Dynamic Management and Leadership in Education

High Reliability Techniques for Schools and Universities

Anthony Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032108216
• eBook ISBN: 9781000478822
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book presents a new integrated theory of dynamic management and leadership in one comprehensive approach. It offers a new way of looking at the field, drawing on a wide body of research and practice in the fields of leadership and management, across all sectors in education and more broadly.

The book focuses on management against a backdrop of leadership theory. Including examples of practice and application in schools, colleges and universities, it uses a range of historical leadership approaches to scaffold different management techniques that are known to work in effective organisations. It explores the overlap between management and leadership as dynamic theoretical and practical activities, merging the two together into a holistic model that can be applied by managers working in educational settings. Its twenty-six chapters also consider the praxis of educational leadership and management from political, economic and ethical perspectives in relation to issues such as equity and widening participation, and outline how 'managership' impacts on student achievement.

Offering a unique balance of theory and practice, across school, college and university sectors, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, graduate students and practitioners in the field of educational leadership and management, and will be important reading for all stakeholders in the area of educational effectiveness and improvement.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003217220-1

Leadership is the great modern narrative, like religion in the 19th century, and managers the new priestly class. Although its effect is probably overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term, it is convenient for education policy-makers to assert that good leadership makes for good schools. This assumption offers a cost-effective route to system-wide improvement: simply recruit enough good leaders, put one in every school, college and university department, and the problem of underperformance is solved. It was the premise upon which the UK’s National College for School Leadership (NCSL), as it was then called, was founded in the 1990s.¹ It adopted a pragmatic approach: leaders were not born with certain desirable traits, as some theorists would have us believe; rather, leadership was an activity for which candidates could be trained, so that it just required a suitably qualified cohort of headteachers to be let loose on the education system, and society would see a transformation in the fortunes of schools. Amid the euphoria that followed (and survived) the election of the New Labour government in May 1997, these approaches dovetailed well with the growing dominance of management consultants and “Third-Way” public-private initiatives in the state sector. In keeping with this political creed, the National College introduced a qualification for those being prepared to transform schooling in Britain – the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) – without which advancement to the top jobs in schools became virtually impossible. Alongside many established practitioners, some academics were recruited by the national college to deliver NPQH in bite-size modules, while others stayed put in universities to ride shotgun on the venture. The college was a prolific funder of research into why what it was doing was right, and those who played ball prospered under the regime. With several notable exceptions, there was a paucity of criticism. It was hard to dismount the tiger!

Outside the college, euphemisms like “entrepreneurship” kept pace with the proliferation of acronyms, as commonplace concepts dating back to Shakespearean times were reborn in the public sector as divine revelation and made to sound pensive. Slogans such as “catch a colleague doing something good today” were as common in business leadership lectures as they were on London Underground posters. But the lifespan of an acronym in education is short, and in 2013 NCSL was merged with the Teaching Agency (TA) to become the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) with an expanded remit to include “senior children’s services leaders and more generic professional leadership development”. The closure of NCSL had been considered by some policy-makers within the new Conservative government because they thought it had failed to deliver what had been promised for it: UK schools had not been “transformed”; educational attainment in England had not improved dramatically in international comparison tests; recruitment to the teaching profession had not increased in quality or quantity; and the recruitment and retention of headteachers had plummeted across the system.

In fairness, most of the staff at NCSL – those who sought experience as well as those best qualified to bestow it – were excellent and delivered good courses in a very flexible and pedagogically blended way, and the professionals who underwent NPQH generally found the course informative. So what went wrong? Well, in theory, NCSL (or any equivalent form of national structure) and a national qualification for headship are sensible ideas, but the ideology that gave birth to them was by its nature bureaucracy-intensifying and de-professionalising to an extent that recruits to the profession, and those already in it, found overwhelming, intrusive and in some cases downright offensive. This was also the case in the UK with medical professionals in the National Health Service, with legal professionals in the justice system and, in fact, with all public sector occupations. The only profession left standing after two decades of “reform” was that of management consultant, whose firms had grown fat on overspending government initiatives and finding public problems for every private sector solution. The NCSL/NCTL was not badly run – not by any stretch of the imagination – but it became flawed in its implementation when the heavy hand of government was simultaneously undermining the integrity of the very profession it was attempting to create.

The second problem was that the idea of a national college for the profession of educational leadership ran out of political capital. It had been a New Labour initiative which perfectly reflected the zeitgeist of that era, but the new Conservative government that saw Michael Gove enjoying himself as Secretary of State for Education regarded the institution as part of what he called ‘The Blob’ (Garner, 2014): an army of cultural terrorists, left-wing pilgrims and haughty academics whose purpose was to thwart the bijou ‘progressive’ radicalism that meant so much to Notting Hill Tories. The Blob was to Michael Gove and advisor Dominic Cummings an oligopolistic cabal of 1960s hippy self-interest, which had come together to stop Britain from having a world-class education service. Was he wrong? Michael Gove was an intelligent and diligent education minister, although blessed with more self-confidence than was strictly necessary for his minor role in government. He certainly overstated the conspiracy, as Department for Education (DfE) insiders like his former Permanent Secretary Sir David Bell pointed out at the time, but it was perfectly predictable that as general factotum in David Cameron’s kitchen cabinet, Minister Gove would dismantle the comfortable consensus that pervaded the education academy at that time. The fact that in 2013 some 100 academics signed a letter to The Independent newspaper expressing fears that Gove’s new national curriculum would disadvantage students with its insistence on rigour and would “threaten creativity in the classroom”, while representing the views of most in the research community, served only to justify Gove and his supporters in their view that his ideological reformation was being opposed by an equally ideological counter-reformation. In any event, it became impossible during this period to offer any intelligent critique of either side, as anecdote was substituted for evidence, and actual evidence was ignored in the struggle to be righteous. The arguments on both sides did not vary much except in the allegorical garb of their discourse. Certain nouns had to have verbal adjectives and gerunds assigned: “paradigms” had to be “shifting”; “stakeholder views” needed to be “captured”; the only “comprehensives” were “bog-standard” ones; and the “suburbs” where the middle classes horded their cultural capital were invariably “leafy”.

The reality is that few if any children come home from school enthusing about the government’s Academy programme or worrying about The Blob’s paradigm wars. Nor are they distracted by how “distributed” leadership is at the school. Their world is the world of the classroom. What child has not come home to complain about having been assigned certain teachers for certain subjects or ranting at the unfairness of subject choices and the impossibility of their timetables? In short, it is management and not leadership that circumscribes the realm of students and their educational attainment.

Leadership versus management

The differences and overlaps between management and leadership are in part cultural and in part a question of definition. For decades, leadership has assumed a pre-eminence and superiority over management. There was never a “national college” for school management. To many politicians and policy-makers, but not to academics or practitioners, a leader is a Churchillian figure who knows what others do not: a seer that alone can navigate the unpredictable; a pilot in times of crisis, which in education, is every day! In contrast, a manager is seen as a mere functionary: an employee operationalising the policies that others higher up the food chain have determined; a lesser professional. An “administrator”, outside the US at least, is even lower on the totem pole: a bureaucrat; a secretary. Peter Drucker famously (but somewhat fatuously) promoted this view when he quipped that “management was about doing things right; leadership was about doing the right things”. For him the role of management was to improve operational performance, maximise income, minimise costs and increase productivity, whereas the purpose of leadership was to establish an organisation’s priorities, set and sell its vision, and allocate resources to achieve that vision. In education, we could rescue the Drucker dictum somewhat by adding a philosophical layer that leadership is about doing the right things for the right reasons, meaning that it demands proper motivation and must stand for something; for example, the belief that all children irrespective of socio-economic background should benefit from formal schooling. And we could then add a moral layer on top of that by saying that leadership is about doing the right things for the right reasons and in the right way, meaning that leaders should acknowledge ethical boundaries; for example, that it is not ‘good leadership’ to better the lot of poor students by stealing money or by cooking the books to get extra staff.²

Setting aside the differences between management and leadership, most policy-makers, practitioners and academics agree on certain things: that leadership is both a responsibility and a power; that management is important; and that the two are inextricably linked in some hard-to-define way that we could call “managership”. This book explores the overlap between the two: between management as a dynamic theoretical activity – the act of creating order and structure that would not otherwise exist – and leadership as a practical exercise. We call this “dynamic” in the sense that it reverses the usual polarity. It sees management not as practice but as theory, and leadership not as theory but as practice, and the constant toggling of the two is a dynamism that creates high reliability in the effective oversight of educational institutions. Let us take a moment to discuss each of these terms in turn.

Praxis, theoria and poiesis

Aristotle held that there were three basic human activities: praxis (doing), theoria (thinking) and poiesis (creating something that did not previously exist). Praxis is the process by which a theory is actualised. It is a skill enacted and refers to the act of applying or practising ideas. In Ancient Greek, the word “praxis” referred to an activity willingly pursued by free people, and we see that reflected today in education in the fact that schools, colleges and universities are staffed by unencumbered professionals. The Polish philosopher August Cieszkowski used the term to mean “action oriented towards changing society” (McLellan, 1970, my emphasis), and his contemporary Karl Marx used the term to refer to the “free and creative activity through which man creates and changes his world and himself” (Petrovic, 1991, my emphasis). Both have obvious links to transformational leadership theory as it relates to managing change, which is discussed in Chapters 23–25.

Corresponding to these three Aristotelian activities are three types of knowledge: practical, whose objective is action; theoretical, whose objective is truth; and poietical, whose objective is production. This book presents dynamic leadership as a combination of all three. Traditionally, it is assumed that leadership is the theoria and management the praxis, but we reject this dichotomy as false. Both leadership and management have “thinking” and “doing” facets, and between them dynamically is the job of running an organisation and poietically bringing something into being – order, structure and a culture of high expectation – that would not otherwise exist. This last point is discussed in detail in Chapter 8 because one of the historical biases in leadership theory has been the presumption that schools are inherently orderly and stable places, and that the job of leader is therefore to keep disorder at bay, rather than inherently disorderly unstable places, where the job is to create (poiesis) order.

Defining dynamic leadership

The adjective “dynamic”, when applied to a process or system, refers to constant change or activity. When applied to a person, it denotes someone who is positive in attitude and full of energy and new ideas. In the scientific sense, it is the branch of physics concerned with the study of forces and movement. It is used intentionally in this book in all three senses to define a combinatory form of management and leadership. Dynamic leadership refers to the practice of switching from reflective practice as a leader – planning, deciding, inspiring and motivating – to high reliability implementation as a manager – auditing, overseeing, remediating, changing, monitoring and rewarding. It assumes reciprocal effects: not only does leadership affect management, but it is in turn affected by it.

Dynamic leadership also refers to context: that schools, colleges and universities are situated in their own dynamic market, and they are dynamically disordered and chaotic organisations. Chaos itself is a dynamic system, transitive and evolving in nature, with random and unpredictable behaviour within. It is sensitive to initial conditions – the so-called “butterfly effect” – which means that each point in the system is closely approximated by other points with significantly different future trajectories, so that an arbitrarily small disturbance to a current situation can lead to a significantly different chain of future events.

This is not to suggest that traditional leadership theory is devoid of “dynamism”. It is not. More than 70 years ago, Lewin (1948) used applied action research to study group dynamics and their relationship to organisational development. Belbin followed later by developing his famous team-role descriptors in order to understand team dynamics, and Porter’s Competitive Analysis model provided an insight into the dynamics of markets. In the 1990s, Peter Senge, who developed the notion of a learning organisation in his book The Fifth Discipline, conceptualised organisations as dynamic systems in various states of continuous adaptation. What is different about dynamic leadership is the belief that the chaos – and this is not a pejorative term – inherent in schools, colleges and universities means that the slightest adjustment to its boundary conditions can result in a totally different scenario to manage, and therefore that scenario planning has limited application. Of course, it helps educational organisations to understand and plan for the most likely unknown, but the dynamic leader accepts that the exact trajectory of educational change is unknowable, is prepared for an (as yet) unrecognisable future and is happy to limit long-term decision-making, which is counter-intuitive in a culture that values foresight as a characteristic of leadership. Dynamic leadership accepts the complexity that arises when cause and effect are separated in time and space in such a way as to make consequences unknowable.

Dynamic leadership of learning organisations (as schools, colleges and universities must be) relies on restless learning and networks that allow dispersed individuals (as teachers, lecturers and researchers must be) to connect together flexibly to solve problems and respond to opportunities. Charisma or “presence” – that inner clarity which is unhindered by doubt or anxiety – plays a part in this dynamism. This is not to dismiss traditional behavioural, contingency or transformational approaches, but dynamic leadership sees leadership and management as coupled together, like the role of leader and follower; not necessarily interchangeable, but co-dependent and mutually influencing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Trait leadership theory
• 3 Charismatic leadership and the Core Quadrants
• 4 Participative leadership and De Bono's Six Thinking Hats
• 5 Behavioural theories: Dynamic leadership, followership and style
• 6 Behavioural theories: Motivational, authentic and transactional leadership
• 7 Situational–contingency theories of leadership and management
• 8 Keeping dysfunction at bay or creating order?
• 9 Genba Kaizen
• 10 Managing innovation and change
• 11 Approaches to intellectual capital
• 12 Dynamic leadership and intellectual capital
• 13 Process improvement
• 14 Scorecards and dashboards
• 15 Structures and systems
• 16 Three Levels Leadership and self-mastery
• 17 Moral leadership and cultural leadership
• 18 Matrices and grids
• 19 Pay and reward
• 20 Measuring responsibility
• 21 A Profile Guide Chart method for job evaluation
• 22 Measuring competition and competitiveness
• 23 Transformational theory Team and network leadership
• 24 Transformational theory and change The dynamic leadership of risk and choice
• 25 Transformational theory and vision leadership
• 26 Distributed, instructional and virtual leadership
• References
• Index