More on Leadership and Moral Imperative

As a leader, what does moral imperative look like in your leadership?

School leadership is serious business.  It takes a combination of clear personal values, persistence against a lot of odds, emotional intelligence, thick skin, and resilience.  It also takes a knack for focusing on the right things and for problem solving.  We will see plenty of named cases of this in action, but let us realize that the best leaders have strong values and are skilled at strategy.  Attila the Hun and Hitler meet this definition.  Leaders with moral purpose, on the other hand, have a different content - deep commitment to raising the bar and closing the gap for all students. 

Leaders need to support, activate, extract, and galvanize the moral commitment that is in the vast majority of teachers.  Most teachers want to make a difference, and they especially like leaders who help them and their colleagues achieve success in terrible circumstances.  Revealingly, once this process is under way, teachers as a group value leaders who help the hardcore resistant teachers leave.  When this happens, the cohesion of the rest of the staff actually increases (Bryk, Bender, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010; Linton, 2011).

From:  The Moral Imperative Realized by Michael Fullan

Published by: Corwin Press and OPC (the Ontario Principals' Council)

Sustainable Leadership

As a leader, how are you engaging with the principles of sustainable leadership?

Hargreaves and Fink (2006) lay out a radical agenda for shaping the capacity of school systems to engage in continuous improvement.  Their seven principles of sustainability in concert focus on sustainable leadership as the solution:

1. Depth (sustainable leadership matters)
2. Length (sustainable leadership lasts)
3. Breadth (sustainable leadership spreads)
4. Justice (sustainable leadership does no harm to and actively improves the surrounding environment)
5. Diversity (sustainable leadership promotes cohesive diversity)
6. Resourcefulness (sustainable leadership develops and does not deplete internal and human resources)
7. Conservation (sustainable leadership honours and learns from the best of the past to create an even better future: pp.19-20)

From:  Turnaround Leadership by Michael Fullan
Published by: Jossey-Bass and OPC

Moral Imperative of School Leadership

As a leader, what is your commitment to the moral imperative of school leadership?

Waiting for Superman captures the moral imperative writ large, and writ deep.   But in my view, this is not the moral imperative if only a handful of disadvantaged kids get a chance.  The first two-thirds of the film is as brilliant as it is alarming.  Unfortunately, the last third relies on moral outrage as its sole strategy and fails to identify any way out other than to say we need more schools with passionate leaders and teachers.  Of course we do.  But moral purpose, even deeply felt, is not a strategy.  We need moral purpose actualized, and on a very large scale.  The latter is the essence of this book. 

Moral Imperative As Strategy

So the question is not just how deep is your moral imperative, but equally, what is your strategy to enact it.  Just as moral imperative is not a strategy, neither is being "right." .....but let's establish some basics here for making the moral imperative a strategy. 

1. Make a personal commitment
2. Build relationships
3. Focus on implementation
4. Develop the collaborative
5. Connect to the outside
6. Be relentless (and divert distracters)

From:  The Moral Imperative Realized by Michael Fullan

Published by: Corwin Press and OPC (the Ontario Principals' Council)

Starting Point for Improvement - Part 2

As a leader, how do you determine what is important when determing your starting points for improvement?

In another study of four successful high-poverty districts, Snipes, Doolittle, and Herlihy (2002) found that these districts in comparison with other districts

1. Focused on achievement, standards, and instructional practice
2. Created concrete accountability systems in relation to results
3. Focused on lowest-performing schools
4. Adopted districtwide professional development and support for consistent implementation
5. Drove reform into the classrooms by defining the role for central offices of guiding, supporting, and improving instruction at the building level
6. Committed themselves to data-driven decision making and instruction
7. Started the reform at the elementary level
8. Provided intensive instruction in reading and math to middle and high schools students

From: Leadership & Sustainability by Michael Fullan
Published by: Corwin Press & OPC (Ontario Principals' Council)

Starting Point for Improvement - Part 1

As a leader, how do you establish your starting point for improvement?

Nearly all of the success stories involve improvements in literacy and numeracy at the elementary level, with some closing of the gap between high- and low-performing schools.  The findings are consistent across many studies.  Togneri and Anderson's (2003) study of success in five high-poverty districts identified six strategies for improvement.  These districts

1. Acknowledged publicly poor performance and sought solutions (building the will for reform)
2. Focused intensively on improving instruction and achievement
3. Built a systemwide framework and infrastructure to support instruction
4. Redefined and redistributed leadership at all levels of the district
5. Made professional development relevant and useful
6. Recognized there were no quick fixes

From: Leadership & Sustainability by Michael Fullan
Published by: Corwin Press & OPC (Ontario Principals' Council)

Capacity Building

As a leader, how do you build the necessary capacity in your staff to meet the demands of the work that needs to be done?

Two key principles should permeate your capacity-building work:

1. Minimize blame and focus on improvement.  If people fear blame, there will be less transparency and less insight into the root causes of problems, which will inhibit capacity-building.  Instead, build a culture in which struggles or challenges are viewed as opportunities to learn and further improve delivery.  It is important to communicate that people are being judged in order to strengthen performance and not for the sake of laying blame.  In practice, a culture of no blame needs to exist alongside a culture of taking responsibility, so plain speaking and honesty will be crucial.  As Michael Fullan (2008) explains in his book The Six Secrets of Change, "This doesn't mean that you avoid identifying things as effective or ineffective.  Rather it means that you do not do so pejoratively."

2. Create a culture of continuous learning.  To truly sustain the capacity to implement change, all system actors responsible for delivery must be constantly going through the cycle of acting, reflecting, making adjustments, and trying again, each time refocusing their efforts on the actions that are found to be most effective.  In this culture, all contributors to delivery are constantly increasing their effectiveness.  As Michael Fullan (2008) put it, "Learning on the job, day after day, is the work".

From: Deliverology 101 by Michael Barber
Published by: Corwin Press, EDI - U.S. Education Delivery Institute, OPC - Ontario Principals' Council

Challenging Conversations - more

As a leader, what principles guide your thinking when you face challenging conversations? 

Engaging in Challenging Conversations....

Most challenging conversations are in fact negotiations.  We are negotiating the terms of a relationship, how it will unfold, and which expectations each party brings to the relationship.  We are also often negotiating about who gets what or who will do what in the future.  Following are the key principles that inform a safe process for having challenging conversations:

• solution focused, not blame focused
• problem focused, not people focused
• nonadversarial approach, not adversarial approach
• dialogue, not diatribe - inclusive, not exclusive
• interest and needs focused, not position focused
• win-win orientation, not win-lose orientation

From:  The Principal as Leader of Challenging Conversations (Leading Student Achievement Series)
Published by: Corwin Press, OPC - The Ontario Principals' Council

Leader or Manager?

As a leader, do you characterize yourself as a leader, a manager, or a combination of the two?

Over time, the concept of 'leadership' vs. 'management' has somehow evolved into a pejorative view of management skills as a set of low-level, mundane and inferior set of skills when compared to the loftier instructional leadership skills.  The intention here is not to enter into a qualitative debate, but rather to demonstrate that an effective instructional leader needs to have well-developed management skills in order to lead effectively.  A poor manager will be hampered by broken relationships, mounds of unfinished paperwork, unmet deadlines and missing or unspent school funds. 

What follows is a synopsis of the key management skills whose absence have caused difficulty for some school leaders.

The article goes on to describe:

• communication skills
• time management
• delegation
• dispute resolution
• fiscal responsibility
• self-management

From:  Instructional Leadeship vs. Instructional Management by the OPC Professional Services Team
Published in: OPC Register - Spring 2011, Vol 13, No. 1

Sustainable Leadership

As a leader, in what ways are you building sustainable leadership in your organization?

Beyond the revolving doors of leadership that plague many systems today, sustainable leadership builds capacity and develops leadership succession in a dynamic and integrated strategy of change.  The seven principles of sustainable leadership are a fundamental part of the Fourth Way.

1. Depth - of purpose in developing student learning
2. Breadth - so this purpose and its achievement are a shared and distributed responsibility
3. Endurance - over time
4. Justice - in attending to all students' learning and achievement
5. Resourcefulness - in using financial resources and human energy
6. Conservation - in connecting future visions to past traditions
7. Diversity - of curriculum, pedagogy, and team contributions

From: The Fourth Way by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley
Published by: Corwin, OPC - Ontario Principals' Council, and NSDC - National Staff Development Council

Lead From the Front

In what circumstances might you 'lead from the front'?

There are times when leading from the front is necessary.  Here are some thoughts on it as well as a link to a great book if you want to pursue some learning about it.

What is Leading From the Front?  It is when a leader asserts an aspiration and invests his or her own political capital to support the aspiration. 

When would one lead from the front? 

• ...when you, as the leader, need to create a sense of urgency in your organization
• ...when you want to communicate that certain aspirations are important enough to be non-negotiable
• ...when you fear that a consultative method would produce watered-down aspirations.....and results.

From: Deliverology 101 by Michael Barber
Published by: Corwin Press, EDI - U.S. Education Delivery Institute, OPC - Ontario Principals' Council

Challenging Conversations

As a leader, how do you handle challenging conversations? 

Challenging conversations are most easily addressed in a school community characterized by respect, collaboration, and competence.

School leaders are often judged by staff, students, and community on how well they manage the challenging conversations that arise daily.  One's skill in meeting these challenges can make or break a reputation.  One's credibility and effectiveness are at stake. 

Dealing with challenging conversations enhances trust in a school community and forms the basis of a collaborative school culture.  It allows an organization to grow and prosper by providing a safe place to have the conversations that promote improvement. 

From:  The Principal as Leader of Challenging Conversations (Leading Student Achievement Series)
Published by: Corwin Press, OPC - The Ontario Principals' Council