Leading through restructuring

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Chapter 9 Leadership

Like two sides of the same coin, leadership and decision making are inseparable. Leadership cannot be a solo performance. By definition, as we shall see, the only way that leaders can exercise leadership is by working with and through other people, the followers. Thus, leadership is always an ensemble performance. The subject of this chapter, leadership theory, focuses on conceptualizing the range from which one may choose in deciding on a way to engage with others in exercising leadership. Contemporary leadership theory is not neutral in making this behavioral choice: It contends that some ways of working with followers are predictably more effective than others.

On the other side of the coin, decision-making theory focuses on the array of options from which one may choose to implement the leadership theory that has been selected. Decision-making theory is the subject of the next chapter; thus, these two chapters are closely interrelated.

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Adaptive Leadership In today’s fast-paced world dominated by change, the school, and particularly the school leader, must be sensitive to emerging changes in the external environment that call for nimble, deft, rapid responses by the organization. One of the key concepts of organizational theory is the role of change and stability in the environment of the organization in selecting a strategy for leadership.

Certainly, as the pressure to improve the performance of schools has gained momentum and ever-widening support, the need for effective leadership in school administration has been increasingly emphasized. But there are many different and often conflicting ways of thinking about and understanding the nature of leadership. One popular concept or theory of leadership is the time-honored top-down style, which is based on the belief that the best ideas are, or ought to be, found at the higher levels of the organization and are passed down to those at the lower levels, where they are implemented. This traditional understanding of leadership comes to us from the military traditions of ancient Rome, and it is currently exemplified in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.

Those who supported the enactment of this approach to school reform into federal law in 2001 confidently believed that they knew what had to be done in the schools and classrooms to improve the learning of students. Their beliefs are clearly spelled out in the law itself, which includes the required use of phonics in teaching reading, the regular use of standardized tests to monitor learning, the punishing sanctions to be levied against schools that fail to demonstrate improvement in student learning, and the insistence on using instructional methods that are supported by evidence of their effectiveness derived from “scientific research.” Those who

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advocate this exercise of top-down power from Washington, unparalleled in the history of schooling in the United States, tend to describe it as an exercise in educational or political leadership.

Contemporary scholarly thought about leadership, however, is dominated by the recognition that change, complexity, and uncertainty are dominant characteristics of the environment to which organizations today must nimbly adapt. Margaret Wheatley (1999) popularized the term chaos theory in the study of educational organizations and leadership after she studied quantum physics and the science of living systems. Her ideas have introduced the need to find new and better ways to lead under the unstable and unpredictable conditions that confront organizations. Essentially, the leader in these circumstances is confronted with the need to deal with two very different kinds of problems:

Some problems are technical (discrete). They are relatively clear-cut, if not simple, and can be solved by applying technical expertise; the outcome can be predicted with some confidence. Such problems normally can be solved by technically competent individuals and that fact might well favor the use of top-down methods of leadership. Other problems are adaptive (emergent). These problems, by definition, are so complex and involve so many poorly understood factors that the outcomes of any course of action are unpredictable (Heifetz, 1994). Common examples of adaptive problems include the reduction of crime, the reduction of poverty, and the implementation of educational reform. Solving these kinds of problems requires leadership methods that make the knowledge of many people at various levels in the organization accessible and that facilitate the involvement and cooperation of these people in leadership processes. Therefore, leadership in dealing with adaptive problems, as we shall explain more fully in this chapter, requires collaboration between and

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among many individuals over time in an iterative process. Heifetz and Linsky (2002) added that adaptive problems

require experiments, new discoveries, and adjustments from numerous places in the organization or community. Without learning new ways—changing attitudes, value, and behaviors—people cannot make the adaptive leap necessary to thrive in the new environment. The sustainability of change depends on having the people with the problem internalizing the change itself. (p. 13)

In the next chapter, we discuss decision-making processes involving discrete (technical) and emergent (adaptive) problems. Many problems confronting schools today, particularly problems of school reform, are clearly adaptive problems and require adaptive leadership concepts and techniques that are discussed in this chapter. But first we need to review some fundamentals of leadership. The literature is replete with discussions about the dichotomy between leadership and management, so this is where we will begin.

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Leadership and Management The rhetoric of reform contends that U.S. schools require leadership, not “mere management.” This point suggests that there is a difference between management and leadership and that they are mutually exclusive. This view correctly derives from the fact that one manages things, not people, and one leads people, not things. We manage finances, inventories, and programs, for example, but we lead people. There is a qualitative difference between managing and leading and, some contend, they are mutually exclusive. Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus (1985), for example, have told us that “managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing” (p. 15). Some blame much of our present dearth of educational leadership on the existence of a managerial mystique, long promoted by schools of business as well as schools of education, that taught managers to pay attention to structures, roles, and indirect forms of communications; to ignore the ideas and emotions of people; and to avoid direct involvement of others in leadership. The result has been a professionalization of management that deflected attention from the real business of schools, which is teaching, and conceptualized leadership as an emphasis on rules, plans, management controls, and operating procedures.

This mistake often manifests itself in the language of those who confuse schooling and teaching with “the delivery of educational services,” and who do so with the cool detachment that a merchant might use to speak of the distribution of goods or the manager of a fast-food restaurant might use to describe the essence of serving food. Thus, in schools, we too often see

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an emphasis on doing things right, at the expense of doing the right things. In schools, improvement plans become substitutes for improvement outcomes. Scores on teacher-appraisal systems become substitutes for good teaching. Accumulation of credits in courses and inservice workshops become a substitute for changes in practice. Discipline plans become substitutes for student control. Leadership styles become substitutes for purpose and substance. Congeniality becomes a substitute for collegiality. Cooperation becomes a substitute for commitment. Compliance becomes a substitute for results. (Sergiovanni, 1992, p. 4)

There is little question that as the U.S. public school enterprise became markedly more bureaucratized in the decades from 1945 to 1985, emphasis was placed on the bureaucratic concept of leadership, which we now call management. There is also little question that this myopic focus needs to be corrected, that leadership is badly needed in educational institutions at all levels. But we must be cautious about substituting management-bashing for leadership.

Educational leaders must—as must all leaders—be able to manage. John Gardner (1989) rightly pointed out that leaders often must allocate resources, deal with budgets, and organize the enterprise to enable people to do the work necessary to move the organization toward its vision. He concluded, therefore, that leaders need to be skilled managers, able to deal with the mundane inner workings of organizational life that must be attended to if the vision is to be realized.

Schools are still largely organized and administered as bureaucracies or, as the contemporary pejorative expression has it, using the factory as a model. There is little question that most educational administrators conceptualize their work largely in terms of management of operational routines. Clearly, this emphasis has tended to thwart the development of instructional leadership in schools while emphasizing management.

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Therefore, U.S. schools are generally in need of more and better leadership. But it is false to argue that principals should be leaders, not managers, because they need to be both.

One of the most common criticisms of educational administrators in the literature on school reform is the charge that they tend to manipulate followers, often by using a veneer of seemingly participative involvement. By indirection, these administrators get followers to pursue ends that the administrators seek while seeming to act on the followers’ intentions. Through this manipulation, those who are in power maintain their power, whereas followers are induced to believe that the arrangement is appropriate and legitimate, if not inevitable. Teachers, deeply socialized into the traditional ways of schools—having participated in them since they were 5 years old—generally accept the hierarchical power of principals and superintendents as a reality of life that is both inevitable and legitimate. It is commonplace for teachers who have had their views brushed aside to say to the principal, “Well, just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll try my best to do it.” This hierarchical power of organizational leaders is an important concept for administrators to understand, and we now turn our attention to the use of power in leadership.

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Power and Leadership There is a vast amount of research on leadership; the literature contains hundreds of definitions of leadership. However, there is general agreement on two factors:

1. Leadership is a group function: It occurs only when two or more people interact.

2. Leaders intentionally seek to influence the behavior of other people.

Thus, any concept of leadership deals with exercising influence on others through social interaction. To understand leadership, we must examine the nature and quality of the social interactions involved. The heart of the matter is power: What kind of power is involved, and how is it exercised?

One must understand that those who lead are necessarily powerful people because power is the basic energy for initiating and sustaining action that translates intention into reality when people try to work collaboratively (Bennis & Nanus, 1985). One cannot lead and be powerless. But the exercise of power is not necessarily oppression—indeed, it cannot be oppressive—in the exercise of leadership as it is being discussed here. Let us explain.

There are different kinds of power through which one may attempt to influence others, and they come from different sources. Understanding leadership requires one to understand the difference between the power of those who lead and the power of those who command. The two are frequently confused with one another. The difference between leadership and command lies in the sources from which power is derived.

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Leadership Different from Command

Those who occupy official positions in the hierarchy of an organization exercise vested authority, which is the legitimate right to command. Vested authority rests on legal power that is customarily granted to official positions in the hierarchy such as dean, superintendent, or principal. Because the legal power of office is granted by those higher in the hierarchy, subordinates have no control over it and must yield to it, at least in theory. In practice, of course, such absolute power is rarely found in U.S. educational organizations. When absolute command is exercised, it is often viewed as oppression. Teachers’ unions, for example, were created expressly to mediate and limit the arbitrary exercise of power of school boards and school district administrators over teachers; there is no doubt that they have generally been highly effective.

The power of leaders, on the other hand, is voluntarily granted by followers who accept the leader’s influence and direction by shared agreement, no matter how informally the agreement is reached. Leaders do not wield legal power vested in an official office; rather, they exercise power that followers have willingly entrusted to them. Why do followers entrust power to leaders? Often, and perhaps at the highest level, because the followers are drawn to the ideas of the leader, because they share the values and beliefs of the leader, and because they are convinced that the leader can represent the followers well in the inevitable conflict with others for control of resources to achieve what the leader and the followers are bound in mutual commitment to achieve.

The key to understanding the difference between the power of officeholders and the power of leaders lies in who controls the power. Followers can, and often do, withdraw the support that they have voluntarily entrusted to the leader. They can also voluntarily increase their grant of support, which

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increases the power of the leader. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, is generally acknowledged as one of the great and powerful leaders of the twentieth century, yet he had little legal authority to make his followers do anything. Nevertheless, Dr. King had extraordinary power to influence the behavior of followers and ultimately the course of the nation.

What Dr. King did have was ideas, a set of values and beliefs, and a clear vision of a better, more just, more morally perfect future that embodied all of these ideas and values. It was the intense wish of his followers to share in achieving these goals that motivated them to empower him with their strong, active support. Thus, Dr. King was a very powerful man who could mobilize vast numbers of people for a common purpose and set in motion momentous events, yet he was no oppressor. He had learned much about leadership from studying Mohandas Gandhi, who was a master of the art. Gandhi’s work stands as a monument to the effectiveness of leadership: He emerged victorious in 1947 from head-to-head confrontation with the determined oppression of seemingly invincible forces of entrenched colonialism.

Position power, such as that of a superintendent of schools or a school principal, provides the officeholder in the hierarchy with legal authority for at least the potential for forcible domination and coercion. This is not leadership; it is superordination. We must distinguish between the two:

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The source of superordination is vested authority [while] the source of leadership is entrusted authority. Authority is vested in a superordinate when power resides in the institution, and obedience is owed the superordinate by the subordinate in virtue of the role each occupies, roles the subordinate cannot alter.

Authority is entrusted to a leader when power resides in the followers themselves, and cooperation is granted the leader by the follower . . . a judgment . . . the follower can alter. The superordinate may legitimately compel subordination; the leader can legitimately only elicit followership. The relationship between subordinate and superordinate is compulsory, between follower and leader voluntary. (Getzels, 1973, pp. 16–17)

Although they do exercise various kinds of power, leaders engage with followers in seeking to achieve not only the goals of the leader but also significant goals of the followers. Thus, “[l]eadership over human beings . . . is exercised when persons with certain purposes mobilize, in competition or in conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological and other resources so as to arouse and satisfy the motives of followers” (Burns, 1978, p. 18). This definition of leadership by James MacGregor Burns is as good a definition as we have at this time.

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Power Defined

Power is commonly considered to be the capacity to influence others (Louis, 1986), and different kinds of power can be used to exercise that influence. The classic, generally accepted definition of power identifies five kinds, or sources, of power, as described by John French and Bertram Raven (1959):

Reward power. Controlling rewards that will induce others to comply with the power wielder’s wishes Coercive power. Having control of potentially punishing resources that will induce others to avoid them Expert power. Having knowledge that others want for themselves so much that they will be induced to comply with the power wielder and thus acquire the knowledge or benefit from it Legitimate power. Having authority conferred by holding a position in an organization that is recognized by others as having a legitimate right to obedience Referent power. Personal charisma of the power holder, or ideas and beliefs so admired by others that they are induced by the opportunity to associate with the power holder and, as far as possible, to become more like him or her

The strength of the leader’s power depends on the range of the sources of power drawn on. Leaders who draw on one source of power are inherently weaker than those who draw on multiple sources of power. Especially since the advent of teachers’ unions and the broadening judicial interpretations of the constitutional rights of teachers, many school principals perceive that their power to lead has been undercut. The official power inherent in the office to coerce teachers into compliance has waned markedly. Although the power to control their compensation also waned in the 1980s and

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1990s, with NCLB and Race to the Top (RTTT) mandates to use test scores in teacher evaluation, we are again seeing the power to control compensation increase. In general, however, the degradation of the coercive power of principals has increased the need for leadership. Strong school leaders still have access to significant sources of power:

Many teachers find helping behavior from principals to be highly rewarding if it is nonjudgmental, supportive, collaborative, and caring in the tradition of self-development (McClelland, 1975). When they find such behavior by the principal rewarding enough, their support for the principal increases, and the principal’s power to lead increases as a result. Teachers continue to recognize the authority of official positions in the organization because they value the organization. They largely defer to the legitimate power of those occupying official positions in the hierarchy of the organization. Teachers generally resent and reject principals who pose as pedagogical experts by demanding that lesson plans be submitted for prior approval and principals who conduct critiques of observed teaching in the paternalistic, judgmental manner that they may think appropriate for technical experts. However, teachers view favorably support from principals for fresh ideas. Teachers tend to recognize and see as powerful those principals who are expert in using collaborative, collegial methods of working together to identify and solve mutual problems. Such methods are personally rewarding to teachers at the higher levels of Maslow’s concept of motivation (see Chapter 5 ) and facilitate continuing personal self-growth. Principals who have fresh, exciting ideas—who have a vision of the future—that others embrace and want to share are building referent power. Teachers tend to admire principals who express their vision coherently and vividly; who inspire enthusiasm; who involve others in dialogue intended to mold and develop the ideas; and who cause them

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to see a connection between the vision and their own desire to achieve something meaningful, to be part of a new and better future that is unfolding. This is an important source of power for principals who would be leaders.

These two kinds of power—position power and the authority voluntarily granted to leaders by followers—are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A university dean may have considerable legal clout in decisions regarding reappointment and tenure yet at the same time have power that comes from strong support of a leader by the faculty. The litmus test is who controls the grant of power: A dean who loses the support of the faculty will also have lost considerable power to influence followers and get things done even though his or her official position remains undiminished. Presidents of the United States combine the official power of office with the power from supporters who willingly accord them great power. For example, the collapse of Richard Nixon’s presidency after Watergate had little to do with the official legal power of the office of the president; without the support of followers, his position in office was untenable.

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Two-Factor Leadership Theory Abandoned Most of the formalistic theorizing that dominated the study of educational leadership in the 1960s to the 1990s has been largely abandoned. Instead, the seminal insights of Burns, which we have been discussing, gave rise to a new understanding of leadership and have gained ascendancy. The approach prior to Burns’s work, which was studied by many present-day educational administrators, generally defined the behavior of leaders in two dimensions:

One dimension was the emphasis that the leader gives to getting the job done. This was often called initiating structure because it often involves structuring the work: delineating the relationship between the leader and the members of the work group; specifying the tasks to be performed; and endeavoring to establish well-defined patterns of organization, channels of communication, methods of procedure, scheduling, and designating responsibilities. It was also often called production emphasis or task emphasis, for obvious reasons. The other dimension was the emphasis that the leader gives to developing friendship, mutual trust, respect, and warmth in relationships between the leader and followers. These behaviors were usually labeled consideration or concern for people (Halpin, 1966).

Bernard Bass spoke of leaders as tending to be either “follower focused” (i.e., emphasizing concern for people) or “task focused” (i.e., emphasizing rules and procedures for getting the task done):

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A task-focused leader initiates structure, provides the information, determines what is to be done, issues the rules, promises rewards for compliance, and threatens punishments for disobedience. The follower-focused leader solicits advice, opinions, and information from followers and checks decisions or shares decision making with followers. The . . . task-focused leader uses his or her power to obtain compliance with what the leader has decided. The follower-focused leader uses his or her power to set the constraints within which followers are encouraged to join in deciding what is to be done. (Bass, 1981)

This two-dimensional theory held that leadership consists of a mix of these two kinds of behavior and that effectiveness as a leader depends on choosing the right blend in various kinds of situations. The general tendency is for individuals to favor one of these behavioral orientations while placing less emphasis on the other. It would be almost impossible, in U.S. schools at least, for a leader to lack completely both of the two behavioral dimensions of leadership. Students of leadership who wish to denigrate this concept of leader behavior, which has fallen into disrepute in academic circles, often achieve their purposes by reporting that they do not find leaders who are always task-oriented or always people-oriented.

In the two-dimensional approach to understanding leadership, great emphasis was given to leadership style. For example, one commonly hears complaints that educational leaders in the past emphasized the task, or managerial, dimension of leader behavior—which is often called the autocratic leadership style—and few emphasized the consideration dimension—which defines the democratic style of leadership. Thus, individual styles of various leaders were described as tending to be autocratic or democratic, task-oriented or people-oriented, directive or collegial, and one could adopt a leadership style thought to be appropriate to the leader’s personality, on the one hand, or the situation in which the leader works, on the other. All of this emanated from efforts to reduce the

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study of leadership to a science, and therein lay its weakness. In education today, recognition is rapidly growing that leadership cannot be reduced to formulas and prescriptions but must be attuned to the human variables and confusions that normally abound in busy, complex, and contradictory—that is, messy—human organizations.

For readers who want to learn more about some of the most popular two- factor theories of leadership, we suggest the following theories and the primary authors associated with each theory:

The Ohio State Leadership Studies and the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire (LBDQ) (Hemphill & Coons, 1957; Stogdill, 1974) The Managerial Grid (Blake & Mouton, 1978) Situational leadership theory (Hersey, Blanchard, & Johnson, 1996) Contingency leadership theory (Fiedler, 1967)

For a thorough description of these and other leadership theories, we recommend Peter Northouse (2010). Northouse’s book is about as complete a listing of leadership theories as you can find, and it includes cases and questionnaires for each major theory.

Leadership As A Relationship With Followers Whe

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