Understanding Leadership

Challenges and Reflections

Libby Nicholas, John West-Burnham

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785830679
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Are current leadership roles and relationships appropriate in a rapidly changing world? Do we need to rethink key assumptions about leaders and leadership? Are you confident about the appropriateness and effectiveness of your chosen leadership styles and behaviours? These are questions facing leaders today and Understanding Leadership by Libby Nicholas and John West-Burnham can help find the answers, with an approach that is neither normative nor prescriptive but rather exploratory and developmental. Applying research and case studies from inside and outside the educational canon, Libby and John challenge prevailing orthodoxies and invite readers to reflect on their personal understanding as the basis for translating theory into practice. All leadership behaviour is based on a number of fundamental personal assumptions about the nature of human relationships and the basis on which human organisations function. Understanding Leadership helps leaders make their implicit understanding explicit and so informs and aids development of professional practice. Effective leaders develop and grow by understanding their personal mindscape the mental map with which they make sense of the world and developing it through reflecting, exploring, testing and questioning. The usefulness of any map is determined partly by its scale and partly by the information it depicts. As leaders develop, so their personal mental maps become more sophisticated and more detailed. The purpose of this book is to help leaders understand and refine their maps through reflective self-awareness facilitating the journey to understanding leadership. Leadership is fundamentally concerned with the complexity of human relationships, performance, engagement and motivation leadership has to be seen as relational. Leadership involves emotional engagement and sophisticated interpersonal relationships. The idea of a hero-leader single-handedly transforming a school is perhaps not a particularly useful or relevant vision of effective leadership for today. Libby and John encourage leaders to arrive at their own working definition of effective leadership and analyse how the myriad of carefully examined models and case studies might apply in their own school context. The eight chapters are underpinned by the following themes, questions and points of reflection: why leadership?; creating a preferred future leading change; leadership as a moral activity; learning as the core purpose of school leadership; leading through collaboration and cooperation; building capacity sharing leadership; leading through relationships; and leadership and personal resilience. High performance, effective leadership can be truly transformational. Leadership cannot be taught; it has to be learnt. It could be argued that school leadership is primarily concerned with learning: the leader's own, and facilitating that of the children. Questioning, interrogating and analysing ideas and practice are fundamental to that learning process. Libby Nicholas and John West-Burnham prompt leaders to do just that. Suitable for school leaders at all levels head teachers, principals, assistant and deputy heads, middle leaders aspiring to senior roles and in all educational settings. The book will also be of interest to education system leaders chief education officers and directors of education and, indeed, anyone concerned with developing effective school leadership; for example, governors and trustees, CPD trainers, coaches and mentors.

Chapter 1

Why leadership?

There seems to be a broad consensus across educational systems that leadership is a key variable in educational improvement. There is less consensus as to the exact nature of successful leadership and the direction that leadership in education might take. This chapter explores the following issues:

• Why is there such an emphasis on leadership?
• What are the origins of the prevailing models of leadership in education?
• What are the problems and issues with certain approaches to leadership in education?
• Can we justify the prevailing models of leadership found in schools?
• Is there a common language to enable a shared understanding of effective leadership?

The problem with leadership

There seems little doubt that leadership is a highly significant factor in explaining the success or otherwise of a school or indeed any human social enterprise. Leadership has always been a vital element in any school improvement strategy, and all the research evidence points to certain types of leadership behaviour as being essential to turning schools around. Indeed, it would seem that there is an overwhelming consensus not just about the importance of leadership but also about the specific components of that leadership:

A large number of quantitative studies … show that school leadership influences performance more than any other variable except socio-economic background and the quality of teaching. (Barber et al. 2010: 5)

This assertion has, of course, to be qualified from a number of perspectives: the historical context and prevailing culture of the school, the leadership styles and strategies adopted and, crucially in a high stakes accountability model, the relative impact of the leader.

What is very clear is that there is an increasing focus on what might be described as a ‘managerial perspective’ in government, across the public sector and in education. This is reflected in neoliberal stances on the importance of competition, the absence of central control, the emphasis on autonomy and the increasing stress on technical expertise as being more significant than any concept of community accountability or institutional or local democracy.

However, Pink (2008: 2) argues:

We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.

If this is true, then it would seem to imply the need for a radical reconceptualisation of the prevailing models of leadership. But the history of the West has tended to stress the individuality of leadership and regard leadership as, in some way, intrinsically heroic. This has been reinforced, not least in schools, by a parallel culture of dependency (waiting to be saved by the hero) rather than the more complex and demanding concept of followership (accepting responsibility for co-creating a preferred future). It might be that one type of relationship between learner and teacher, essentially dependent, is a microcosm of the relationship between head teacher and staff. In order to respond to the challenges of living in a very different world, leadership may need to be understood as a process and a relationship rather than personal status and a reified position posited on degrees of significance and value:

our understanding of leadership needs to move beyond contemplation of isolated heroes and consider instead those who translate their ideas into action … in order to understand how individual leaders and followers contribute to the leadership process we need to understand and explain how their psychologies are shaped and transformed by their engagement in shared group activity. (Haslam et al. 2011: 17)

The crucial point here is that leadership is derived from significant relationships – that is, leadership is a function of the social and emotional dynamics of the group. It is not so much a matter of the leader taking control of the group but rather understanding the emotional climate of which they have become a part. The reality is, of course, that leadership is a fundamentally contested concept. It is a fuzzy and highly complex set of interconnected propositions that are not amenable to a technical-rational interpretation. The leader as technician is as potentially dangerous as the leader as hero. Clearly, there needs to be a balance between leadership as a set of technical skills and leadership as an art rooted in relationships, imagination and moral purpose.

Is the Anglophone world in thrall to the idea of the hero-leader?

Is this a cultural issue or a manifestation of a dependency culture?

Do we still believe that charisma is a helpful concept in talking about leadership in education?

What are the implications of the move towards academisation and increased collaboration for our understanding of effective leadership?

Can leadership be reduced to a set of technical skills?

In their study of the potential implications of the development of various types of technology on the nature, status and work of professionals, Susskind and Susskind (2015: 32) identify a number of key questions:

1. Might there be entirely new ways of organising professional work that are more affordable, more accessible and perhaps more conducive to an increase in quality than traditional approaches?
2. Does it follow that all the work that our professionals currently do can only be undertaken by licensed experts?
3. To what extent do we actually trust professionals to admit that their services could be delivered differently?
4. Are our professions fit for purpose? Are they serving our societies well?

If the word ‘professional’ is replaced with ‘leaders’ then a powerful and potentially challenging critique begins to emerge. This critique is powerfully expressed in the conclusion of their analysis in which they see two possible ways forward:

One leads to a society in which practical expertise is a shared online resource, freely available and maintained in a collaborative spirit. The other route leads to a society in which this knowledge and experience may be available online, but is owned and controlled by providers. (Susskind and Susskind 2015: 307)

This is the essential dilemma about the nature of leadership: is it to be seen as a collective capacity working through shared ownership and interdependency, or is it about control and the exercise of power? Brown (2014: 9) extends this critique of a world dominated by an essentially historical view of leadership:

‘Strong’ leadership is, then, generally taken to signify an individual concentrating power in his or her own hands and wielding it decisively. Yet the more power and authority is accumulated in just one leader’s hands, the more that leader comes to believe in his or her unrivalled judgement and indispensability.

An important corollary of this, Brown argues, is that leaders are overwhelmed by the number of decisions they are required to take and so either delegate inappropriately or make rushed decisions on the basis of inadequate evidence. Strong leaders are often guilty of the rationalistic fallacy – the belief that the world is controllable, predictable and essentially linear. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Leadership is messy and swampy and the idea that effective leaders can occupy the high ground and actually control their world is part of the mythology of strong leadership.

Brown goes on to make the case for moving away from the emphasis on the leader to recognising that they ‘must be able to appeal to emotion, sharing in the sense of identity of their party or group’ (Brown 2014: 61). This is about much more than building effective teams, working through consensus or developing quality relationships. Rather, it is about moving away from focusing on the leader and questioning the very concept of the leader-centric organisation. For Haslam et al. (2011: 17) leadership is too often seen:

as a noun rather than as a verb, something that leaders possess rather than as a process in which they are participants … leader-centricity tends to obscure, if not completely overlook, the role that followers play.

An interesting example of the cultural implications of a leader-centricity is the way in which orchestral conductors are perceived. The most famous (but not all) seem to be characterised by a combination of supreme musicianship and massive egos. There is no doubt that individual conductors can make an enormous difference to a performance – the difference between a competent performance and a life-changing event. And yet orchestral musicians are extraordinarily technically accomplished; most, if not all, are capable of solo performances of the highest standard. So, is the conductor just another manifestation of the need to have a leader rather than explore different ways of working? Consider the following characteristics of the work of professional orchestral musicians:

• Recruitment to a great orchestra requires the highest possible combination of technical mastery and musicianship.
• Each section...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Why leadership?
• Chapter 2: Creating a preferred future – leading change
• Chapter 3: Leadership as a moral activity
• Chapter 4: Learning as the core purpose of school leadership
• Chapter 5: Leading through collaboration and cooperation
• Chapter 6: Building capacity – sharing leadership
• Chapter 7: Leading through relationships
• Chapter 8: Leadership and personal resilience
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• About the Authors
• Copyright