School leaders should develop procedures and practices that encourage value and moral inquiry to become a more authentic leader. An authentic leader would use moral inquiry to seek values and ethical attitudes that would guide them in their decision making process. According to George Sher (1992) the values that a leader exemplifies should be a “character trait that is for some important reason desirable or worth having” (as cited by Carr & Stuetel, 2005, p. 4). Therefore a leader should take careful consideration of which personal characteristics they wish to portray as representative of their leadership/personality or themselves. These values upheld/chosen by the leader also need to be viewed by the majority as desirable traits within an individual (Carr & Stuetel, 2005, p. 5).
A school leader has to develop a dialogue with the various stakeholders/constituents in their school that moves beyond the immediate here and now and focuses on transcending to “standards of decency and justice which are not immovably tied to a set of purely local customs and prejudices” (Carr, 2000, p. 196). This is not an easy task and should not be taken lightly. In their dialogical interactions with others, school leaders should try to focus on the larger pictures of what is right, rather than relying on the historical arguments of how things have been done in the past. The school leader must be “equipped with resources for the principled justification of their conduct” (Carr, 1999, p. 42). This would imply that the school leader has thought about and given considerations to all sides of a value before actively implementing a value into everyday practice of guiding decisions and social interactions within a school community. This type of dialogical practice would require a heavy investment in time and mental capital of the school leader, but once sufficiently employed, this practice would produce a greater perception of authenticity with colleagues and subordinates. Subordinates would be able to recognise a pattern and structure to the school leader’s decisions and actions therefore create a more authentic relationships within the school.