An Introduction to Career Learning & Development 11-19

Perspectives, Practice and Possibilities

Anthony Barnes, Barbara Bassot, Anne Chant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136901775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

An Introduction to Career Learning and Development 11-19 is an indispensible source of support and guidance for all those who need to know why and how career learning and development should be planned, developed and delivered effectively to meet the needs of young people.

It is a comprehensive resource providing a framework for career education conducive with the realities of lifelong learning, enterprise, flexibility and resilience in a dynamic world. It discusses the key under-pinning theory and policies and provides straight-forward, practical advice for students and practising professionals. Experts in the field provide essential guidance on:

• development and leadership of career education strategies in school
• planning and implementing career learning activities in the curriculum
• collaborative working and engagement between schools, colleges and Connexions services, as well as with parents, community and business organisations
• key organisations and where to find useful resources
• effective teaching and learning - active, participative and experiential learning approaches
• issues of ethics, values, equality and diversity
• guidance on self-evaluation, making the most of inspection, and quality standards and awards.

An Introduction to Career Learning and Development 11-19 is an invaluable guide for teachers, teaching support staff, careers guidance professionals and all other partners in the delivery of CEIAG who wish to enhance their understanding of current and emerging practice and provide support that can really make a difference to young people's lives.

Part B
Practice

Chapter 4
Leadership and strategy

Promoting the career learning and development of young people through the formal education system presents formidable leadership and strategic management challenges. We examine some of the key elements of leadership and strategy as they apply to CLD and relate this to the performance of key tasks. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main roles and responsibilities of a wide range of guidance and education professionals working as senior leaders, middle leaders and operational staff, not all of whom would readily class themselves as careers specialists.

Leadership and its importance

Effective leadership at all levels is widely recognised as the hallmark of a successful school. What leadership is and what makes a good leader are both hotly debated. West-Burnham (cited in Davies and Ellison 1997) attempted to show that leadership and management were distinctive but complementary activities (see Box 4.1).

Box 4.1 Management and leadership

Management is about:	Leadership is about:
• implementation	• vision
• operational issues	• strategic issues
• transaction	• transformation
• means	• ends
• systems	• people
• doing things right	• doing the right things

(West-Burnham in Davies and Ellison 1997)

Current thinking on leadership emphasises that it is not just a ‘top-down’ phenomenon. Senior leaders may have primary responsibility for strategy but middle leaders (e.g. careers coordinators) usually have a major input into strategy and are in any case largely responsible for its implementation. Educational leadership is distributed throughout a school and it is up to individuals to make effective use of the leadership authority they can legitimately claim.

Current thinking also emphasises that leaders should try to flex their leadership style to respond in a way that suits the needs of the situation and the people involved. How everyone else performs their leadership functions affects everyone else’s leadership capacity and style. Joseph Nye, Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University, writing about effective world leaders, defines this ability as ‘contextual intelligence’ – the intuitive diagnostic skill that helps you align your tactics with your objectives so that you get ‘smart’ strategies in different situations. Tannenbaum and Schmidt (1973) describe a continuum of leadership styles and it is helpful for leaders of CLD to reflect on the pros and cons of adopting these different styles to cope with the situations they face (see Box 4.2).

Box 4.2 Leadership styles

Style	Definition
Telling	Leader gives instructions and has a strong control instinct
Selling	Leader has clear views and values and attempts to convince others to follow
Consulting	Leader presents ideas, invites comments and suggestions, and reaches decisions by consensus
Sharing	Leader develops other staff and delegates actions and decisions within defined limits

(Tannenbaum and Schmidt 1973, cited in Field et al. 2000)

It is also widely acknowledged that leadership is a group dynamic in which followers formally or informally give their consent to be led. Harnessing this dynamic is one of the skills of leadership. Collarbone and Billingham (1998) draw a distinction between ‘transactional’ and ‘transformational’ leadership which provides further insights into how this consent might work (see Box 4.3). ‘Transactional leadership’ (based on the exchange relationships

Box 4.3 ‘Transformational’ and ‘transactional’ leadership

Transformational leadership	Transactional leadership
• builds on the need for meaning	• builds on the need to get the job done and make a living
• preoccupied with purposes, values, morals and ethics	• preoccupied with power and position, politics and perks
• transcends daily affairs	• swamped in daily affairs
• orientated towards long term goals without compromising human values and principles	• orientated to short-term goals and hard data
• separates causes and symptoms and works at prevention	• confuses causes and symptoms and is concerned with treatment
• focuses more on missions and strategies for achieving them	• focuses on tactical issues
• makes full use of available human resources	• relies on human relations to oil human interactions
• designs and redesigns jobs to make them meaningful and challenging; realises human potential	• follows and fulfils role expectations by striving to work effectively within current systems
• aligns internal structures and systems to reinforce overarching values and goals	• supports structures and systems that reinforce the bottom line, maximise efficiency and guarantee short-term gains

(Collarbone and Billingham 1998)

between the leader and the follower) can be contrasted with ‘transformational leadership’ (based on the ability of an individual to envision a new social condition and communicate this vision to followers).

School improvement researchers emphasise the value of ‘transformational leadership’. ‘Transformational’ leaders have the ability to inspire a shared vision, to empower staff and to ‘raise everyone’s game’. It is the way in which these leaders transform the feelings, attitudes and beliefs of students, colleagues and partners that is particularly relevant to improvement in CLD.

Careers leaders will sometimes need to reflect on the basis of their power or authority to make things happen. Power can be represented on a spectrum from ‘clout’ to ‘wisdom’ (see Box 4.4).

Box 4.4 Spectrum of power

Reward power	is based on the belief of followers that the leader has access to valued rewards which will be dispensed in return for compliance with instructions
Coercive power	is based on the belief of followers that the leader can administer penalties or sanctions that are considered to be unwelcome
Referent power	is based on the belief of followers that the leader has desirable abilities and personality traits that can and should be copied
Legitimate power	is based on the belief of followers that the leader has a position of authority in the organisational hierarchy which gives them the right to issue orders with which followers have an obligation to comply
Expert power	is based on the belief of followers that the leader has superior knowledge relevant to the task in hand

(French and Raven 1959)

Careers coordinators usually have limited access to the ‘harder’ forms of power but they have more scope to use the ‘softer’ forms of power to win support for what they want to achieve. Softer forms of power focus on motivation and work best when the interests of the leader coincide with the needs and interests of those they are seeking to influence. This is relevant to strategic leadership as CEIAG is traditionally a ‘goodwill curriculum’ (Harris 1999) which relies on the coordinator negotiating support from colleagues within the school.

Strategic management of CLD

Strategy is about knowing what to achieve, being able to justify the direction and finding the best way to get there.

The need for a well-developed strategy relates to the complexity of CLD. Careers work is relevant to the needs of all young people in a school, it is delivered across the curriculum by a wide range of staff and it requires the contribution of a wide range of internal and external partners. Moreover, it must respond to national and local policy initiatives while staying focused on the needs of young people, the school and its community.

A useful model for strategic planning of CLD at the school level is the seven ‘S’s framework developed by McKinsey & Company (1982). It shows the relationship of strategy to six other elements or variables that need to be aligned to improve school performance (see Fig. 4.1).

Figure 4.1 The seven ‘S’s framework

The benefits of using the seven ‘S’s tool for school leaders are:

• It focuses on the seven key elements that determine whether CLD provision is effective or not – that is, it can be used to diagnose problems and develop a strategy for improvement.

• It emphasises that the successful implementation of CLD activities requires all these elements to be coordinated and aligned.

• It acts as a reminder of the complexity of change – that is, to improve CLD provision may involve working on aspects of all these elements.

Box 4.5 provides a checklist of CLD issues to consider under each of the elements in the framework. It can be used to gather evidence of the effectiveness of current strategy.

Box 4.5 Seven ‘S’...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part A Perspectives
• Part B Practice
• Part C Possibilities
• Index