Mini Case: Out of the Box Leadership Your superintendent knows that you are in a doctoral program and that you are undoubtedly learning

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d 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 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)

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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.

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Leadership As A Relationship With Followers Whenever we try to lead people, we become part of their environment and therefore part of their equation for organizational behavior, B = f (p • e). Thus, leaders are not merely concerned with the leadership style and techniques that they intend to use but also with the quality and kinds of relationships that they have with followers. Leadership is not something that one does to people, nor is it a manner of behaving toward people; it is working with and through other people to achieve organizational goals.

What distinguishes leaders from other authority figures is the unique relationship between leaders and followers. Leaders relate to followers in ways that

Motivate them to unite with others in sharing a vision of where the organization should be going and how to get it there. Arouse their personal commitment to the effort to envision a better future and then create it. Organize the working environment so that the envisioned goals become central values in the organization. Facilitate the work that followers need to do to transform the vision into reality.

How do leaders accomplish these tasks? That depends, first, on what they think leadership is, which is defined in terms of the character and quality of the relationship between leader and follower. This rapport arises from the bedrock assumptions that the would-be leader holds about people and the

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world in which they work, the world from which all our cultural beliefs and values arise.

Using Douglas McGregor’s concepts, one who accepts Theory X assumptions about followers tends to think about leadership pretty much as the stereotype of the traditional boss overseeing a gang in the field or on the shop floor: issuing orders, checking up, and prodding to keep things moving. One who accepts Theory Y assumptions about people at work tends to think about leadership more in terms of collaborating with others to reach organizational goals and achieve the organization’s mission, sharing enthusiasm for the work to be done, providing help in solving problems, and supporting and encouraging. In the United States today, people working in education who subscribe to Theory X assumptions commonly mask them behind the kind of Theory X soft behavior, which was discussed in Chapter 1 , so they can avoid appearing insensitive and undemocratic. Theory X soft behavior by the leader poses some serious moral and ethical problems, which we will discuss later in this chapter.

The key to understanding leadership, then, lies in understanding your own concept of the human nature of followers and how leaders relate to them. For example, Niccolo Machiavelli’s assumptions about human nature were set forth in his advice to a young man of the ruling class in the fifteenth century. Machiavelli’s treatise, The Prince, once was required reading for students in educational administration and is still widely admired today. It taught that the exercise of leadership by those who inherit positions of power as a privilege of membership in a dominant elite social class required the ruthless exercise of position power, the use of guile and deception when expedient to achieve the leader’s personal agenda, and indifference to the concerns of others.

This Machiavellian view of leadership is still very prevalent although it usually is expressed obliquely in cautious terms and is usually disguised in

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Theory X soft behavior to appear reasonably adapted to the democratic demands of our time. The central idea is that leadership consists largely of commanding and controlling other people. Consider, for example, this observation intended for a mass audience of readers from the management ranks of corporations:

A leader is a leader only insofar as he [sic] has followers. If we want our subordinates to do something and they do not do it, then, plainly, they have not followed our lead. Likewise, if we want our charges to accomplish something, quite apart from how they go about it, and they do not accomplish it, then, again they have not followed our lead. Now these are the only two ways that we can be leaders: we can want certain actions and we can want certain results. The degree in which we get what we want is the measure of our leadership.

A follower is a follower only insofar as he [sic] does what a leader wants in order to please the leader . . . we are all social creatures, and so we want to please the boss . . . Work is done for the boss. We grow for our parents, learn for our teacher, win for our coach. Even the most independent of us presents his [sic] work as a gift for the boss. (Keirsey & Bates, 1984, p. 129)

This statement says a great deal about the writers’ assumptions about the human nature of followers and how leaders relate to them. On the other hand, consider this statement of assumptions about leadership from a modern military perspective by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (as cited in Galloway, 1991):

When you lead in battle you are leading people, human beings. I have seen competent leaders who stood in front of a platoon and all they saw was a platoon. But great leaders stand in front of a platoon and see it as 44 individuals, each of whom has hopes, each of whom has aspirations, each of whom wants to live, each of whom wants to do good. (p. 36)

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This quote expresses a very different view of human nature than was embodied in Max Weber’s now classic work on bureaucracy. Weber’s work first appeared in the early years of the twentieth century and became known in the United States only after World War II when translations from the German were published in English. We discuss Weber’s views in the following section.

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Your Understanding of Human Nature Is Critical

At the turn of the twentieth century, the emergence of giant industrial corporations was transforming society in Europe. Max Weber saw that the old aristocracies could not provide the new kinds of leadership required in the expanding government, business, and industrial organizations of the day. To replace the absolute power inherited by privileged social classes, which was enjoyed by members of the German Junkers of Weber’s day and The Prince of Machiavelli’s day, and to reject the exercise of traditional autocratic rule in modern industrial, commercial, and government organizations that were then emerging around the world, Weber supported the rise of a disciplined and orderly organization composed of offices arranged hierarchically, with legally assigned power and authority descending from the top to the bottom. As discussed in Chapter 3 , Weber approvingly gave this kind of organization a name: bureaucracy.

In contrast to autocratic rule, the “law” of the bureaucratic organization lies in its written rules and regulations, official standard operating procedures, written memos, chain of command, and acceptance of the concepts of hierarchical superordination and subordination. It is a vision of organization that is rational, logical, impersonal, formal, predictable, and systematic, and it reflects beliefs about the nature and needs of the human beings who populate the organization. Bureaucratic theory generally holds that people tend to be motivated by the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Chapter 5 ) with emphasis on pay and benefits, job security, and advancement in rank.

Weber’s work has had enormous influence in establishing and maintaining bureaucracy as the most pervasive and credible organizational concept in

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the world. Yet few who are taught the virtues of bureaucratic organization in their universities understand or even know that it was the same Max Weber, sociologist and theologian, who also wrote powerfully on the Protestant work ethic as a defining characteristic of human nature. Weber was convinced, and convinced many other people at the time, that Protestantism was undergirded by certain fundamental moral and ethical imperatives that were played out in the world of work, the so-called Protestant work ethic, in ways that were superior to those of non-Protestant cultures. Thus, in reality, Weber viewed bureaucracy as embodying and codifying in the world of work certain views of human nature that he believed were inherent in Protestant theology. The two were, in his mind, closely linked.

Let us return to the concept of organizational behavior in which B = f (p • e). In exercising leadership, the leader has an array of options from which to choose in influencing the nature and quality of the organizational environment with which members interact in the course of their daily work. How one chooses depends on one’s understanding of what kinds of behaviors are desirable and sought, on the one hand, and how they are likely to be elicited in the organization’s environment, on the other. If, for example, you think that Machiavelli understood the realities of modern educational organizations, then his advice on leadership will be appealing and appear practical. If, on the other hand, you think that schools are best understood as bureaucracies, then you will do your best to create a bureaucratic environment for people to work in.

However, if you think of people in Theory Y terms, then you will try to create the organizational environment likely to elicit and support the high motivation and high levels of effort that they will find satisfying in their work. Such an environment is growth-enhancing and engages the members of the organization in personal growth and development as well as in organizational growth and development—that is, a healthy state of

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increasing ability to identify and solve its own problems in an ever- changing world. An important part of such an organizational environment is the type of leadership that James MacGregor Burns described as transforming (Burns’s original term, later called transformational or transformative).

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Transformational Leadership The idea of transforming, or transformational, leadership was conceptualized by James MacGregor Burns (1978) and has directly influenced the thinking of scholars ever since. Burns’s insights were later developed and elaborated by Bernard Bass (1985). They have subsequently been used as the basis of research, such as that of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus (1985), Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1983), and Judy B. Rosener (1990), each of whom studied corporate leaders, while Thomas Sergiovanni (1992) used the ideas of transformational leadership to organize a critique of school reform.

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Transformational Leadership Compared and Contrasted with Transactional Leadership

The heart of Burns’s analysis was to compare and contrast traditional transactional leadership with the newer idea of transforming leadership. Having explained that leadership is different from simply wielding power over people, Burns went on to explain that there are two basic types of leadership. In the most commonly used type of leadership, the relationship between leader and followers is based on quid pro quo transactions between them. Transactional educational leaders can and do offer jobs, security, tenure, favorable ratings, and more in exchange for the support, cooperation, and compliance of followers.

In contrast, “the transformational leader looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower. The result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents” (Burns, 1978, p. 4). This evokes a third, and higher level of leadership—the concept of moral leadership that began to receive so much attention in education in the 1990s.

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Moral Leadership

The concept of moral leadership comprises three related ideas:

First, the relationship between the leader and those who are led is not one merely of power but is a genuine sharing of mutual needs, aspirations, and values. The genuineness of this sharing is tested by whether the participation of followers is a matter of choice that is controlled by the followers. Second, the followers have latitude in responding to the initiatives of leaders: They have the ability to make informed choices about who they will follow and why. As we shall explain more fully, the concept of transforming leadership means that followers voluntarily involve themselves in the leadership process. Among other things, followers voluntarily grant power and authority to leaders and are free to withdraw that grant. Therefore, in the highest level of transforming leadership, which is moral leadership, the followers must have access to alternative leaders from whom to choose, and they must have knowledge of alternative plans and programs they can embrace. Third, leaders take responsibility for delivering on the commitments and representations made to followers in negotiating the compact between leader and followers: “Thus, moral leadership is not mere preaching, or the uttering of pieties, or the insistence on social conformity. Moral leadership emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations, and values of followers” (Burns, 1978, p. 4). In this sense, moral leadership is very different from the thin veneer of participation that administrators frequently use to give their relationships with followers some patina of genuine involvement while control remains firmly in the administrators’ hands.

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A Progression

A progression is clearly inherent in the concept of transforming leadership:

At the lowest level of functioning is the exercise of power to exact the compliance of followers, which is not leadership at all. At the entry level of leadership is transactional leadership, wherein the leader and followers bargain with each other to establish a “contract” for working together. At a higher level of functioning is transforming leadership, in which the leaders and followers mutually engage in common cause, joined by their shared aspirations and values. At the highest level is moral leadership, which demands motivating emotional stimuli, such as a shared mission, a sense of mutual purpose, and a covenant of shared values interwoven with the daily life and practices of ordinary people to inspire new and higher levels of commitment and involvement.

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A Process of Growth and Development Through Instructional Leadership

The levels in this progression in transforming leadership increasingly draw on the higher levels of the motivations of followers and, in return, offer increasing opportunities for followers and leaders to grow and develop increasing capacities for effective organizational behavior. Thus, transforming leaders engage the aspirations of followers, tap their motivations, energize their mental and emotional resources, and involve them enthusiastically in the work to be done. This kind of leadership does not merely obtain the compliance of followers; it evokes their personal commitment as they embrace the goals to be achieved as their own, seeing them as an opportunity for a willing investment of their effort. It transforms the roles of both followers and leaders, so they become nearly interdependent; their aspirations, motives, and values merged in mutual commitment to achieve the shared goals. Burns’s focus was political leadership, not educational leadership, and he used Gandhi as one well- known exemplar of both transforming and moral leadership. One also thinks of the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. But such leadership is not limited to those who appear larger than life on the world stage. Many coaches, in various sports ranging from football to tennis, illustrate effective leadership in their work. Indeed, the metaphor of the coach is popular in speaking of leadership in many kinds of organizations. Many who have followed Burns’s scholarly lead have described how readily his concepts of transforming leadership apply to realms other than politics, such as education and business. Increasingly, one finds literature that describes the behavior of people in high-performing schools as being consistent with transformational leadership.

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We know that members of educational organizations thrive on the experience of being part of an organization that is constantly growing in its capacity to detect and solve its own problems. A school having such characteristics is seen by teachers as a successful and effective place in which to work. For example, a substantial body of research, such as Dan Lortie’s classic Schoolteacher (Lortie, 1975), tells us that teachers are highly motivated by feeling successful and effective in their teaching. The more recent body of work by Linda Darling-Hammond (2006; Darling- Hammond & Bransford, 2007; Darling-Hammond & Richardson, 2009) tells us that teachers are successful when they are provided with the necessary resources, such as extensive professional development; and school structures, such as professional learning communities and common planning times. Darling-Hammond also supports National Board Certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) (Sato, Chung Wei, & Darling-Hammond, 2008), a process that emphasizes a commitment to students and their learning, knowledge in the use of assessment practices, teachers being active members of learning communities in their school, and teachers participating in sustained professional development.

From such studies of teaching and learning, one can conclude that an educational leader in a school might seek to foster a culture that facilitates teaching and enhances the likelihood that one will be successful at it, that energizes and applauds the efforts of teachers, that rewards and supports success in teaching, and that celebrates teaching as a central value in the life of the school. This is the result of instructional leadership at its finest. Such a school is likely to have a history that stresses the importance of teaching, heroes who epitomize achievement in teaching, and rituals and ceremonies that celebrate teaching and the successes of teachers. These are likely to be prominent characteristics of the school that are emphasized daily at all levels of the organization. Thus, one can exercise leadership by working with and through teachers to transform the culture of the school

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and, in the process, transform the very ways in which the leader and the teachers relate to one another. It is widely believed that the vehicle for bringing about such a transformation is a vision of the future that is better, more desirable, more compelling, and more personally fulfilling than the reality of the present.

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Implementing Tranformational and Moral Leadership Educational leaders need to be aware of several important concepts when implementing their theory of practice in educational organizations. These concepts should be helpful in providing practical applications of transformational and moral leadership. These concepts are distributed leadership, professional learning communities, parent involvement, and sustainable leadership. We then end this chapter with a discussion of the study of leadership by Marzano, Waters, and McNulty (2005) that has received wide acceptance in providing direction to educational leaders.

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Distributed Leadership

Most organizations to some degree empower members to make decisions. For example, they may have committees that function for a particular purpose, and they are given some level of decision-making authority. In a traditional hierarchical organization, this authority level is minimal. They may have “recommending” authority only, and the official leaders make the decision. The term distributed leadership is used to describe the type of leadership that is used in organizations that purposefully empower teams and individuals to make important decisions. Distributed leadership is defined or used in various ways by researchers, but we like the following definition by Spillane and Diamond (2007) to describe the distributed leadership perspective:

Leadership refers to activities tied to the core work of the organization that are designed by organizational members to influence the motivation, knowledge, affect, or practices of other organizational members. (p. 4)

This definition does not tie leadership to specific individuals in formal leadership positions, such as a school principal. The distributed leadership perspective is a framework for studying leadership and management behaviors and interactions that are “tied to the core work,” which in schools is teaching and learning, and the activities are understood from the context of the leaders, the followers, and the situation in which they occur. A key component of this definition is that leadership is “designed by organizational members:” That is, these activities are purposeful and developed by many, not only by the designated leader, and there is broad- based participation of teams and individuals that is not just simple delegation.

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Professional Learning Communities

From a practical standpoint, we believe it is best to implement distributive leadership by using the concept of a professional learning community (PLC). Peter Senge (1990) popularized the notion of a learning organization in his book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Senge focused on organizations as systems in which leaders seek to bring people together to collaborate on ways to achieve the organization’s goals. Implementation of his five disciplines—personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking—is the bedrock of a learning community. These concepts have been described for applications in schools most notably by Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker (1998). Professional learning communities are a means to distribute leadership throughout the school and they have the following characteristics

1. Shared mission, vision, and values 2. Collective inquiry 3. Collaborative teams 4. Action orientation and experimentation 5. Continuous improvement �. Results orientation

Using these characteristics as a guide, all organizational members together develop or revise the mission, vision, and values of the school that results in a collective commitment to its principles and future direction. Then, individual PLCs are formed around common interests to promote the vision and mission. In schools, these common interests may be grade-level teams, cross-departmental teams to work on interdisciplinary curriculum, subject area teams, and so forth. The PLCs work collaboratively to ask questions about what they are doing, where they are going, and how they

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will get there. Members of PLCs learn together and build the capacity of the school. They question, experiment, collect data, and use results to continually improve the teaching and learning processes that will implement their mission and lead them toward their vision.

So how are schools transformed into PLCs? DuFour and Eaker (1998) tell us that transformation can be achieved through a focus on “the three Cs of sustaining an improvement initiative—communication, collaboration, and culture” (p. 106).

Communication involves the use of many different forms of media and behaviors that inform constituents about the following:

What do we plan for? Focuses attention on current goals and activities. What do we monitor? Identifies what will be monitored and how data will be collected, and shares data with everyone. What questions do we ask? These are the tough questions that focus on the mission and vision, such as the following: Are we working on the important learning processes that help students achieve? What do we model? Everyone models what is important, e.g., the principal actively engages in collaborative teamwork. How do we allocate our time? Time is set aside for the important aspects of a PLC, such as time to collaborate. What do we celebrate? Celebrations broadcast what is valued. What are we willing to confront? Everyone must be willing to confront those who behave in ways that undermine the mission and vision of the school.

Collaboration, the second C, is deliberative. The school’s formal leaders must provide opportunities for groups to work together by building time into the school day. Providing collaborative opportunities is perhaps not the most difficult aspect of developing PLCs, but it is the most important.

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Without collaboration, teachers are isolated in their classrooms, and interaction opportunities occur only in the teachers’ lounge or workroom. Collaborative teams, as indicated above, can be formed according to grade levels or subject areas, on the basis of students who are taught by a group of teachers, by areas of schoolwide emphases, or by areas of professional development.

The third C, culture, is a focus on the values, beliefs, traditions, and norms of the school. Four strategies for affecting and shaping school culture include the following:

1. Articulating, modeling, promoting, and protecting the shared values that have been identified

2. Systematically engaging staff in reflective dialogue that asks them to search for discrepancies between the values they have endorsed and the day-to-day operation of the school

3. Inundating staff with stories that reflect the culture at work 4. Celebrating examples of shared values and progress in the

improvement process with ceremonies and rituals (DuFour & Eaker, 1998, p. 148)

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Parent Involvement

One of the values that should be part of any school is the importance of parents or guardians in the involvement of their children’s education. Parents should be partners with the school and with their children in the educational experience. Researchers have shown that parent involvement is important in improving their children’s achievement. Parents can help motivate their children and help reinforce at home what is important in school. No matter what educational level parents have attained, they can be an important part of the process. Two meta-analyses of 104 research studies on parent involvement confirm the importance of parent involvement. One study of parent involvement at the secondary school level found that family involvement related with higher student achievement across both the general population and minority students (Jeynes, 2007). In another meta-analysis, elementary and middle schools students whose parents were involved in their education

earn higher grades and test scores and enroll in higher level programs, are more likely to be promoted, pass, earn credits, . . . attend school, have better social skills, demonstrate improved behaviors, graduate and pursue post secondary education. (Henderson & Mapp, 2002, p. 7)

These positive results were consistent across all demographic subgroups.

It is clear that parent involvement in schools, including PLCs, is critical, so how should parents be involved? That is, what is meant by parent involvement? One of the national leaders in the movement to involve parents in schools is Joyce Epstein. Her model for parent involvement has six components; we have provided one implementation example for each area:

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1. Parents as providers of the child’s basic needs. Provide parent educa

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