In a recent episode of The Table, I sat down with Belle Halpern, founder of Inspiring Educators and co-author of Leadership Presence, to explore what it really means to lead with authenticity in our schools. Belle’s journey from professional theater to leadership development offers school leaders a fascinating lens for thinking about how we show up, communicate, and connect with our communities.
What struck me most about our conversation was Belle’s core message: the leaders who make the greatest impact aren’t the ones who have all the answers or project an image of perfection. They’re the ones who show up fully human, who let their communities see what drives them, and who understand that presence isn’t about performance. It’s about authenticity.
From Stage to School: What Theater Teaches Us About Leadership
Belle’s background in theater might seem unrelated to educational leadership at first glance, but the connection runs deeper than you’d think. During our conversation, she shared a transformative moment from her performing career that fundamentally changed how she understood her purpose. Standing backstage at New York’s Town Hall, waiting to perform while worried about her brother during the 1989 Santa Cruz earthquake, Belle realized something crucial: what mattered wasn’t the ambition or the accolades. What mattered was using her voice to genuinely touch people and serve others.
This shift from ambition to service became the foundation of her work with leaders. As school administrators, we often feel pressure to project authority, to have everything figured out, to be the person with all the answers. But Belle’s work suggests that our greatest strength as leaders comes from a different place entirely. It comes from showing up as real people who care deeply about the work and the people we serve.
The theater skills Belle brings to leadership development aren’t about acting or putting on a show. They’re about presence, authenticity, and the ability to connect meaningfully with others. These are precisely the skills that transform a competent administrator into a leader who inspires trust and builds genuine community.
The Four Roles Framework: Expanding Your Leadership Range
One of the most practical frameworks Belle shared involves four distinct leadership roles: Captain, Conceiver, Champion, and Collaborator. Understanding when to embody each role can dramatically improve how we navigate the complex challenges schools face daily.
The Captain brings clarity and direction. This is the role we step into when our community needs decisive action and clear communication. When a crisis hits or when uncertainty creates anxiety, the Captain provides the steady hand that helps people feel grounded. This role isn’t about authoritarianism. It’s about taking responsibility and helping people understand what comes next.
The Conceiver focuses on vision and possibility. This is the strategic, big-picture thinking that helps us imagine new solutions and chart courses toward ambitious goals. When we’re doing long-term planning, developing new programs, or reimagining how our schools can better serve students, we’re operating in the Conceiver role.
The Champion advocates and celebrates. This role involves recognizing others’ contributions, championing new ideas, and building momentum around initiatives that matter. When a teacher develops an innovative approach or a student overcomes significant challenges, the Champion ensures those stories are shared and celebrated.
The Collaborator builds bridges and facilitates partnerships. This role emphasizes listening, bringing people together, and creating space for multiple voices. When we’re building consensus around a new policy or bringing together different constituencies within our school community, we’re working as Collaborators.
Belle emphasized that effective leadership requires flexibility across all four roles. Many of us have default modes where we feel most comfortable, but different situations demand different approaches. A head of school might need to be a Captain during a board meeting, a Conceiver during strategic planning, a Champion at an all-school assembly, and a Collaborator during faculty meetings, all in the same week.
The key insight here isn’t just knowing these roles exist. It’s developing the self-awareness to recognize which role a situation calls for and the flexibility to shift accordingly.
Making Teachers Feel Seen: The Foundation of School Culture
During our conversation, Belle and I spent considerable time discussing what it means to make teachers feel truly seen. This isn’t a soft skill or a nice-to-have. It’s fundamental to building the kind of culture where teachers want to stay and can do their best work.
Belle pointed to research showing that feeling valued at work isn’t primarily about compensation or benefits, though those matter. It’s about whether people feel their contributions are recognized, whether their voices are heard, and whether they’re seen as whole human beings rather than just employees filling roles.
In schools, this takes on added significance because teaching is inherently relational work. Teachers who feel unseen by their leaders often struggle to fully see their students. Conversely, when teachers feel genuinely valued by their administrators, that sense of being seen cascades down to students and families.
Belle described what she calls “unconditional positive regard” as the foundation of this approach. Even when we need to have difficult conversations about performance or when someone isn’t the right fit for a role, we can maintain deep respect for them as human beings. This distinction between managing performance and valuing people is crucial for school leaders who must balance accountability with humanity.
One practical suggestion Belle offered: regularly ask yourself whether the people you work with feel seen by you. Not just acknowledged or managed, but genuinely seen. Do they feel that you understand what matters to them? Do they know that you recognize their unique contributions? Have you created space for them to share what drives them beyond just their job responsibilities?
The Gen Z Effect: How Communication Norms Are Shifting
An unexpected but valuable thread in our conversation focused on how younger generations are reshaping workplace communication. Belle’s daughter is a teacher, which has given Belle insight into how Gen Z professionals approach leadership and institutional culture differently than previous generations.
Gen Z educators, Belle noted, tend to value authenticity over polish. They can spot performative leadership from a mile away, and they’re less willing to accept hierarchical structures that don’t make sense to them. They want to understand not just what they’re being asked to do, but why it matters and how it aligns with the mission they care about.
This shift has important implications for how school leaders communicate. The formal memos, the carefully crafted all-staff emails that maintain professional distance, the tendency to filter everything through an institutional voice – these approaches often feel inauthentic to younger faculty members. They want leaders who communicate like real people, who acknowledge challenges honestly, and who invite genuine dialogue rather than just delivering information.
This doesn’t mean abandoning professionalism. It means rethinking what professionalism looks like in an era where authenticity and transparency are increasingly valued. It means being willing to say, “I don’t know, but here’s how we’ll figure it out together,” rather than feeling pressured to project certainty we don’t feel.
Belle also emphasized that Gen Z educators are more willing to question systems and ask whether there are better ways to do things. Rather than viewing this as threatening, school leaders can harness this energy by creating genuine opportunities for innovation and shared problem-solving.
The Courage to Be Vulnerable: Sharing What Drives You
One of the most powerful moments in our conversation came when Belle talked about leaders sharing what gets them out of bed in the morning. Not in a performative way, but genuinely sharing the purpose that drives their work.
This requires vulnerability. It means moving beyond our professional personas and letting our communities see what we truly care about. For some leaders, this feels risky or inappropriate. Belle’s perspective challenges that assumption.
When leaders share their authentic motivations, several things happen. First, it builds trust. People recognize authenticity when they see it, and they respond to it. Second, it gives others permission to bring their whole selves to work. If the head of school can acknowledge that they’re driven by a deep commitment to equity because of their own experiences, it creates space for teachers to connect their personal passions to their professional work.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, it reminds everyone why we’re really here. Schools can become consumed by operational details, budget constraints, enrollment challenges, and compliance requirements. When leaders reconnect themselves and their communities to a deeper purpose, it provides essential perspective and renewed energy.
Belle cautioned against what she called “hanging your humanity at the door.” The instinct to separate our personal selves from our professional roles is understandable, but it often makes us less effective as leaders. The most inspiring leaders Belle has worked with are those who integrate who they are with what they do.
Beyond the Office: The Danger of Leadership Isolation
Belle made a point that resonates with many school leaders: the danger of becoming isolated in your office. There’s a gravitational pull toward spending most of our time responding to emails, attending meetings, and managing the administrative machinery of schools. But leadership that happens primarily from behind a desk is limited leadership.
Effective school leaders are visible. They’re in classrooms, in hallways, at lunch duty, at games and performances. They know students’ names and ask teachers about their families. This visibility serves multiple purposes.
First, it keeps leaders grounded in the actual experience of the school community. It’s easy to make decisions based on abstract principles or organizational charts. It’s different when you’ve just watched a third grader struggle with reading or observed a talented teacher using an innovative approach to engage disengaged students. These direct experiences inform better decisions.
Second, visibility builds relationships. Trust isn’t built through formal channels or official communications. It’s built through hundreds of small interactions where people experience you as a real person who cares about them and their work.
Third, being present in the life of the school signals what you value. If you’re regularly in classrooms observing teaching and learning, people understand that educational quality matters. If you’re at student events, students feel that their activities are valued. Your physical presence communicates priorities more effectively than any mission statement.
Belle acknowledged that this requires intentionality. Our calendars fill up quickly, and it’s easy to look up and realize we’ve gone weeks primarily interacting with other administrators. She suggested building visibility into your regular routines rather than treating it as something extra you do when you have time.
Coaching vs. Managing: The Dual Role of School Leaders
During our conversation, Belle drew an important distinction between managing for performance and coaching for development. School leaders must do both, but they’re fundamentally different activities that require different mindsets.
Managing for performance focuses on ensuring people meet expectations, address problems, and deliver results. This is necessary work. Schools have standards to maintain, and not every teacher is going to be a good fit in every situation.
Coaching for development focuses on helping people grow toward their potential, develop new skills, and discover their strengths. This work is about possibility and growth rather than evaluation and accountability.
The challenge is that these roles can feel contradictory. How can you simultaneously evaluate someone’s performance and coach them toward growth? Belle suggested explicitly naming which hat you’re wearing in different conversations.
“I want to be your coach right now,” she might say to someone. “Let’s take off the performance evaluation hat and talk about your development outside of this specific role.” This explicit naming helps create psychological safety for more open, developmental conversations.
For school leaders, this distinction is especially important. The teachers who feel most supported by their administrators are those who experience both appropriate accountability and genuine investment in their growth. When leaders only manage for performance, teachers feel evaluated but not developed. When leaders only coach without addressing performance issues, credibility suffers.
Belle emphasized that coaching requires seeing people’s potential, even when their current performance doesn’t meet standards. Sometimes that means recognizing that someone might thrive in a different environment, and having the courage to support them in making that move. This reflects what Belle called “unconditional positive regard” – maintaining deep respect for people as human beings even when their fit with a particular role isn’t working.
Dignity and Self-Worth: Separating Person from Position
Toward the end of our conversation, Belle asked me about dignity, which led to a powerful exchange about separating our self-worth from our professional roles. This resonates deeply for school leaders, many of whom pour themselves completely into their work.
I shared my own journey of recognizing that my value as a person is separate from my performance at work. For years, my entire self-worth was wrapped up in professional achievement. This made me effective in some ways, but it also made me vulnerable to burnout and made it difficult to maintain healthy boundaries.
Understanding that I am worthy as a person regardless of professional outcomes fundamentally changed how I lead. It allowed me to take appropriate risks, to acknowledge mistakes without feeling personally devastated, and to maintain perspective during difficult periods.
This insight also transformed how I see the people I work with. If my worth isn’t determined by my professional performance, neither is theirs. Even when I need to have difficult conversations or make hard decisions about someone’s role, I can maintain genuine respect for their inherent dignity.
For school leaders, this distinction is crucial. The pressure we face can make it tempting to define ourselves entirely by professional metrics – enrollment numbers, test scores, college acceptances, fundraising results. While these outcomes matter, they don’t determine our worth as human beings.
When we internalize this truth for ourselves, we’re better able to extend it to others. We can hold high standards while maintaining compassion. We can address performance issues while preserving dignity. We can make difficult decisions while treating everyone involved with respect.
Small Steps Toward Greater Presence
As we wrapped up our conversation, I emphasized that this work doesn’t require completely transforming yourself overnight. It’s about small, intentional steps toward greater authenticity and presence.
Maybe it’s committing to spending 20 minutes each day walking through your building and having informal conversations. Maybe it’s sharing more genuinely in faculty meetings about what drives your work. Maybe it’s being more explicit about which leadership role you’re stepping into for different situations.
Belle’s work reminds us that leadership presence isn’t about charisma or natural talent. It’s a set of skills and practices that anyone can develop. It requires self-awareness, intentionality, and the courage to show up as your authentic self.
The leaders who build the strongest school communities aren’t those who project perfection or maintain professional distance. They’re the ones who let their communities see their humanity, who share what they care about, and who recognize that their most important work is helping others feel seen, heard, and valued.
In an era of increasing pressure and complexity in education, this approach to leadership matters more than ever. Our teachers need leaders who are real with them. Our students need adults who model authentic humanity. Our school communities need leaders who understand that presence and connection aren’t luxuries. They’re essential to the work of building places where everyone belongs.
