EQ Australia

Violets and rosewater

I wonder if other people have noticed that as soon as you are appointed to an organisational leadership position, a number of major changes occur. Your utterances take on extraordinary wisdom and sophistication. Your judgement is immeasurably enhanced. You can see into the future with uncanny accuracy. You understand the inner workings of your staff members, and can easily anticipate their wishes. You effortlessly outmanoeuvre people in negotiation, and they are grateful for the opportunity to learn from you. You amaze all about you with your insight, compassion and spiritual depth. You scale unimaginable heights of human intelligence and capacity, as well as displaying Gandhi-like levels of humility. You become tremendously good-looking. You no longer have bad hair days. You exude a fragrance of violets and rosewater. Most importantly of all, your jokes become funnier.

Are you principals listening? Is this how it works in schools? The reason you are missing out on the valuable benefits experienced by most leaders is that in schools we mostly misunderstand leadership. If I were to summarise what I see as current wisdom about educational leadership, it would come down to four propositions, each of which is wrong:

Power in schools should be shared.
In a school, everyone is (should be) a leader.
Delegation represents the sharing of power.
The best model for schools is the leadership team.

These mistakes all arise from the same source. They all rest on forgetting that leadership is about the exercise of power. Let me ask you a question: If you had the power to make your school work highly effectively, to ensure that staff were committed and productive, that students were all highly successful, why would you share that power? What would you hope to gain by sharing?

The answer, and here I follow Macchiavelli, is that you would only do so to increase your power. You would share power because you don¹t have it. Changes in leadership represent an attempt to retain power in the face of social shifts. We have seen a change in style, reflecting what now works in the exercise of power. The real change is a movement from authoritarian styles to communicative and consultative styles, from power exercised directly to power exercised indirectly.

So delegation is not aimed at sharing power, but enhancing it. This is because the person to whom responsibility is delegated feels much more engaged with the task than if the leader issued an instruction. That engagement means greater effectiveness.

What is occurring here is greater subtlety and sophistication in the use of power, and in its extension across the organisation. Leaders have found new techniques by which they get their own way. It is only leaders who misunderstand the changes who find themselves sharing power or losing authority.

There is no organisation in which everyone is a leader, which becomes evident when it comes time to take responsibility for a disaster. The only leader left standing when the police or the inspectors arrive is the real leader. Everyone else is busy with paperwork or important meetings. When a really tough decision has to be made (sacking someone, ending a program, changing conditions of employment), that decision will be made by the leader. A smart leader will have a team of people to consult, and to provide advice, because that will engage those individuals in support of the decision. But the team won¹t make the decision.

So lots of people might have leadership roles, broadly defined, but in most organisations there is one formal leader. That person is responsible for everything, and accountable for problems and failures and for fixing those problems and failures. In schools, this is the principal, who is not called the principal for nothing.

Bruce Wilson

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