A profile of leadership behaviors that describes principals who successfully improve schools has emerged from effective schools literature and research of the corporate world. Instructional leadership involves four technical tasks that comprise a leadership profile: curriculum development, teaching supervision, staff development, and teacher evaluation. Studies indicate, however, that principals tend to spend the greater part of their time on management and operations activities and that school systems generally lack incentives for creating improvements. Research identifies four behavioral patterns among leaders: (1) Sense of vision (vision draws faculty attention to key curriculum areas and includes skills of consensus building and seeking creative solutions. (2) Organization developer (to develop an organization of people committed to excellence, leaders use skills in team building and conflict resolution. Understanding internal changes can mobilize faculty for improvements). (3) Instructional support. The principal must have expertise in teaching and designing effective staff development programs. (4) Monitoring learning. Successful principals monitor activities, a task analogous to management's "control" function. Skills include establishing clear indicators of student performance and providing progress reports to parents and faculty. These leadership behaviors rely on a knowledge base concerning the efficacy of various strategies or school improvement interventions. H. Walberg's (1984) findings on the relative power of factors such as home and school climate in enhancing student performance provide a useful conceptual framework for enterprising principals. A bibliography, charts, and tables are appended. (CJH)