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Background : Education delivers a fundamental base for all further human, social and economic development. It inspires creativity and fosters innovation. Education is generally considered as the tool for economic growth and social development of a nation. Education or school outcomes are strongly associated with the quality and/or relevance of leadership style used by principals. The quality of education is positively correlated to quality educational leadership. As a result, in educational organisations, leadership behaviour plays a significant role in success in schools. Methods: To understand the research issues and to investigate the feeling of the public secondary schools principals and teachers in the study, this research applied a qualitative research approach. Specifically qualitative instrumental case study design was used. In this research 34 participants were selected, 24 teaches and 10 principals from the 65 public secondary schools. Semi-structured individual in-depth interviews used to collect data from participants. Data analysis was done concurrently with the data collection process. As the interviews conducted in Amharic language, the interviews translated to English language after the audio recorded data transcription. In this research ATLAS.ti 8 qualitative data analysis software used to facilitate the organisation of collected data. Results: The public secondary school management system has unique structures in schools namely, teachers’ one- to-five grouping, development group/change army and school command post committees together with different departmental structures. Even though the school has four principals (one head principal and three vice-principals), all of them seemed to focus on coordinating and developing an ‘educational army’ in the school. The principals are evaluated by the officials based on the effectiveness of the school in developing the ‘educational army’, such as monitoring one-to-five teams. They also work hard at changing teachers’ attitude toward to the ruling political party. The school principal has no mandate to make any decisions alone as it can be negated by the command post. Conclusions: the public secondary school management structure is consisted of principals and department heads. However, the process of managing and leading the school is executed by hidden politically organized body like school command post, one to five structures and ruling party members in the school.
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