School-leaders must face complex situations that require the development of very specific competences. We have worked on two of them   that, according to the work to detect training needs that we had elaborated , possess a special interest : facing hostile situations, verbal attacks (fom a pupil , an assembly colleague, a parent, etc.) and the formulation of criticisms and improvement propositions that affect the behaviour of other people. When this situations appear, the school-leader must face them. The dilemma is how to do it? He/she knows perfectly that his way of intervening will have a very important incidence on the issue; he/she knows that it will have an incidence on the whole organization, but he/she also knows that after-effects will derive on him/herself: his/her way of acting will affirm or weaken his/her leadership. He/she knows all this but still he/she has to act immediately...and he has only got a few seconds to question the sense of his/her intervention: What is he/she going to do ? What is he/she going to say? How is he/she going act? With what intention? It is a matter of taking a maximum profit of these few seconds.

The work Afrontamiento de situaciones de hostilidad y desempeño de la función directiva/ Facing hostile situations and the development of the headship function   is addressed at school-leaders though it is also useful for the rest of teachers. In that work we comment aspects that guide the planning and development of a training activity to improve the professional competence in facing that kind of situations ( Published in the review   XXI Revista de Educación , núm. 8, pp. 35-49)

The presentation Emitir críticas y plantear retos de mejora/ Express criticism and establish improvement challenges corresponds to a training activity for school-leaders aimed at the development of this leading competence.