“You have to be willing to make tough decisions,” Dudley Flood today told participants during an Assembly session, “Survival Skills for the First Year Principal,” in which he urged them to remember the intangibles of leadership.

“All of us have had a fair amount of training in how to organize, manage, deal with time, and other management skills,” he said; “but frequently the intangibles of leaderships are neglected, and they can make a big difference in a leader’s success.”

A principal’s personnel traits can determine how successful that person will be in leading a school, according to the former school principal and executive at the North Carolina Department of Education. He told the audience that personal traits can motivate people to act because they will want to do something rather than react because they have to do it.

He called upon participants to study their leadership style to assure that it meets the demands of today.

“Many of us were trained in an autocratic style, but that just doesn’t work today,” he pointed out.

Flood also urged principals to make sure they had some fun in their job, saying “we do this thing 24 hours a day, so you better enjoy being a principal.” He called upon participants to promote the principalship to help attract other quality educators to the profession.

One trait he drew special attention to was making tough decisions.

“It’s easy to make easy decisions, but you have to be willing to make the tough decisions. Many of us have the tendency to postpone making decisions by appointing a study group. It’s important to gather information, but sometimes you already have enough knowledge to act.

“People want leaders to make decisions, and they don’t expect all decisions to be perfect. As leaders, we have to be thick skinned enough to make a decision and if it turns out to be inappropriate, to make a better decision. Tell people you made the best decision you could based on the information you had at the time. If you see it doesn’t work, that gives you better information for making another decision.”

For further information, Flood can be reached at [email protected].