What is Leadership?

How do you define leadership? Two important steps towards becoming a leader could be achieved through understanding what leadership is and identifying one’s own leadership style. These two important elements alongside with identifying and assessing one’s own assumptions around being a leader in their workplace will influence and guide the person’s decisions and actions within a pedagogical leadership role.

The role of educational leaders has been undergoing many changes in the era of globalization due to diverse needs and expectations of the stakeholders of education. This increases the need for professional development of educational leaders to fulfill their roles. Educational leaders have high impact on shaping school culture, school improvement, student learning, and achievement, so that their professional development is critical to their continued success as leaders. Educational leaders who participate in professional development programs update and extend their knowledge and improve their performance on the job by applying new knowledge and skills to implement the best educational practices in schools.

There has been a great interest in leadership not only in education but also in many sectors such as business, health, and technology. Leadership as a process of social influence can maximize the efforts of others for the achievement of a goal. In educational settings, leaders are appointed to positions formally or informally, influencing their colleagues by providing direction to them. Main core of educational leadership, used as school leadership exchangeable, is achieving better student success in schools. That is why all scholars and school staff work hard to find ways to obtain better school outcomes. In this sense, scholars put forward different classifications of school leadership and tried to explain the roles and responsibilities of school leaders.

School leaders have clearly stated responsibilities set by Ministry of Education, government in different countries. Responsibilities of the school leaders may show similarities but also may show differences according to size, type, region of the school, school year and country. In all successful schools, the principals have high expectations for all students and have multiple responsibilities such as supporting curriculum and instruction, fostering a positive and caring culture, recruiting, and retaining school staff, engaging parents and community resources, keeping up with the paperwork, e-mails, parent calls, evaluating teachers, attending school meetings, and community events.

Decisions and Actions Within One’s Pedagogical Leadership Role

New and experienced school leaders have different needs to fulfill their responsibilities because they have different levels of management, communication, technological skills, and understanding of curriculum. Also, schools have different specific needs due to their demographical structure, academic Educational Leadership 6 achievement level of students, experience of teachers, and parental involvement. In the light of the literature, all we need as educational leaders is:

• Clear recruitment criteria not only based on the teaching experience
• Clear stated roles and responsibilities
• Determination of training needs of new and experienced school leaders every year regularly. Because the needs change according to rapid changes in technology, communication, and culture during globalization
• Effective and fast determination of training needs of educational leaders ○ by interviews with school leaders ○ by conducting surveys ○ by using observations ○ by administration of school leader evaluation surveys to school community including students, teachers, and parents as part of the school-self-evaluation ○ by reports of external inspectors of the schools
• Sustainable training programs in collaboration with universities, professional associations, or governmental agencies
• Personalized training programs with careful consideration of content, duration, mode and place of instruction, experience, and career stage of participant school leaders
• Updating training programs according to requirements of the era to meet the expectations of all stakeholders of education
• Encouragement of educational leaders to participate in professional development programs (i.e., giving certificates of attendance, certificates of successful completion, increment in salary, and advancement in career)
• Monitoring and evaluation of quality and efficiency of professional development programs
• Affordable professional development programs for all educational leaders (especially leaders in poor countries)
• Free, intensive networking between educational leaders for communication at national and international level (i.e., supported by pioneers of social media and social networking service companies)
• Free access of educational leaders to literature in education (i.e., supported by universities)
• Financial investments and funds by the governments, national and international associations, unions, foundations, agents to develop and implement up to date, and high-quality professional development programs.

Pedagogical Leadership Styles

Let’s begin by examining four popular leadership styles:

1. 1. 1. Trait-based leadership (the “hero” leader)
      2. Situational leadership (the “chameleon” leader)
      3. Transformational leadership (the “visionary” leader)
      4. Servant leadership (the “servant” leader)

We have very briefly discussed several leadership styles in this first part of the course, but there are more out there. There is, for example, a large research line on ineffective (and often perceived as immoral) leadership styles, such as Machiavellianism.

There are numerous textbooks, management books, (scientific) articles and blogs about leadership styles. This literature presents us with a variety of styles, well beyond the ones presented in this course.

Look at the chart below for further information on each type of leadership.

Characteristics of each leadership style:

Hero leader:

• Impact is made by the individual leader alone.
• The personal characteristics and behavior of the leader make the difference rather than the context in which the leader operates.
• One can become a great leader by emulating the personal characteristics and behavior of great leaders.

Chameleon leader:

Visionary leader:

• The role of the leader is to be a role model, to create a shared vision, and to build a team’s trust and capacity to work together.
• Leaders create an environment in which individuals transcend their individual goals to achieve the higher mission of the organization.
• Leaders create desirable outcomes in organizations and have to be able to transform the context rather than simply react to it.

Servant leader:

• Role of leadership is one of service, not just to customers but to employees as well.
• Primary focus is on people and not the organization.
• People are treated fairly and humanely and supported in their personal growth.
• Leaders can be trusted to serve the needs of the many rather than the few.
• Teamwork, community, values, service, and caring behavior are important principles.
• The ideal is self-giving without self-glory.
• Leaders enhance dialogue and understand social dynamics.

Issues that may occur within each leadership style:

Hero leader:

• The mindless application of heroic traits may lead to inauthentic behavior, which undermines trust.
• Top-down.
• Assumption that “one size fits all.”

Chameleon leader:

• Difficult to determine the correct behavior in a given context.
• Losing oneself in the context and lacking authenticity.
• Merely externally oriented, without a strong internal sense of purpose.

Visionary leader:

• Not all leaders have visionary personalities, and these may be hard to develop.
• All attention goes to the visionary leader instead of the issues that s/he is trying to address
• High risk as the reputation of the organization is determined largely by the visionary leader.
• Dependence of the organization on the visionary leader, potentially a lack of empowerment of leaders at lower levels within the organization.

Servant leader:

• They can be viewed as too “soft.”
• Failing to establish their authority.
• May struggle with giving commands or being in charge.