What’s the point of Leadership?

Leadership is one of those words that means a lot of different things to different people.  Even within the field of educational leadership, we find the terms transformational leadership, transactional leadership, servant leadership, pedagogical leadership, charismatic leadership, authentic leadership, influential leadership, participative and task-oriented leadership.  On a bad day I find myself on the brink of asthmatic leadership.  It can all be a bit confusing.  

There are many conceptions of leadership. None of them are ‘the truth’; they are all tools.  This cartoon captures  a partial truth about leadership… it is elusive, and always something to grasp; thinking about it means looking ahead, aware of the gaps between where you are and where you want to be – at least I have found it to be so.  But it’s also slightly misleading, because it is possible to make progress; and in this course you will be offered many powerful tools that we have found useful at the College.  The challenge is to take these tools, learn which ones suit you and your teams, and use, adapt and share these tools for what works for you.

In learning about these tools and habits of thought, I ask you to be constructively critical of everything that you hear.  The magical simplicity of ‘7 Habits’, ‘3 Steps’ or ‘9 Essential Skills’ is more about marketing than anything else.  Be discerning. With that critical caveat, I want to ask you to consider four related concepts which I think are often confused.  

• Status

• Power 

• Official Authority

• Leadership

These are important points and I want to make a few observations.

1. We must not confuse leadership with status.  From the news, and from our own experiences, I suspect we can think of top people who couldn’t lead a squad of seven-year-olds to the ice cream counter.  At its worst, status is about simply being known, and being popular  – as witnessed in celebrity culture.  But – sticking with my theme – if you want to be popular, don’t be a leader, sell ice cream, as the saying goes.  

 

2. Nor should we confuse leadership with power.   Of course, leaders always have some measure and some form of power, but many people with power are without leadership gifts and also without formal titles.  Again, I think we can think of examples from our own lives; in the wider world.   For us, on those occasions where we require someone to do something, we need to ask ourselves if we are exercising power, rather than leadership; for they are different things.  There is sometimes a place for use of power; it can  be used well or badly. There is power that comes with expertise for example; or power that comes from a broader perspective; and there is also power that comes from having a (literal or metaphorical) gun.  So it’s critical to be aware of what you are doing, and why.  Be sure that others will also be aware, or at least speculating.  Leadership is not power –  something increasingly obvious to me.

 

3. Finally, we must not confuse leadership with official authority, which is simply legitimised power; the power that exists because of a title.   Think about your own titles; it gives you certain powers.  Authority may be most apparent with the most senior people, but it’s easy to be confused here.  When a  security guard tells me, as Head, to do something, I follow just as if I had any other role.  I would do the same when teachers instruct me on a classroom visit or a finance colleague corrects me on an accounting point.  

 

This is a really critical distinction.   Confusion between leadership and official authority can have  a deadly effect.  It we imagine that our place on the organisation chart has given us a body of followers then we are making a grave mistake.  Nothing comes for free, everything is earned.  And rightly so.  If you take one thing away from my remarks here, make it this point.

So then what is leadership?  Well you heard my scepticism about the typologies of the magic paths to leadership, so I hesitate here.  But let me offer a few thoughts that resonate for me.

 

There is wisdom in these quotes.  So this takes us to people.  French Diplomat Jean Monnet said, Nothing is possible without individuals; nothing is lasting without institutions and it seems fitting today, as you look at strategic leadership, to make two observations.

1. It is a vacuous cliche to say that leadership is about people; the questions are which people? why? in what ways? what does this mean, precisely? who is capable of what? who is not capable, why and how can we grow them? For us, our approach is a collaborative one, not a heroic one (the subject of day two of this course). Leadership’s role is to ensure that collaboration happens, which is much, much, harder than it sounds.
2. But while leadership is indeed about people, it is also about institutions; and it’s not a question of excellence. An excellent organisation may already be caught in the rigidities that will bring it down; troubled  by the complacency that foreshadows decline.  Physicist can talk about entropy; for humans the parallel is that motivation tends to run down. Values can decay. The problems of today can go unsolved while people recite  the slogans of yesterday.  Organisations can have structures and processes that were designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

 

This is our job; exciting, and a little bit scary.

 

Leadership requires major expenditures of effort, energy and emotion — more than many people care to make.  You are here because you are interested and I salute you for that.  But I have spoken in a rather dry form of prose, so let’s end with a rather more poetic account that, I think, unpacks to much the same message:

 

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”        

Antoine de Saint Exupéry.