Educational Leadership

Context, Strategy and Collaboration

Margaret Preedy, Nigel Bennett, Christine Wise, Margaret Preedy, Nigel Bennett, Christine Wise, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781446201640, 9781446201633
• eBook ISBN: 9781473975057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Drawing together current thinking and research by leading writers in the field, this Reader will help you to understand and critically analyse key strategic aspects of educational leadership, including:

- leadership perspectives and values

- external and internal contexts

- autonomy and accountability

- partnership and collaboration

- leading strategy and change.

The book explores major challenges for educational leaders in managing the increasingly permeable boundary between educational organisations and their external contexts and reconciling environmental expectations and internal priorities. The Reader will encourage you to positively problematize the field and reflect on current debates and issues.

This book will be an essential resource for providers and students of postgraduate level courses in educational leadership and management, as well as those involved in undertaking professional development programmes. It will also serve the reflective practitioner as personal reference when occupying or aspiring towards leadership roles in schools, colleges and other educational organisations.

Dr Maggie Preedy, Professor Nigel Bennett and Dr Christine Wise have taught, researched and published widely in the field of educational leadership and management. Maggie Preedy and Christine Wise are Senior Lecturers in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at The Open University, UK. Nigel Bennett is Emeritus Professor of Leadership and Management in Education at The Open University.

Part 1

Leadership Theories and Values

1

An Overview of the Leadership Discourses

Simon Western

Introduction

This chapter summarizes the leadership discourses, and show how they relate to each other and to leadership practice. It is important to highlight that while these discourses emerged at different social and economic periods, each are now familiar and have become normative. Each discourse dominated a historical period, in contemporary organizations, each one has its strengths and weaknesses. Each discourse may stand alone and dominate different sectors and organizations, but they also co-exist, within organizations and within individual leaders and leadership teams. However, one discourse is usually dominant in any given situation at any given time. In leadership practice, co-existence usually means one of two things:

1. a strategic leadership synthesis of skills and culture to maximize organizational efficiency and enhancement of member engagement;
2. competing cultures and visions of how to lead the organization.

I will now summarize each discourse.

Discourse 1: leader as controller

The first leadership discourse that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century epitomized by Taylor’s scientific management is the Leader as Controller. This character is very similar to MacIntyre’s social ‘manager’ character, which he claims signifies the tension between manipulation and non-manipulation, and I would add between control and autonomy. The Controller leadership discourse is born from scientific rationalism and the industrial revolution, which, in the name of the Enlightenment and progress, relegated the worker to being a cog in a machine, mirroring standardization and mechanization within the mass production of the factory. The leader as Controller operates as a technocrat leader focusing on efficiency. In Etzioni’s (1961) taxonomy of control, this leadership character is based on an overt system of coercive and utilitarian control, using reward and deprivation (transactional leadership). In the leadership discourse, covert control is applied from beyond the workplace. The political/economic and social leadership supports the drive for worker efficiency, leveraging worker productivity through class power relations and the threat of unemployment, poverty, healthcare and pension benefits. Political leadership always retains the leader as Controller discourse in the background alongside other leadership discourses, using the threat of job loss and welfare to work benefit links etc., as a social control mechanism (healthcare linked to paid employment is very important in the USA).

Discourse 2: leader as therapist

The second discourse is the leader as Therapist. [It] signifies the dominant therapeutic culture in contemporary Western society and highlights the tension between individualism and alienation, personal growth and workplace efficiency, well-being and mental/emotional health. [It] represents the subtlety of therapeutic governance as opposed to coercive control. This leadership reflects the wider social trends of atomization, self-concern, and the post-war individualistic expectations of being fulfilled, successful and happy (Rieff, 1966; Lasch, 1979; Furedi, 2003).

The Therapist leader emerged from within the Human Relations movement and encompasses the work of theorists such as Mayo, Lewin, Maslow, Frankl and Rogers. Their focus on individual personal growth and self-actualization was readily translated to the workplace, through techniques to motivate individuals and teams, through job re-design and job enhancement to make work more satisfying and to produce work-group cohesion. Employers and theorists believed that happier workers would be more productive than unhappy, coerced workers. This approach in essence was seen as more progressive and productive. It aimed to overcome the alienation created by the machine-like efficiency under the leader as Controller discourse. Work became a site for personal growth and achievement, a place to create meaning and identity. Under the leader as Therapist, people ‘went to work to work on themselves’ (Rose, 1990), embracing therapeutic culture in society at large.

Personnel departments were established, management consultants and new texts, theories and a huge training and development industry flourished. The leader as Therapist still flourishes, often alongside the later Messiah character; a common scenario is the HR Director acts as the Therapist character and the CEO as leader as the Messiah character. Recent examples of the therapist discourse are the interest in emotional intelligence and the huge growth of executive coaching. However, this discourse lost its potency in corporate life, as it could no longer deliver the economic benefits across global business.

Discourse 3: leader as messiah

The third discourse is the leader as Messiah. The term leader has been elevated in recent years, challenging the dominance of the term ‘manager’ and signifying more social change. Coming to the fore since the early 1980s and most clearly articulated within the Transformation leadership literature, the Messiah discourse provides charismatic leadership and vision in the face of a turbulent and uncertain environment. The Messiah character signifies the tension between salvation and destruction, between the technocrat and the moral visionary, and between hope and despair. The Messiah discourse appeals to individuals and society, promising salvation from the chaotic world in which a lack of control is experienced and where traditional community is diminished. As the workplace rises in importance as a site of community, replacing institutions such as the church and family, so the manager/leader replaces the priesthood as a social character of influence.

The Messiah character leads through their signifying capacity, symbolism, ritual, myth and language. Their focus is to act on culture change and the Messiah leadership discourse relies on ‘normative control’, which is self- and peer-control through surveillance and internalization, emotionalism and cultural norms. Followers of the Messiah character work hard because of an internalized belief system aligned to the leader’s vision and values.

The earnings of leaders graphically represent the new values and expectations on leaders since the Messiah discourse arrived. In the 1980s, in the USA, CEOs earned 40 times the average wage (as the Therapist character), in 2000 (as the Messiah character) they earn over 475 times (Business Week, ‘Executive compensation scoreboard’, 17 April 2000).

Table 1.1, at the end of the chapter, shows an overview of the signifying qualities of each discourse, clearly demonstrating the differences between them and how they impact on leadership practice. It also includes an overview of a fourth discourse – eco leadership – that is discussed later in the chapter. It is an interesting exercise to be playful with the discourses we have discussed, to observe leadership and the language leaders use, seeing if they fit into one or more of these discourses. Also look at vision statements, company websites, newspaper articles, and try to identify these discourses. When you have identified a leadership discourse, look for any patterns and the context in which they occur. Practising this alerts you to the underlying discourses in any leadership situation, which then enables you to take a critical stance, and ask why a certain discourse is favoured, and what implications this has for the employees and the organization.

The leadership discourses in practice

The embodiment of the leadership discourse by a leader character brings the concept of a discourse into the lived workplace. It provides a tangible and observable leadership practice to engage and negotiate with. It reveals to those who take a critical perspective how a discourse impacts and influences organizations, managers and employees. It reveals the constantly changing tensions and desires within the social realm and how this impacts on leadership at work. There is a dynamic interaction between the character (the discourse-filled role) and the actor inhabiting the character. The interaction extends also to those interacting with the leader or leadership team.

Discourses preference

Individual leaders, leadership teams and organizations rarely consciously choose their preferred leadership discourse as these are hidden within normative behaviours and expectations. However, they are drawn to discourses for various reasons.

Sometimes leaders and organizations are ‘trapped’ within a discourse; others change between leadership discourses under certain conditions. Individuals and groups can be attracted to different discourses depending on their personal social location and how they perceive the world from this location.

Often individuals have an internalized ‘idealized’ leadership stance, which relates to their social location, and their personal experience of leadership, beginning from their parenting. If a person has a very strict mother or father, or they are brought up in a strict religious culture or a harsh boarding school, this may influence the leader they identify with later in life. They may assume that all leaders should be in the Controller discourse, as this is the norm to them. Alternatively they may internalize a view that this early experience was damaging to them and they may seek a reparative leadership model that would situate them in the ‘therapy discourse’. Individuals who doted on their parents or another early leadership role model may identify with the Messiah discourse, relating to the special leader who presents as a saviour.

Changes in leadership discourses often arise due to external pressures. An individual leader can be pulled by competing discourses. As British Prime Minister, Tony Blair embodied the Messiah discourse, talking passionately, with vision, with persuasion, attempting to modernize and change the culture of his political party, the country and beyond, but every so often he reverted to the Controller leadership discourse. His desire seems to be visionary, but his instincts seem to be the controller, the interventionist leader, setting a target and audit culture of micromanagement in the public sector.

Anxiety over performance often distorts a leadership team who favour the Messiah discourse, and all the company rhetoric supports transformational leadership, but then return instinctively to the controller discourse, when they receive poor output figures or share prices drop.

Understanding the leadership discourses makes it easier for leaders in practice to recognize these processes. When they are recognized, leaders can act to ensure that reactivity to short-term pressure doesn’t alter their strategic course.

Different geographical, historical and socio-cultural contexts will also favour different leadership discourses. It appears that in the USA leadership seems more generically accepted than in Europe where it seems more distrusted. The Messiah discourse is therefore more likely in the USA, and the Therapist discourse more likely in Europe as it has less of an overt leadership feel to it.

The British National Health Service (NHS) is an interesting example of a large public sector institution which has experienced all three discourses. It was dominated by hierarchy and control in the early years and until the 1970s was led by the leader as Controller discourse with severe matrons, rigid role definitions, a bureaucratic structure and medical personnel acting with omnipotent power. This shifted towards the leadership as Therapist discourse as new management/leadership techniques filtered in from the private sector, and it was realized that leadership and motivation were key issues as employee morale waned in an under-resourced and underpaid service. In the late 1980s, greater reforms began to take place and again, following the corporate lead, the leader as Messiah discourse became prominent, with the aims of modernizing the NHS and changing the culture to enable flexible and adaptive working. Huge sums were spent on leadership development using competency frameworks designed to support the change using the Messiah discourse. Symbolic culture changes took place, which were/are hotly contested, for example, to make patients into customers with choices and create an internal market. Interestingly, while the espoused leadership was the Messiah discourse and CEOs have been given more positional power to change culture, the reality on the ground has been one of competing discourses. The health workers’ favoured discourse is the Therapist discourse, which relates closely to their clinical roles and vocations, and that is what clinical leaders attempt to provide. The senior management attempts to create culture change through the Messiah discourse, but complain that the government is so anxious about its modernizing reforms that it reverts to the leader as Controller discourse, micro-managing CEOs’ performance. This is due to the government anxiety that if the reforms fail they would themselves lose office. This anxiety is passed down throughout the institution and the experienced leadership is the Controller discourse. An ex-colleague of mine spoke of her experience as a clinical leader:

My job used to be caring for people, now I feel like I am running a production line, all we are concerned about is getting the waiting times down, if we don’t, our funding is reduced. The leadership here talks about creating a culture of trust, empowering us to do our jobs, but in reality they are the most controlling leaders we have had in my 24 years of service. (Ward Charge Nurse, NHS hospital, September 2005: Anonymous)

The result of an espoused Messiah leadership discourse colliding with the experience of a Controller discourse creates cynicism and distrust, resulting in low morale.

Positions within hierarchies, and location in functions and departments, also impact on the leadership discourse. The Messiah leadership discourse is more favoured, the higher in the organization one climbs. The Therapist leader has become favoured in the realms of aspiring middle managers, HR depart...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Leadership theories and values
• Part 2: Strategic leadership and managing change
• Part 3: Leadership in context
• Part 4: Partnerships and collaboration
• Part 5: Looking to the future
• Index