The American essayist and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau lamented in one of his journal entries from 1838 about the difficulty that human groups have in working collaboratively: “The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.”
It may well be an unfortunate fact that Thoreau’s assertion lies deep in the psyche of most leaders and encourages them to lead not with a focus on their best staff, but in a style that is ever fearful of an inevitable degradation of performance to the lowest performing members of staff.
Consequently, underperforming members of staff become the focus of the organisation’s management systems. So, rather than promoting systems and structures that enable autonomy and self-determination to unleash the excellence of employees, many leaders create a workplace environment designed to control and micromanage staff in a belief that without these systems staff would inevitably lack motivation and ‘bunk off’.
Controlling and top down organisational structures therefore would appear to be a very sensible way of going about managing an organisation. Such an approach enables leaders to decentralise, delegate responsibility, make lines of responsibility clear, incentivise performance and despatch those who do not perform or achieve appropriate results. Performance can be optimised and targets can be achieved.
However, the problem with this traditional and top down approach and its focus on outcomes and targets is that in many cases that leaders become motivated to achieve the organisational performance targets in a single minded way. The success of the organisation and personal success are intertwined. Often this means that leaders can ignore the needs, interests or wider considerations of other stakeholders as they focus on performance targets. Leaders become disconnected from the staff and have little interest in their motivations or development. Maintaining high performance becomes about high stakes accountability, monitoring and micro-management. This approach makes staff become disconnected from the organisation and do not feel valued. Consequently there is no link for them between their own motivations and the goals of the organisation – so why would they be motivated towards high performance? In ‘Drive’ Daniel Pink’ covers in detail the core factors that motivate staff towards high performance. He talks about the important of ‘mastery, autonomy and purpose’ and the problem with more traditional approaches to leadership is that they do not really provide an opportunity for any of these motivators. (In a later blog, ‘Intentional School Design’ I will discuss how school leaders can eschew a top down model and can facilitate a co-created ‘culture of excellence’ in which all staff and pupils are motivated to achieve a common goals and in which all stakeholders can flourish.)
The traditional style of leading organisations can get results, but most – if not all – writers and thinkers on leadership are clear that it can only work up to a point. As the complexity of the organisation increases, where the workforce is highly skilled and as contexts change, the ability to control in a top down way from the middle becomes more unwieldy and less effective. The educational system is clearly an example of Rather than changing their mindset, the traditional leader looks for more systems of command and control implements more hierarchical structures to impose authority over those at the bottom of the organisational flow chart.
Education is no stranger to this ‘traditional’ style of leadership. In fact the concept of the ‘hero leader’ or the ‘super headteacher’ has been particularly intoxicating in education, especially to support failing or underperforming schools. For many years, the preferred method of turning around a failing school was to parachute in a super head and they would begin a top down process of school improvement. Usually a series of approached as outlined in the following table;
| Traditional Leaders (Super Head) |
| Imposes structures |
| Uses command and control |
| Micromanages |
| Excessive demands on staff |
| Narrow curriculum |
| Reinforces high stakes accountability |
| Values test results |
| Excludes ‘difficult’ pupils |
| Builds personal empire |
While there were some cases of this working as a method of school improvement, there were also many cases where it did not work at all. Often, once the super head had moved on – usually after a year or two – the school would revert to its previous poor performance and sometimes be in an even worse state in terms of academic performance and with a demoralised staff. The systems and structures introduced by this type of leadership, may have brought about some short term gains in test results, but it did not produce sustainable school improvement or develop a motivated staff and a culture of excellence for all.
Prior to the election of the conservative government in 2010, the ‘super head’ leadership style was beginning to lose favour as an approach to school improvement in favour of more collaborative approaches. ‘The Importance of Teaching, The Schools White Paper’ (2010) for example refers to school improvement through encouraging high levels of school autonomy, sharing the practice of good schools and good leaders through collaboration and setting up networks of ‘teaching schools’ as a system for delivering this.
It is perhaps ironic that this White Paper put in place the foundations for the academisation of schools and the forming of multi academy trusts (MATs) which, in many cases, encouraged a more traditional style of leadership rather than a move towards leadership focused on collaborative school improvement and ‘system thinking’. In many ways system thinking and developing system leaders as a solution to the limitations of traditional leadership was very much the aim of this White Paper. But the new collaborative structures such as teaching schools and MATs did not produce a system wide change in leadership thinking and behaviours.
MATs as Silo Replication?
When I talk to headteacher colleagues about why they have decided to convert to an academy, I rarely get an answer containing a whiff of idealism or a craving for some illusory sense of liberation. The most common response is, “It’s better to be an early adopter: look at what happened with specialist status. The early schools got the most money.” Others will talk of the inevitable withering way of local authority support, of becoming an academy in order not to be outshone by the school next door, or – dismally and predictably – of needing the cash to stave off deficit. Geoff Barton: Published in The TES on 11 March, 2011
This may be due to the fact that the leaders selected for and offered these ‘system leadership’ roles were not selected for their ‘system thinking’. Unsurprisingly they were selected for their track record in leading Ofsted judged outstanding schools – a ‘proven’ track record in successful school leadership was seen to be the most important prerequisite for recruitment. It would then be similarly unsurprising that these leaders used the same thinking that had made them successful in leading one school to leading multiple schools. So the first cadre of executive headteachers and MAT CEO’s were not, in the majority of cases, highly experienced system thinkers and leaders. The collaborative structure put in place with the intention of system wide improvement, were put into the hands of school leaders who were unfamiliar with how to work collaboratively and were more at ease with traditional models of leadership. Success for them was not improving the system, it was the effective replication of the school improvement model they had used previously. This is a ‘standardisation strategy’ to school improvement – find an approach that works and replicate that standard model irrespective of context. The problem is that to carry out such a standardisation strategy, a high level of centralised control is required.
I hasten to add that not every MAT is badly led or has a controlling top down approach. However, it has tended to be the case that headteachers, who had been highly successful in one school, were encouraged to extend their leadership to schools in other settings they needed to have strict controls in place (whether suitable for the context or not) that attempted to secure the approaches and results they had in the original school. Invariably, as the schools they were taking over were more vulnerable and not performing well in terms of results, the MAT leaders tended to ‘clamp down’ with strict traditional structures.
In his excellent book titled ‘Imperfect Leadership’, Steve Munby, who in his role as CEO of the National College between 2005 and 2012, was deeply involved with the development of system leadership structures during this time, confirms that there were some imperfections in the process used to select the cadre of early system leaders. He laments that the selection criteria for National Leaders of Education (NLEs) was only for those headteachers judged as outstanding by Ofsted. The problem emerged that some who had led outstanding schools were just not very good at helping others to improve. He says they did not have the ability to ‘flex leadership to context’.
This first generation of executive / MAT leaders drove the system in a direction at odds with the original intention of collaborative school improvement – some as true systems thinkers, but many perhaps stink anchored solidly in that silo mentality / dysfunctional collaboration described in earlier blogs.
So if an inflexible, top down, controlling leadership mind-set is limiting in terms of bringing about the most effective leadership behaviour, then what mind-set has the potential to bring about highly effective leadership and system wide improvement?
The Infinite Headteacher 