Leverage Leadership 3.0

A Proven, Updated Framework That Empowers School Leaders to Build High-Impact, Time-Smart Schools

In the era of shrinking resources, AI and the latest high-quality curriculum materials, what separates great schools from the rest? The answer is in how a leader uses their time. Rooted in observation and training of over 40,000 school leaders worldwide, Leverage Leadership 3.0 provides school leaders with a clear, updated roadmap for achieving exceptional results.

As schools face widening gaps and intensified accountability, leaders need tools that help them focus their time on what matters most to directly improve teaching and learning. In this thoroughly refreshed third edition, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo revisits and strengthens the seven levers, offering streamlined methods that help leaders reclaim hours each week and invest them in the coaching and collaboration that elevate classroom practice.

Bambrick-Santoyo draws from experience founding and leading internationally recognized leadership institutes and high-performing schools to ground the book in practical insight and everyday applicability. With step-by-step guidance and a renewed focus on sustainable leadership, this edition demonstrates how consistent, intentional actions—not extraordinary personalities—create thriving schools.

Designed to empower school leaders to maximize limited resources while improving instruction and student outcomes, Leverage Leadership 3.0:

• Introduces an AI-enhanced companion app powered by a proprietary library of exemplars, rubrics, and videos that serves as a personal planning assistant, generating data-meeting scripts, feedback plans, walkthrough tools, and PD agendas in a fraction of the time. This way, leaders spend less time preparing and more time coaching face-to-face.
• Provides newly developed video exemplars showing real principals and teachers applying the seven levers across diverse school contexts
• Offers refined protocols and one-page tools that turn complex leadership tasks into efficient, actionable, thirty-minute solutions
• Delivers expanded guidance for building staff capacity and strengthening teacher retention through targeted, high-impact coaching

Leverage Leadership 3.0: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools is essential reading for principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, superintendents, and teacher leaders in K–12 settings, whether new to school leadership or experienced in continuous improvement. It is well-suited for leadership preparation programs, superintendent academies, principal residencies, and courses in educational leadership within M.Ed. and Ed.D. pathways.

PAUL BAMBRICK-SANTOYO is the Founder and Dean of the Leverage Leadership Institute. He has trained more than 50,000 school leaders, including hundreds of schools that have gone on to become the highest-gaining or highest achieving schools in their districts, states and/or countries.