight when they are not responsible for anything else.
Insight. A simple protocol and a regular slot make peer support practical, even in a heavy week.
Changing at day 30
Scene. Aziz, a new deputy head in Bukhara, planned to start with timetable reform. After 15 conversations at day 30, 11 teachers say their biggest problem is that meetings take their lesson preparation time. He changes his first priority to halving meeting time. At day 60 meetings last 45 minutes and teachers are willing to discuss the timetable.
Insight. A 30-day review with evidence from conversations allows a leader to change course without losing face.
Common pitfalls
- Writing a plan with six or seven priorities and finishing none.
- Planning every hour of every week, leaving no space for crises.
- Treating wellbeing as a luxury to be arranged after the plan is complete.
- Never telling anyone about the plan, so nobody can help or challenge it.
Write the 90-Day Plan
- Open the Kit: a SAMPLE new-role story, a blank one-page 90-day plan, four ethics cards and a wellbeing check. (5 min)
- Alone (15 min): using the template, write your own 90-day plan for your real school or cluster: three priorities, each with outcome, evidence, owner, first step and review date.
- Pairs (10 min): challenge each other with three questions: What will you stop? How will we know it worked? Whose trust do you need first? Revise.
- Part B, Ethics cards (20 min): in trios take two of the four cards. Apply the four-question test, decide what you would do and write the exact first sentence you would say. Share with the group.
- Alone (5 min): complete the wellbeing check and write three commitments (a protected hour, a peer, a boundary).
- Whole group (5 min): three volunteers read one priority and its evidence. Everyone writes their leadership task from the Kit.
Your facilitator will guide you through this activity in the session.
Questions to discuss
- Which priority did your partner's questions make you drop, shrink or sharpen?
- Which ethics card was hardest, and which of the four questions settled it?
- What is the first thing you will stop doing to make room for the plan?
Reflect
- Who would notice first if you were running on empty, and would you listen to them?
- When did you last say 'I do not know' to your staff?
- If your 90-day plan succeeds, what will a Grade 5 pupil notice?
Try it tomorrow
- Sort your time log into keep, hand over and stop, and carry out one stop this week.
- Book a regular 30-minute talk with a peer for the next two months.
- Put three review dates, day 30, 60 and 90, into your diary now.
Further reading and links
A leader who looks after their own energy, tests decisions for fairness and writes a short plan with evidence can keep leading when it gets hard.