What sets great principals apart isn’t just their instructional knowledge or strategic mindset, it’s their ability to understand and adapt their behavior in service of others. In a world where school leaders are called to be communicators, mediators, motivators, and visionaries, often all before noon, technical competence simply isn’t enough.
That’s where Behavioral Intelligence comes in.
More Than Personality: A Next Step in Leadership Self-Awareness
For years, educators and leaders have turned to tools like personality assessments, leadership style inventories, and disposition rubrics to better understand themselves and their teams. These frameworks from Myers-Briggs to DISC to situational leadership, have provided helpful insights, but often fall short when real-time behavior doesn’t match theoretical labels. That’s because our behavior is fluid, context-dependent, and shaped by a dynamic mix of internal drives. In the words of behavioral scientist Jay Johnson, “you can’t just say this is how I am, that’s how you’re choosing to be.”
As David Yeager, author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, explains, young people, whether students or early-career teachers, are highly attuned to status and respect. They crave meaningful recognition and the chance to earn a valuable reputation, not just compliance for compliance’s sake. This means traditional command-and-control leadership styles often fall flat. When principals default to enforcement or overprotection, they risk triggering resistance or withdrawal. But Behavioral Intelligence offers an alternative: by understanding our own behavioral tendencies and learning to flex them, especially toward a “mentor mindset” of high standards and high support, we can lead in ways that resonate with younger generations and inspire them toward growth, not disengagement.
Behavioral Intelligence builds on what we already know about identity and style, but takes it a step further by helping us understand the biological drivers behind our behaviors, and how those drivers push and pull us in every decision we make. Unlike fixed types, Behavioral Intelligence equips leaders with a flexible, measurable framework, rooted in neuroscience, communication, and behavioral science, that helps us explain behavior, predict outcomes, ethically influence others, and most importantly, control our own reactions in high-stakes leadership moments.
What Is Behavioral Intelligence?
At its core, Behavioral Intelligence is the ability to explain, predict, influence, and control behavior, both your own and others’. These four capacities form what the team at Coeus Creative Group refers to as the EPIC model:
- Explain why behavior is happening
- Predict how people are likely to respond in given contexts
- Influence others ethically and effectively
- Control your own reactions to lead with intention, not impulse
Behavioral Intelligence is not about placing yourself in a box or labeling others. It’s about building a flexible understanding of your behavioral preferences, recognizing how they show up under pressure, and learning how to stretch into other ways of leading when the situation calls for it.
Understanding the Elements
The Behavioral Elements framework offers a clear, memorable way to explore the biological drivers behind behavior. These drives are grouped into four “elements” that everyone possesses to varying degrees:
- Fire – The drive to achieve, act, and compete
- Water – The drive to bond, support, and nurture
- Air – The drive to explore, innovate, and create
- Earth – The drive to protect, organize, and preserve
Each of us has a dominant driver and a set of secondary preferences. These preferences shape how we lead, how we communicate, and how we react to stress, change, or conflict. But none of us is limited to just one way of being. In fact, the power of Behavioral Intelligence lies in the ability to activate different elements when the moment demands it.
Why It Matters for School Leaders
Every day, principals encounter situations that require nuanced behavioral shifts:
- A tense staff meeting that requires empathy and calm (Water)
- A new initiative that needs systems, structure, and timelines (Earth)
- A conflict between families that calls for creativity and perspective-taking (Air)
- A low-performing team that needs bold leadership and clear expectations (Fire)
Knowing your behavioral preferences helps you avoid defaulting to the same response every time. More importantly, it allows you to consciously engage the element that fits the context, even if it’s not your instinctive style.
Behavioral Intelligence and Building Ranks
The NASSP Building Ranks framework identifies two core leadership domains: building culture and leading learning. These are not merely tasks, they are deeply human endeavors that depend on behavioral fluency:
- Building a strong culture requires relationship-building, equity-minded communication, and adaptability.
- Leading learning demands strategic decision-making, innovation, and the ability to inspire action across diverse teams.
Behavioral Intelligence gives school leaders the internal toolkit to navigate both domains with intention. It deepens your understanding of how your leadership is received, how you influence your school environment, and how you can adjust in real-time to create positive, productive conditions for growth.
The Invitation: Grow, Don’t Label
This work isn’t about labeling yourself as a “Fire leader” or a “Water principal.” It’s about recognizing your patterns, developing your agility, and growing your impact. It’s about saying: I know where I start, and I know how to stretch.
In the next article, we’ll dive into how Behavioral Elements directly align with the Building Ranks dimensions, and why that matters as you lead change, foster trust, and shape the future of your school community.
Reflect and Grow:
Think about a recent leadership moment where your instincts kicked in. What element was likely driving your response? If you could have drawn on another element, how might the outcome have shifted?
To learn more about how MASSP can bring the Behavioral Edge to you and your team and unlock infinite potential through your behavioral awareness, reach out to tom@massp.com or visit massp.com/behavioral_edge.