This research starts from a set of concerns and questions about leadership in schools. These concerns translate into willingness to reflect on the future of school leadership, but also into the need to bear these thoughts in our present.

Leadership has been analyzed and theorized from different scientific disciplines. Despite the diversity of approaches (prescriptive or descriptive) and the multiple analyzed dimensions and variables (personality features, internal and external contextual factors), it is possible to identify some consensus around a common definition of leadership. Thus, leadership is defined as an activity that seeks to transform reality through engagement and involvement of others. More specifically, this activity consists on articulating relationships to structure the perceptions and expectations of individuals and, as a consequence, to modify their behaviour. That is, leaders are change drivers, who work for the mobilization of all kind of resources and who do it having interpersonal relationships as a starting point.

We have had experiences of leadership in Catalan schools for years. This experience should let us assess its advantages and difficulties, its strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, the new Catalan education law (2009) reinforces this concept and, at the same time, it makes necessary to reconsider school managerial functions.

A key factor when assessing the performance of management tasks or, if appropriate, leadership, has to do with people who assume these responsibilities: knowing their profiles, their motivations to held the post of school principal or the personal relationships established within school helps us to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their actions. That is the reason why we focus on the connections between different elements that contributes to the development of school leadership: hierarchy, authority, management, actors, school autonomy, power or management, among others.

In this paper we present, first, a review of how theory has dealt with the concept of leadership, having into account contributions from organization, management, educational and sociological studies. The main part of the paper includes the results of the analysis of the interviews and focus groups. We have structured it around the major issues that let us analyze management performance form a critical perspective: access to school management, main elements affecting it, positively or negatively, and personal features of school principals. Finally, we finish with main conclusions of the study and some proposals.

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