Asian Journal of Sociological Research

In contemporary times, the discipline of leadership research has shifted from a focus on Leaders to followers - that is forging links between (principals, headmasters) and teachers. Educational leaders have the awareness that their primary tasks and functions are not only to enhance learning outcomes, but also to assist effective governance, it how to blend the merits of centralized management devolution of power for enhancing management and school improvement. Also, the new perspective is   persuading educational policy makers, administrators and managers of schools that school enhancing learning environment needs the efforts of every teacher not just a few individuals.  It also integrates educational administrators that are result oriented, instilling hope in their staff and concentrate on aiding learning through collaboration. The current trend that education leaders need to integrate is the public-private partnership through the voucher system, to enable youths living in the slums and inner cities to have access to qualitative education. Another significant demand is the necessity to stress the retraining of principals and educational leaders to enable them undertake new responsibility in the 21^st century. This demand has become imperative because they perform the roles of human resource managers to the teachers, public relation officers to the communities and counsellor to people. Switching from command and control (hierarchical skills) of the 20th century to coordination and collaboration as managerial skill has become absolutely necessary for leaders in the 21^st century. The change in leadership skills constitute a fundamental challenge for educational leaders. This paper  further emphasizes that  educational leaders  must  blend integral, strategic, transformational, distributed and visionary leadership styles because they constitute the fundamental means to sustain reforms and new global trends in educational practices. The trend in the future prioritize the professional training of school heads because of enormous responsibilities placed on them for improving learning outcomes, training of teachers and retention of staff and ability to achieve result in a complex environment.