Reflections on the Context of Leadership: Assignment 3
Royal Roads University
MAELM 501
August 19, 2012
Simon Blakesley
Reflections on the Context of Leadership
There are countless ways to approach leadership. How well leaders are able to apply the appropriate method to the appropriate situation is what determines their effect. To make such decisions, leaders must assess the purpose and value of the tasks set before them, understand the attributes and interests of the learners, know themselves and the people around them. All of these skills are dependent on being able to accurately determine the significance of context.
Assessing Purpose and Value
Leaders are responsible for leading change. The wise leader carefully considers the purpose and value of that change before attempting to implement it. In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), Steven Covey states: “It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy—very busy—without being very effective” (Habit 2, ebook). I would argue that people know this, at least intrinsically. I certainly keep it in mind when I am teaching my adult students: if the purpose and value of knowledge is not readily apparent, they are not interested in learning.
Knowing that their efforts to learn will reward them with a skill that will improve their employability is the main motivation for most of my students. Relating tasks to the learner not only helps them understand why they should move beyond status quo, it also helps the leader determine whether the change itself needs to be tailored to fit the status quo before initiating it. (Marzano et al., 2005, p.81). It also helps to determine how to best communicate this change. Should the task be distributed? If so, amongst whom? Does the task require situational leadership or transactional leadership or transformational leadership or some other style or combination of styles of leadership? Considering purpose and value will help determine the most effective approach. There is no one way to implement change.
Determining the Context of Situation
Further complicating the defining of effective leadership is that it is dependent on the people being led. Consider my leadership role as a married mother of two school aged children. I have an upcoming task to lead the family through a summer vacation filled with happy memories and growth through adventure while avoiding serious injury. Consider my next-door neighbour. She is also a wife and mother of two planning a summer vacation road trip to visit relatives in Alberta. Both families have similar interests, education, and income. Will their vacation differ from ours? Yes. They are different people with different interests, abilities and biology. Our matching 2002 Passat wagons are similar at best, each having been driven on different roads by different people. Road conditions change continually. What works for one family may not work for another, even if the variables are very similar situation. The successful leader will be prepared to adapt to these variables. In Learning as a Way of Being (1996), Peter Vaill “uses the expression permanent white water to describe the complex, turbulent, changing environment in which we are al trying to operate” (p.4). He defines them as surprising, complex, ill-structured, often costly, and difficult to reproduce (pp. 10-14). Leadership involves responding to the situation as it is. Like family holidays, leadership is contextual.
Contextualizing Communication
Simply choosing to adapt does not make change happen. The change must be communicated. Leaders who want to implement change need to first fully understand the change they are trying to make. Changing course halfway through is disruptive and will decrease confidence in the leaders’ abilities. Once the change is fully understood, leaders must clarify the purpose and value to the followers. This can be a complex task because the collective is made up of individuals with idiosyncratic needs and communication styles and there is a marked difference between telling and teaching. Finally, the leaders need to motivate. Even if communication were entire accurate, there remain the task of motivating followers to implement the change. There are myriad approaches to this task and choosing the appropriate on will depend on the context of the worker and the nature of the work. In my work as a teacher, I can sometimes simply tell someone to do something (hand this in next Tuesday), and sometimes I need to involve the student in the process (set due date in conference with student). Deciding factors are the nature of the assignment, the learning style of the student, and importance of life context (national holiday, sick child, etc.). All theories of leadership that I have read connect to skills and modes of communication. Indeed, the context of communication is the very core of leadership. It is also why the effects of leadership are so difficult to measure.
Understanding the Learner
I grew up in a supportive but serious family and had everything a young Canadian girl could reasonably ask for. Nevertheless, my early high school career was fraught with antisocial behavior. At first it was my aim simply to disrupt the class. Then I moved on to antagonizing the teachers. Eventually I took aim at the actual building itself. In the end, I was compelled to seek education elsewhere.
I chose an alternative school because I thought it would be easy. My folly became clear during the school admission interview. It was a revelation that I was being interviewed by a committee made up of teachers and students. I was further stunned to find that the teachers were called by their first names, the significance of which, to an angry disempowered adolescent, I cannot underemphasize.
This social dynamic also marked an intellectual turning point. The course content was worldly, the discussion was inclusive, and the assignments were challenging and relevant. My disruptive behavior was replaced with a keen desire to learn and a feeling of social responsibility that had me organizing coffee houses, running for student council, and taking part in the admissions committee that marked the beginning of my path to positive citizenship. In my previous two years of school I had missed more days that I had attended. Over the same time in my new school, I missed half of one day. I graduated with honors.
This all happened many years ago, but these events are an important part of who I have become. A desire to contribute cooperative, open, and honest community informs my interactions with family, neighbours, colleagues, and students. This experience, handed to me so casually, led me to teaching because it taught me to recognize potential. I do not doubt that it will be the very foundation of my identity as a principal. The simple act of being recognized and heard created profound change. I see echoes of the power of this social dynamic in several leadership styles outlined by Robert Marzano, Timothy Waters & Brian McNulty in School Leadership that Works: From Research to Results (2005).
Transformational Leadership espouses “individual consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence” (Marzano, Waters & McNulty, 2005, p. 14), all of which were influential factors leading my teenage journey from hoodlum to hero. The trust building as outlined in Total Quality Management (Edward Deming, 1986) is described as “the process of establishing respect and instilling faith into followers based on leader integrity, honesty, and openness” (Sosik & Dionne in Marzano, Waters & McNulty, p.16). The integrity of the alternative school culture embedded in its transparent, reliable and democratic systems allowed me to have my say. Servant Leadership (Robert Greenleaf, 1970, 1977) emphasizes listening. Indeed the feeling of being heard was perhaps the most import element of my transformation. In the end, it was not just me who was changed. The change in me was returned in kind to the group, which was then given back to me and so on in a dialectic creation of civility in the community.
P.M. Forni, director of The Civility Initiative at John Hopkins University, identifies individualism and lack of restraint, low self-esteem, a feeling of injustice, and anonymity as some causes of decreased civility in The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude (2008). These causes were present in me, and they were present in many students at Killarney High School in East Vancouver where principal David Deerpak has recently transformed an exceptionally dysfunctional school culture into a positive learning community by connecting students to each other and their adult leaders. Deerpak’s success is attributed to tough looks, and tough love (Kate Hammer, 2012). There was no democracy or transparency in his approach, and only the students were held accountable. His politics seem antithetical to that of the alternative school that I attended, but civility was achieved in both contexts.
Learning from the Learner
I have been feeling quite confident about my intrinsic connection to an approach to leading that spreads across different leadership styles. Reading about First-Order Change (Marzano et al., 2005) reinforced my perception when I saw that Culture, defined as “building and maintaining a culture where a common language is employed, ideas are shared, and staff members operate within the norms of cooperation” (p.71) was second on the list of responsibilities (p. 69). It was the position of Culture in Second-Order Change (p. 70) that has me reconsidering my thoughts and realizing the weight in the idea that leadership is contextual. If Marzano et al. are right, and I am inclined to agree with their logic, I have considerable reflection to do before I am prepared to lead disruptive change. I need to consider how I will respond when Culture, along with closely related Input, and Communication are not just bumped off the list of responsibilities, they are actually compromised (p. 73). Implementing Second-Order Change will be challenging for me even if I do take proactive measures, but if I don’t, I predict they will be marked by failure both professional and personal. Regardless of outcome, it is clear that every issue is unique and effective leaders take stock of context before taking action. Understanding the nature of change will help prepare me not to confuse the ideal for the real, a situation that Argyris and Schøn warn against: “such a discrepancy rapidly erodes trust in the leader’s fitness to manage” (in Marzano et al., 2005, p.73). The depth of this understanding, however, would be shallow without the context of self-knowledge.
Understanding Self
My recent Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment (1998), revealed that I show slight preferences in all categories except Intuition, for which I show a clear preference. My initial response was on of dismay: I had been anticipating the calming reassurance of unhindered direction. I felt slighted by results that portrayed me as equivocal. Further disheartening, I did not fully agree that I was an INTP. I feel more like an ENFP, which could be explained by my slight preferences except that the category that I felt least described me was the one for which I showed a clear preference.
In efforts to understand these confounding results, I examined more closely the 98 questions that purported to identify my personality. There was a question that came up repeatedly that I had trouble answering. It asked about whether I preferred to have a plan for a day’s outing or whether I preferred to play it by ear. I had trouble answering because, in the context of my very busy life, I yearn for days without itineraries. A day without an agenda frees me from the stress of a too-long to-do list. My context means that I prefer a day without a set plan, but in reality my actions are guided by set intentions. Were my life unencumbered by rewarding work, enlightening education, and cherished people, I would make many plans of action because I could easily allow for lazy days where I could follow my muse. The truth is, I prefer to know the parameters of any idea before I set to work unraveling its meaning.
If this is true, I am left with an even less clear idea of my preferences. I have reconsidered my first, rather negative response to slight preference. Slight preference shows not over-weaning indecisiveness but considerable flexibility because I recognize the value of all arenas of thought. Without a strong preference, I can accommodate and adopt a variety of leadership styles. Situational Leadership would requires me to “adapt [my] leadership behavior to followers’ ‘maturity’ (Marzano et al. 2005, p.17). Servant Leadership lends itself to a leader without strong bias in thinking style because empathy is the foundation of helping people. If I am very clearly a Thinker, it will be challenging for me to facilitate conflict resolution and professional excellence in someone who is very much a Feeler because our communication styles will naturally be at odds.
Conclusion
In the end, all of this thinking must be considered in context. “Hallinger and Heck (1996a) concluded that leadership has limited but significant effects in schools” (Lindahl, 2007, p. 322). I am left wondering how significant a limited effect can be. Harris (2005) states “that a relationship exists between school leadership and school improvement, ‘but its exact nature is still unclear’ (p.255 in Lindahl, 2007, p.322). It seems foolhardy not to question the value of research on educational leadership when experts do not even agree on whether or to what degree a principal can affect student achievement because of “the highly contextual nature of school improvement processes and of the leadership necessary to guide them”(Lindahl, 2007, p.322). The key is in considering the theory and weighing it in light of the context of the situation where I find myself in a leadership role. I cannot change whether a person is naturally outgoing of reserved, but I can attempt to enhance a working relationship by designing solutions that focus on their natural tendencies.
The study of leadership is theoretical. In approaching leadership tangibly, I can look within myself and take thoughtful and honest inventory of my strengths and weaknesses. On my weaknesses, I can work and attempt to make advancements. My strengths I can refine so that I don’t become too reliant on them. Working with Group 5 during the MAELM residency revealed that my inherent ability to generate ideas and express interpretations would better serve the group if I applied it less impulsively. This lesson was learned not by just paying attention to my own communication styles but by becoming aware of the communication styles of the people around me. Leading is following because leaders need to pay attention to everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, not just their own. All leaders are dependent on the skills and circumstances of their followers. All leadership is contextual because leaders must respond to nuance of communication and external forces beyond their control.
Next Steps
Thoughtful and honest consideration of my ethics is only a starting point. I need to develop a vocabulary to discuss my approach to moral stewardship so that I can clearly communicate my standards. I hope to mirror this move from theory to application. Along with continued study of theories of leadership, I would like to increase my skills in conflict resolution. What are some strategies for identifying and dealing with passive aggression? How do you lead an unmotivated teacher? What can I learn about interviewing? What do I do when someone is upset with me? How do I break bad news? Which bad news is mine to break? Can I learn these skills from a book? We shall see.
References
Briggs, K. & Myers, I. (1998). MBTI: Self-Scorable Form M. Edmonton, AB: Psychometrics
Covey, S. (1989). The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Retrieved from http://vpl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/2913421038_the_seven_habits_of_highly_effective_people
Forni, P.M. (2008). The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude. New York,NY: St. Martin’s Griffin
Hammer, Kate (2012, June 26) At a Vancouver School, tough love tames a blackboard jungle, The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from http://www.theglobeandmail.com
Lindahl, R.A. (2007). Why is leading school improvement such a difficult process? School
Leadership and Management, 27(4), 319-332 Marzano, Robert, Waters, Timothy, & McNulty, Brian (2005). School Leadership That Works:
From Research to Results. Denver, CO: ACSD Vaill, Peter (1996). Learning as a Way of Being: Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass