The more that large scale, sustainable educational reform becomes the agenda, the more that leadership becomes the key. In this article I will argue that ‘the principal as instructional leader’ has been a valuable, but too narrow a solution. Instead, the instructional focus must be embedded in a more comprehensive and fundamental set of characteristics which I call ‘the principal as leader in a culture of change’. I will also argue that to achieve the latter we must address the even deeper matter of ‘leadership and sustainability’.
The emphasis on the principal as instructional leader has been a valuable first step in increasing student learning. For example, Newmann, King and Youngs (2000) found that ‘school capacity’ is the critical variable in affecting instructional quality and corresponding student achievement. At the heart of school capacity was principal leadership that focussed on the development of teachers’ knowledge and skills, professional community, program coherence, and technical resources.
This same model has been extended to the work of entire districts in achieving large scale turnaround in literacy and numeracy. Some of the core strategies for developing the role of the principal as instructional leader are well described by Fink and Resnick (2001). They discuss five mutually reinforcing sets of strategic activities that they have used including: nested learning communities, principal institutes, leadership for instruction, peer learning and individual coaching. The effect is to develop large numbers of principals as instructional leaders, which in turn, serve to increase literacy and mathematics.
Despite these impressive results, they do not represent deep or lasting reforms. Indeed, one can improve literacy and numeracy scores in the short run, while the moral and working conditions of teachers deteriorates over the mid to long run. To accomplish lasting reform we need fundamental transformation in the learning cultures of schools and of the teaching profession itself. In brief, the role of the principal as instructional leader is too narrow a concept to carry the freight of the kinds of reforms that will create the schools we need for the future.
Principal as Leader in a Culture of Change
We are now
beginning to discover that leaders who have deeper and more lasting impact
provide more comprehensive leadership than focussing just on higher standards.
Collins’ (2001) study Good to Great examined 11 businesses that
had a minimum of 15 years of sustained economic performance. Collins identified
the Level 5 Executive Leader who “builds enduring greatness” in
comparison to the Level 4 Effective Leader “who catalyses commitment to a
compelling vision and higher performance standards.”
The Hay group has
been analysing leadership including the characteristics of highly effective
principals. In Australia, for example, they identified thirteen characteristics
across four domains: Driving School Improvement; Delivering Through People;
Building Commitment; and Creating an Educational Vision (the latter included
analytical thinking; and Big Picture thinking) (Hay Group, 1999).
In England, Hay
Management Consultants (2000) compared 200 highly effective principals, with
200 senior executives in business. They found that both groups were equally
impressive and that “the role of headteacher is stretching, by
comparison, to business.” The five domains of leadership they identified
were: Teamwork and Developing Others; Drive and Confidence; Vision and
Accountability; Influencing Tactics and Politics; and Thinking Styles (conceptual
and analytical).
Similarly,
Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee (2002) claim that emotionally intelligent leaders
and emotionally intelligent organizations are essential in complex times. They
identify 18 competencies around four domains: self-awareness, self-management,
social awareness, and relationship management. Such leaders are aware of their
own emotional makeup, are sensitive and inspiring to others, and are able to
deal with day-to-day problems as they work on more fundamental changes in the
culture of the organization.
My point is that
the principal of the future has to be much more attuned to the big picture, and
much more sophisticated at conceptual thinking, and transforming the
organization through people and teams. This, too, was my conclusion when I
examined successful leadership for businesses and in school systems (Fullan,
2001). If the goal is sustainable change in the knowledge society, business and
education leaders have increasingly more in common. This convergence requires a
new mind and action set for leading complex change. Figure 1 depicts this
framework. It consists of personal characteristics of energy/enthusiasm and
hope, and five core components of leadership: moral purpose, understanding
change, relationship building, knowledge creation and sharing and coherence
making. In the following paragraphs I describe the five components,
illustrating each component in action with a reference to a hypothetical
principal whom I will call ‘Culture Change Principal or CCP.
Figure 1
Framework for Leadership
(From
Fullan, 2001)
Moral purpose,
defined broadly as we will see, is one of the five hallmarks of leading in a
culture of change. In addition to the direct goal of making a difference in the
lives of students, moral purpose plays a larger role in transforming and
sustaining system change. Within the organization how leaders treat all others
is also a component of moral purpose. At a larger level, moral purpose means
acting with the intention of making a positive difference in the (social)
environment. Let me be absolutely clear. The goal is system improvement
(all schools in the district). This means that a school principal has to be
almost as concerned about the success of other schools in the district as he or
she is about his/her own school. This is so because sustained improvement
of schools is not possible unless the whole system is moving forward. This
commitment to the social environment is precisely what the best principals must
have (incidentally, the strategies discussed by Fink and Resnick (2001) do
indeed foster shared commitment among principals across the district).
Moral purpose
means closing the gap between high performing schools and lower performing
schools; high performing and lower performing students, by raising the level of
achievement of all, while closing the gap. This is the only way for large
scale, sustainable reform to occur — and it is moral purpose of the
highest order.
Our hypothetical
Cultural Change Principal would behave differently than most principals, even
instructionally focussed ones. Yes, CCP would make it clear that student
learning was paramount, and would monitor it explicitly with all teachers. But
CCP would also be concerned with the bigger picture — how well are other
schools in the district doing; what is the role of public schools in a
democracy; is the gap between high performing and low performing students being
reduced: (a) in my school (b) in our district (c) in the state and nation.
CCP’s moral purpose would also permeate how he/she treats others whether
they be students, teachers, parents, and others. CCP would also be concerned
about the development of other leaders in the school with a view to how
prepared the school would be to go even further after CCP’s tenure as
leader. In short, a Cultural Change Principal would have explicit, deep and
comprehensive moral purpose.
Second, it is
essential for leaders to understand the change process. Moral purpose without
an understanding of the change process is moral martyrdom. Having innovative
ideas, and being good at the change process, is not the same thing. Indeed, the
case can be made that those firmly committed to their own ideas are not
necessarily good change agents because the latter involves developing
commitment with others who may not be so enamoured by the ideas. In Leading
in a Culture of Change I suggested six guidelines for understanding the
process of change: (1) the goal is not to innovate the most, but rather to
innovate selectively with coherence; (2) it is not enough to have the best
ideas, you must work through a process where others assess and come to find
collective meaning and commitment to new ways; (3) appreciate early
difficulties of trying something new — what I call the implementation
dip. It is important to know, for example, that no matter how much
pre-implementation preparation, the first six months or so of implementation
will be bumpy; (4) redefine resistance as a potential positive force. Naysayers
sometimes have good points, and they are crucial concerning the politics of
implementation. This doesn’t mean that you listen to naysayers endlessly,
but that you look for ways to address their concerns; (5) reculturing is the
name of the game. Much change is structural, and superficial. The change
required is in the culture of what people value and how they work together to
accomplish it; (6) never a checklist, always complexity. There is no
step-by-step shortcut to transformation; it involves the hard day-to-day work
of reculturing.
Our Cultural
Change Principal has learned the difference between being an expert in a given
content innovation and being an expert in managing the process of change. CCP
would not make the mistake of assuming the best ideas would carry the day. CCP
would provide opportunities for people to visit other sites using new ideas,
would invite questions (even dissent), and would not expect the change process
to go smoothly in the first few months of implementation. Such a principal
would also push ahead expecting progress within a year having created the
conditions for the process of change to yield results sooner than later.
Third, I found
that the single factor common to successful change is that relationships
improve. If relationships improve, things get better. If they remain the same
or get worse, ground is lost. Thus leaders must be consummate relationship
builders with diverse people and groups — especially with people
different than themselves. This is why emotional intelligence is equal to or
more important than having the best ideas. In complex times, emotional
intelligence is a must.
The Cultural
Change Principal knows, as the Hay Management Consultants (2000) found, that
developing relationships and team building is the most difficult skill set of
all for both business and educational leaders. CCP works on the full range of
emotional intelligence domains, especially self-management of emotions, and
empathy toward diverse others (Goleman et al, 2002). This is not just a matter
of boosting achievement scores for next year, but rather laying the foundation
for years two and beyond. Motivating and energizing a disaffected teacher, and
forging relationships across otherwise disconnected teachers can have a
profound multiplying effect on the overall climate of the organization.
Building relationships is the resource that keeps on giving.
Fourth, the new
work on knowledge creation and sharing is central to effective leadership.
There are several deep insights here. One is that information (of which we have
a glut) only becomes knowledge through a social process. This is why
relationships and professional learning communities are essential. Another is
that organizations must foster knowledge giving as well as knowledge seeking.
We all endorse continuous learning when we say that individuals should
constantly add to their knowledge base, but there will be little to add if
people are not sharing. A norm of contributing one’s knowledge to others
is the key to continuous growth for all.
This is a good
place to take up the relationships between the knowledge society and moral
purpose. Hargreaves (in press) argues forcefully that the knowledge society can
easily become amoral where selfishly seeking new ideas become the draw. For the
knowledge society to thrive on a deep and continuous basis, it must have a
moral compass. The knowledge society and moral purpose (social responsibility
to others and the environment) need each other. It is easy to see why moral
purpose will not go very far without knowledge, but I am also saying that the
knowledge society literally will not sustain itself without moral qualities.
This is not just a value statement; substantively, the technical quality of
knowledge and its usability will be superficial unless it is accompanied by
social and moral depth.
The CCP
exquisitely appreciates that teaching is both an intellectual and moral
profession. This principal constantly reminds teachers that they are engaged in
practising, studying and refining the craft of teaching. Through the sharing of
latest readings, action research, and inquiry groups, CCP models being the lead
learner. Teachers working with a CCP know that they are engaged in the
scientific discovery and refinement of the knowledge base of teaching.
Knowledge creation and sharing fuels moral purpose in schools lead by CCPs.
Finally, since
complex societies inherently generate overload, fragmentation and
non-linearity — in
complexity theory terms that is what they are perennially good at —
effective leaders must always work on connectedness or coherence-making
(Fullan, 1999, 2001). Coherence making is a complex and somewhat elusive
concept. Principals not attuned to leading in a culture of change make the
mistake of seeking external innovations, and taking on too many projects. CCPs
on the other hands, focus on student learning as an integrator, and look for
external ideas that can further the thinking and vision of the school. They
realize that overload and fragmentation are natural tendencies of complex
systems. They appreciate the creative potential of diverse ideas, but they
strive to focus energy and achieve greater alignment. But they also look to the
future preferring to create a culture that has the capacity not to settle on
the solution of the day.
The previous four
capacities help forge coherence through the checks and balances embedded in
their interaction. Leaders with deep moral purpose provide guidance, but they
can also have blinders if their ideas are not challenged through the dynamics
of change, the give and take of relationships, and the ideas generated by new
knowledge. Coherence is part and parcel of complexity and can never be
completely achieved. Leaders in a culture of change value and almost enjoy the
tensions inherent in addressing hard to solve problems because that is where
the greatest accomplishments lie. This clearly places the principal well beyond
the role of instructional leader.
Leadership and Sustainability
Those of us
working on the development of leadership have increasingly turned our attention
to sustainability — the likelihood that the overall system can
continuously regenerate itself in an ever-improving direction. Because little
attention has been paid to sustainability and because the 1990s represented a
decade of neglect of supporting, developing and nurturing new leaders, the dearth
of leadership has reached crisis proportions. Many states, foundations, and
other agencies have made leadership development their number one priority.
My colleague,
Andy Hargreaves, and I have been focussing particularly on the relationship
between leadership and sustainability which we see as the way to large scale
reform. Here I discuss four components of sustainability: (1) leadership and
the (social) environment; (2) learning in context; (3) leaders at many levels
and leadership succession; and (4) the development of the teaching profession.
Here, in other words, I turn to the conditions — policies, programs,
infrastructures — under which principals as leaders in a culture of
change can be produced and sustained in large numbers.
Leadership and
the (Social) Environment
The concept of
sustainability was originally applied to concerns about the depletion of
resources in the physical environment. Our concern is the depletion of
resources in the social and moral environment (see also Hargreaves, in press).
This is an abstract concept, so I want to be as practical as possible here. By
the social/moral environment I include questions of ‘closing the
gap’ of achievement between high and low performers; the development of
all schools in the system; and ultimately, the link to the strength of
democracy in society. Put directly, if individual leadership does not concern
itself with the development of the social/moral environment (as well as the
internal development of the school) not only will the system deteriorate but so
will one’s own organization over time. There are strategies for
cultivating such leadership which essentially involves focusing on the moral
purpose of all leaders, while reinforcing it with interaction across leaders
— interaction which monitors performance (including closing the gap of
achievement) and engages in problem-solving activities therein.
Learning in
Context
Attempting to
recruit and reward good performance is helpful to the organization, but is not
the main point. Providing good training is useful but that, too, is a limited
strategy. Elmore (2000:25) makes a similar observation:
What’s
missing in this view [focusing on talented individuals] is any recognition that
improvement is more a function of learning to do the right thing in the
setting where you work (my emphasis).
Learning in
context, for example, occurs when principals are members of intervisitation
study teams in a district in which they examine real problems and their
solutions as they evolve in their own systems. Learning out of context takes
place when principals go to a workshop or conference. The latter can be
valuable as an input to further development but it is not the kind of applied
learning that really makes a difference.
Learning in the
setting where you work, or learning in context, is the learning with the
greatest payoff because it is more specific (literally applied to the
situation) and because it is social (thereby developing shared and collective
knowledge and commitments). Learning in context is developing leadership and
improving the system as you go. This kind of learning is designed to
simultaneously improve the organization and the (social/moral) context.
Learning in context is related to sustainability because it improves the system
in a way that establishes conditions conducive to continuous development. These
conditions include: opportunities to learn from others on-the-job; the daily
fostering of current and future leaders; the selective retention of good ideas
and best practices; the explicit monitoring of performance, and the like.
Leaders at
Many Levels/Leadership Succession
The organization
cannot flourish (or at least not for long) by the actions of the top leader
alone. The commitment necessary for sustainable improvement must be nurtured up
close in the dailiness of organizational behavior, and for that to happen there
needs to be many leaders around us. There needs to be leaders at many levels.
Learning in context helps to produce such leaders. Furthermore, for leaders to
be able to deal with complex problems (what Heifitz (1994) calls Leadership
Without Easy Answers) they need at least ten years of cumulative
development on the job. Leadership for many, over time, accomplishes just that
in a built-in way. In this sense, ultimately your leadership in a culture of
sustained change will be judged as effective not by who you are as a leader but
by what leadership you leave behind.
This brings us to
leadership succession. As Hargreaves says “Nothing fails to succeed like
succession.” Or the shorter, “Nothing fails like succession.”
There have been massive numbers of studies of leadership, but little attention
to succession. Succession is more likely if there are many leaders at many
levels, but also must be addressed in its own right. Organizations at all
levels must set their sights on continuous improvement, and for that they must
nurture, cultivate, and appoint successive leaders who are moving in a
sustained direction.
The good news for
most of us is that charismatic leaders are a liability for sustained
improvement. Collins’ (2001) compared 11 companies with long-term
financial performance profiles (a minimum of 15 continuous years) with other
companies that made short-term shifts from good to great, but failed to sustain
their gains:
Larger-than-life,
celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated
with taking a company from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great-CEOs came
from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEOs
six times more often (Collins, 2001:10, emphasis in original).
Leaders who built
enduring greatness were not high profile, flashy performers, but rather were
“individuals who blend extreme personal humility with intense
professional will” (p. 21). Sustainability depends on many leaders, and
thus, the qualities of leadership must be attainable by many, not just a few.
The Teaching
Profession
There is a
growing shortage of teachers around the world, and the sustainability worry is
not the massive exodus associated with demographics, but whether or not we can
attract and retain a high quality teaching force. Heroic principals can help
compensate for limits in the profession, but by definition such principals will
be in the minority. More fundamentally, we will not have quality principals on
any scale until we have quality teachers on a large scale, both for reasons of
getting the job done, and in light of the fact that quality teachers (on a
large scale) form the pool for appointing quality principals (on a large
scale).
Once again,
individualistic strategies (signing bonuses, pay hikes, etc) will not work,
unless the conditions of work are conducive to continuous development
and prideful accomplishment. This is decidedly not the case now, and until
improving the working conditions of teachers is addressed we have no chance of
accomplishing large scale, let alone sustainable, improvement.
In England and
Wales, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (2001) just completed a Teacher Workload Study
for the government. Among other things, they found that principals and teachers
work more intensive weeks (but not necessarily more intensive years) than other
comparable managers and professionals. In any case, they conclude that if the
government is to transform the teaching force that:
“an
essential strand will be to reduce teacher workload, foster increased teacher
ownership, and create the capacity to manage change in a sustainable way that
can lay the foundation for improved school and pupil performance in the future
(PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 2001:2)
It is beyond the
scope of this article to discuss what this will entail (there is a pilot
project in England and Wales about to get underway to address these issues). My
point is that principal leadership is an instrument of this transformation (of the
working conditions of teachers), but more to the point of sustainability, the principalship
is a beneficiary because we will only get quality principals across the board
when we have quality teachers across the board.
In conclusion,
the principal as instructional leader has taken us only so far in the quest for
continuous improvement. We now must raise our sights and focus on principals as
leaders in a culture of change and the associated conditions that will make
this possible on a large scale, sustainable basis including the transformation
of the teaching profession. This will require system wide efforts at the level
of schools, communities and districts, as well as radically more enlightened
policies and incentives at the level of the state. Sustainability depends on
it. Never has there been a more precious time to tackle this agenda than the
next five years.
References
Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great:Why
Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t. New York:
Harper Collins.
Elmore, R. (2000). Building a New Structure for School Leadership.
Washington, DC: The Albert Shanker Institute.
Fink, E. & Resnick, L. (2001). Developing
Principals as Instructional Leaders. Phi Delta Kappan. V. 82. pp 598-606.
Fullan, M. (1999). Change Forces: The
Sequel.London: Taylor & Francis/Falmer.
Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a Culture
of Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Goleman, D. Boyatzis, R., McKee, A.
(2002). Primal Leadership. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Hargreaves, A. (in press). Teaching in
the Knowledge Society. New York: Teachers College Press.
The Hay Group, (1999). Excellence in
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& Training.
Hay Management Consultants, (2000).The
Lessons of Leadership. London: Hay Management Consultants Ltd.
Heifetz, R. (1994). Leadership Without Easy Answers.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Newmann, F., King, B., & Youngs, P. (2000). Professional
Development That Addresses School Capacity.
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research
Association.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers (2001). Teacher
Workload Study. London: Department for Education and Skills.