This document discusses the leadership styles needed during the COVID era. It describes an "edupreneurial leader" who can scan internal and external environments, diagnose personnel, and utilize flexible leadership styles. Leaders may adopt entrepreneurial and pedagogical styles depending on their personality, education, experience, and the success and risks of their organization. As environments become more uncertain, an edupreneurial approach of doing more with less and improving outcomes by aligning internal and external factors is needed. There is no single best leadership style; the optimal mix depends on situational context. The search continues for the right leadership cocktail.

1. Searching for the right Leadership
cocktail mix during the Covid Era
Petros Pashiardis
Professor of Educational Leadership
Rector, Open University of Cyprus
email: p.pashiardis@ouc.ac.cy
The Innovating Higher Education Conference 2021
3 – 5 November 2021, Bari, Italy

2. The Role of
Educational Leaders

3. © Petros Pashiardis & Stefan Brauckmann (2008)

4. Edupreneurial
Leadership

5. The edupreneurial leader
• Scanning and influencing the
environment (internal and external)
• Providing a good diagnosis of their
personnel
• Being flexible to utilize a variety of
leadership styles and their hybrids

6. Leaders, depending on their:
Can become edupreneurs (the Entrepreneurial leadership
style alongside the Pedagogical leadership style)
(1) personality characteristics,
(2) education and training in leadership,
coupled with
(3) experience and common sense,
(4) level of success (or lack thereof) that their
organization is functioning at, as well as
(5) their risk-averse or risk-prone personality

7. As the external environment
becomes more fluid, uncertain, and
full of paradoxes, the notion of
becoming more edupreneurial
seems to be like an (almost) one-
way street

8. To do more…
with less…
…and do it better (student outcomes)…
…by aligning the inner- and outer world of
organizations.

9. The edupreneurial leader* and
edupreneurial leadership
• Influencing the outside environment
• Influencing the inside environment
To stimulate the development process by
creating a community of shared responsibility
between internal and external stakeholders
*Pashiardis, P. & Brauckmann S. (2019). New Public Management
in Education: A Call for the Edupreneurial Leader?, Leadership
and Policy in Schools, 18 (3), 485-499. DOI:
10.1080/15700763.2018.1475575

10. So what about
the Leadership
cocktail mix?

11. There is no best cocktail of school
leadership mix for all school leaders -
one size does not fit all; but all styles are
necessary under different Situational/
Contextual/ Ecological conditions.
Brauckmann & Pashiardis, (2011).
Pashiardis, (2014).
The search for the Holy Grail goes
on….