The views of school administrators on storytelling leadership approach

In this study it was aimed to determine the level of using storytelling leadership by the school administrators by revealing their opinions on the storytelling leadership approach. In the reaserch, a semi-structured interview form was used as a qualitative research method. Face to face interviews were conducted with a total of 15 school administrators, including 6 school principals and 9 deputy principals, working in secondary and high schools affiliated to the Ministry of National Education in Kırşehir. The data obtained from the interviews were examined after obtaining the approval of the administrators and coded in the context of the purpose of the research and questions. The generated codes were transformed into themes to reveal the research findings and descriptive and content analyzes were made. As a result of the research, it has been revealed that school administrators use storytelling leadership behaviour while communicating with students, teachers and parents at school. It has been observed that school administrators sometimes use fiction stories and sometimes their own life stories to motivate and inspire school staff, students and parents and to be a reliable role model for them. In this research the school administrators stated that they use stories to convey their values, beliefs and tacit knowledge they want to give to school personnel. It has been observed that school administrators benefit from stories to provide desired behaviour change in students and school personnel, to improve their perspectives and to enable them to gain empathy skills. According to the findings of the study, having storytelling skills, being a good observer and having a strong memory appear as important storyteller leadership competencies. Keywords: Leadership, school administrators, storytelling leadership.