The Making of Educational Leaders

225 Pages·1999·14.583 MB·English

by  Peter Gronn

MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP IN
EDUCATION
Series Editors: PETER RIBBINS AND JOHN SAYER
The Making of Educational Leaders
TITLES IN THE MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP IN
EDUCATION SERIES
DAVID COLLINS:
Managing Truancy in Schools
ANNE GOLD:
Head of Department: Principles in Practice
HELEN GUNTER:
Rethinking Education: The Consequences of Jurassic Management
CHRISTINE PASCAL AND PETER RIBBINS:
Understanding Primary Headteachers
STEVE RAYNER AND PETER RIBBINS:
Headteachers and Leadership in Special Education
PETER RIBBINS (ED.):
Leaders and Leadership in the School, College and University
PETER RIBBINS AND BRIAN SHERRATT:
Radical Educational Policies and Conservative Secretaries of State
ANGELA THODY:
Leadership of Schools: Chief Executives in Education
The Making of Educational
Leaders
PETER GRONN
CASSELL
London and New York
Cassell
Wellington House Cassell & Continuum
125 Strand 370 Lexington Avenue
London WC2R OBB New York
NY 10017-6550
www.cassell.co.uk
© Peter Gronn 1999
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any
information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
First published 1999
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-304-70515-2 (hardback)
0-304-70516-0 (paperback)
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
Part I: Framing leadership
1 The meaning of leadership 1
2 Leadership as a career 21
3 Formative agencies 44
Part II: Formation
4 The identities of leaders 65
5 The values of leaders 85
6 The styles of leaders 105
Part III: Accession
7 Succeeding leaders 125
8 Selecting leaders 145
9 Inducting leaders 165
Concluding comments 185
References 188 188
Index 206 206
Acknowledgements
A number of special people helped make this book a reality. I am deeply
grateful to Professor Peter Ribbins of the University of Birmingham, the
series editor, for his unwavering support and perseverance on my behalf.
Thanks also to my good friend Ian Ling, who made lots of helpful comments
on the draft, to Helen Clements, who chased up numerous references and
helped finalize the manuscript, and to Claude Sironi for his excellent work
with the diagrams. Many of the ideas in the book gestated during long
conversations with three fine teachers and mentors, sadly, all of them
deceased. I am grateful to Professor Alan Davies of the University of Mel-
bourne, for his kindness and enthusiastic support of a young scholar, to
Professor Thorn Greenfield of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
for his friendship and deep sense of humanity, and to Sir James Darling, for
his patience and openness, and the warmth of his unbounded generosity. My
most important debt, of course, is to my wife, Barbara, and daughter,
Gabrielle, who have had to endure much but without whose emotional
support and help this book would not have been possible.
Introduction
Leadership has been, and continues to be, a source of endless curiosity to
academic commentators, journalists, practitioners and the general public.
This fascination with the comings and goings of individuals as diverse as
celebrities, politicians, sportsmen and women, entrepreneurs, school princi-
pals and others, persists despite the typical kind of ho-hum reception now
accorded many new works on the topic. 'Not anotherbook on leadership!' has
become almost the standard refrain. Moreover, the leadership literature
increases at a truly staggering rate. In his preface to the third (and most
recent) edition of Bass & Stogdill's Handbook of Leadership - a publication of
genuinely encyclopaedic proportions which comes closest to being the Bible
of the field - Bernard Bass (1990, p. xv) notes that the 3,000 original entries
in 1974 had more than doubled to 7,500 by 1990. A new student of
leadership might well be tempted to ask how much of this vast corpus
provides useful, as opposed to merely decorative or ornamental, knowledge.
This is a question the eminent scholar Chris Argyris - founder and propo-
nent of organizational learning - asked himself in the late 1970s. The
overwhelming bulk of the findings of leadership research, including his own,
Argyris (1979, p. 61) claimed, lacked utility and application in specific action
contexts. Why? Because 'the theories-in-use that subordinates held were
never mapped ... I never studied the learning system that they created'.
If, two decades later, Argyris's rather disarming observation remains
substantially true then little useful purpose would be served by yet one more
trek across such apparently well-worn territory. Another contribution to
leadership, however, is not hard to justify. For a start, there has been a
considerable body of writing since Argyris's confession (a lot of it docu-
mented by Bass) which has redirected the field in highly imaginative and
innovative ways. Some of this work is discussed below and is the fruit of the
labours of scholars, most of whom have managed to avoid getting tangled up
in the recent paradigm wars in the social sciences - as Peter Ribbins and I
have argued elsewhere (Gronn and Ribbins, 1996, p. 453), leadership
studies emerged from the at times paralysing intellectual introspection and
viii Introduction
turmoil of these battles in remarkably robust form. Indeed, presently there is
an extraordinary outburst of creative energy and vitality in the field.
Then, of course, much has happened to dramatically redefine the con-
texts in which leaders lead and to reshape the expectations of those with
whom they work, principally as a result of the impact of two universal
phenomena: the globalization of nation-state economies and the resort by
governments of all persuasions to market forms of resource allocation and
service delivery. And, finally, there has emerged since Argyris's landmark mea
culpa, to an extent previously unparalleled, a remarkable emphasis on
learning. This development is evident in such expressions as the 'learning
organization', and even the 'learning society', but it is equally implicit in
writings about phenomena like intelligent leadership, knowledge capital
and working smarter. In societies whose core business is now more and more
the business of learning - as Drucker (1993) thought would be the case - it
follows that leaders have to become learners themselves and that they are
required to promote the learning of others. Needless to say, such trends have
dramatic implications for institutions traditionally devoted to learning, like
schools, colleges and universities, and those who lead them.
These developments amount to a new world order both of and for
leadership. In such circumstances the key question that arises is: How well-
equipped are leaders in this new dispensation to learn and to lead the
learning of others? This query prompts a number of subsidiary ones such as:
What factors combine to shape the lives of leaders in ways which will ensure
that their peculiar mix of personal attributes is acknowledged by others to be
leadership? Further, how is it that leaders get to become leaders? Why is the
designation 'leader' attributed to some people who are successful and not to
others? Which particular barriers - personal, organizational and social -
have had to be surmounted in order to attain leadership status? Likewise,
what kinds of opportunities have opened up along the way for leaders to
exploit and to display their particular brand of leadership? These issues form
the central focus of this book.
The Making of Educational Leaders is not intended as a cookbook of recipes
or prescriptions on how to lead. Instead, it is directed to those individuals
either who aspire to attain formal positions of leadership, or who wish to
exercise leadership informally, in a variety of educational settings. It has two
aims. First, it is intended to provide a helpful new framework for under-
standing leadership as a longitudinal and developmental career. Second, it
considers in detail the various institutional and role-related tasks which need
to be accomplished by aspiring leaders as part of their anticipated career
progression, and it offers some helpful clues as to how this might be
achieved. While the book is not intended to provide immediately relevant
usable knowledge for the solution of particular problems in real-world
contexts - i.e. as called for by Argyris and others in the action science
tradition - it is, nonetheless, meant to be useful in the attainment of a sense
of personal mastery. In summary, the book proposes that, from the point of
Introduction ix
view of the individual, leadership may be profitably thought of as a progres-
sion through four sequential life course stages: formation, accession to office
or positions of influence, role incumbency and, finally, divestiture of status,
power and role.
This particular conceptualization of leadership has already been dealt
with briefly elsewhere (e.g. Gronn, 1993b, 1996, 1997) but The Making of
Educational Leaders provides the first detailed elaboration of the framework
(see Chapter 2). Observers of the careers of public office holders often assert
that there is a world of difference between aspiring to and preparing oneself
to assume a leadership role, and then being in office and exercising responsi-
bility. This is a distinction, broadly, between becoming a leader and being a
leader, and it applies in education and beyond. Because I also recognize the
difference in the demands facing leaders and would-be leaders, and differ-
ences in the learning experienced in each of these phases (i.e. getting there
and being there), I have limited the discussion in this book to what it means
to become a leader. The text, therefore, is devoted to the first two of the four
stages of the framework.
This book had its origins in two things. First, many of the ideas have been
canvassed and sharpened in two subjects taught over a number of years in the
Master of Educational Studies and Master of Educational Policy and Admin-
istration degrees at Monash University. To those enrolled in Leaders and
Leadership, and Leaders and Followers, who were gracious enough to allow
me to outline my thoughts and then helped me knock them into respectable
shape, I owe a great debt. The second factor, which dictated the precise form
taken by the framework, arose out of research into the life of Sir James
Darling, the noted Australian headmaster and educationalist. Darling, who
died in 1995 aged 96, was an Englishman educated in the English public
school tradition. What quickly became apparent when I tried to acquire a
more thorough understanding of the English boys' boarding schools during
the Victorian and Edwardian eras was that I was witnessing something much
more significant than a mere set of forces that had shaped the life of one
man. Rather, there was a system of sorts at work - a system with an at times
loosely coupled, uneven, ragged or even ramshackle appearance, but a
system nonetheless, in which young males were being groomed for leader-
ship roles vital to the running of an empire.
I wondered whether similar preparatory arrangements operated at other
times and in other places. Rupert Wilkinson's (1964) early comparative
study of the schooling of elites, The Prefects, convinced me that I was right.
The word which best described these various systems of socialization to elite
roles was 'formation'. The remaining key words - accession, incumbency
and divestiture - occurred to me when making sense of the phases and
overall development of Darling's public life. I next outlined my then rather
embarrassingly skeletal and undernourished career framework to two good
friends, John Stapleton, of the University of Manitoba, and Peter Ribbins, of
the University of Birmingham, who each endured what, at the time, was mere