Leadership Framework and Insight

A leader needs both a model of what leadership is and a working set of daily habits. The framework names the abstract pieces. The insights name the daily moves. Together they bridge from theory to what the leader actually does on Monday morning.

Leadership as a process

The framework starts with leadership defined as a process, not a state.

Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organisation in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent.

Three words in that sentence are worth pulling out.

1. Process. Leadership is something done over time, not a status acquired by promotion. It happens through repeated acts of influence, not through one big speech.
2. Cohesive. A leader makes the group stick together. After a leader has been at work, the group feels more like a team than it did before.
3. Coherent. A leader makes the group make sense as a whole. The parts line up with each other and with the goal.

A leader who delivers neither cohesion nor coherence is busy, not leading. A staff that is more divided and more confused after a year under a new head has not been led, regardless of what was said in meetings.

Process leadership and trait leadership

The framework names two ways of thinking about leadership ability:

1. Process Leadership. The knowledge and skills a leader applies, including planning, communicating, coaching, deciding, listening. This is learnable.
2. Trait Leadership. The personal characteristics that shape how someone leads, including patience, confidence, integrity, decisiveness, warmth.

Both matter. A leader with the skills but the wrong traits comes across as cold and technical. A leader with the right traits but no skills runs on charm and runs out of options quickly. The combination that works is acquired skill resting on developed character.

The useful idea is that leadership is not all skill, not all personality, and not all situation. It is all three woven together.

Five insights for the leader

The framework also offers a short list of practical insights. These are not the only useful pieces of advice for a school head, but they are five that recur across the literature.

1. Become strategic rather than operational

A new leader’s first instinct is usually to keep doing the operational work she did before her promotion. The senior teacher promoted to head of department keeps lesson planning and grading the same way she always did, and tries to add the leadership tasks on top.

The result is a leader who is exhausted and a department that is still without a leader. Becoming strategic means deliberately handing off the operational work she used to own, so that her time goes into the work only she can do.

A useful test: at the end of the week, which decisions did she make that no one else in her position could have made? Those are the strategic ones. Everything else is operational, and most of it should be delegated.

2. Create a climate of celebration and applause

A leader sets the emotional weather of the group. A leader who notices and names good work shifts the climate. A leader who only notices problems creates a defensive group.

Spirited organisations excel.

This is not management by flattery. It is the steady practice of seeing what is good and saying so. In a staff meeting, the head who opens with “before we go to the agenda, I want to thank the grade-4 team for the way they handled last week’s parent meetings” sets a different tone than the head who opens with “let us go through the issues from this week”.

3. Put the pickax to the mountain every day

Be committed every day to putting the pickax to the mountain, find new ways to lift yourself and others higher.

The image is steady work, not heroic effort. A school is not changed by one big initiative. It is changed by daily, small, repeated work over years. A leader who shows up every day with the same patient effort moves mountains in a way that one-time campaigns do not.

This insight is anti-fashion. It says reform is not glamorous. The leader keeps chipping.

4. Be the source of possibility thinking

A leader is the person in the room who says “what if we tried” when others say “this is impossible”. Not naively. The leader knows what cannot be done. But she carries a habit of asking what could be done, and that habit travels through the group.

Without possibility thinking, the school stays where it is. Staff bring up problems and quietly let them sit. With possibility thinking, the leader catches problems and reframes them as design questions.

5. Lift others up

Let your co-workers know they are worthwhile and full of promise.

A leader who genuinely believes in the people she leads gets work out of them that they cannot get out of themselves. A leader who does not believe in them gets the average performance that compliance produces.

This is not the same as praise. Believing in someone shows up in stretch assignments, in honest feedback, in patience with mistakes, in coaching for the next role. Staff can tell the difference between a leader who flatters and a leader who actually backs them.

Flashcard

What is the difference between strategic work and operational work for a school leader?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Strategic work is what only she can do. Operational work is everything else.

A new leader’s instinct is to keep doing operational work and add leadership on top. The result is exhaustion and no leadership. The fix is to deliberately hand off the operational work so that her time goes into decisions and conversations that no one else in her position could have. A useful weekly check: which of this week’s decisions could only she have made? Those were the strategic ones; everything else should be delegated.

Why these five and not others

Many books list more than five insights. The reason this set is useful is that each one addresses a different failure mode common in new leaders:

1. Strategic over operational addresses the new leader who keeps doing her old job.
2. Celebration addresses the leader who only notices problems.
3. Daily pickax addresses the leader who wants a one-time campaign.
4. Possibility thinking addresses the leader who manages by saying no.
5. Lifting others addresses the leader who uses people instead of growing them.

A new head can ask herself at the end of each week: which of these five did she fall short on this week? The answer points to the work for next week.