Conference asks: What is leadership?

A recent conference has fed into the current debate about deregulation and devolution, writes WENDY CURRIE.

The Curriculum Corporation's Annual Conference, "Breaking the Leadership Rules," was characterised by some fundamentally contradictory views of leadership from the presenters, foremost among which was whether good leadership is collegial and dispersed or the exercise of exclusive power.

At the two extremes were Curriculum Corporation CEO Bruce Wilson and Tasmanian Department of Education Secretary Martyn Forrest.

The very title of Bruce Wilson's paper, "Leadership: What's wrong," indicates that his thinking is underpinned by the view that there are fundamental problems with contemporary school leadership in practice and in theory.

He based his paper on an examination of present ways of thinking about leadership, that is three ideas which he maintained are wrong:

1. power should be shared
2. everyone is a leader
3. we should talk about 'leadership' rather than 'management'.

Unfortunately, he seemed dreadfully muddled about what the terms "power" and "leadership" actually mean, and argued that sharing of power is counterproductive, given the accountability is not shared. To argue that part of what is wrong with leadership today is that people make the mistake of assuming power can and should be shared is akin to hitting a not quite perfect idea with a sledgehammer to make it fit the bill a little better.

He seems to be saying that what passes for leadership today is merely a different style of leadership from the old authoritarian style, but still with the justified aim of retaining power. Rather Machiavellian, as he himself admits. One would have thought that in reality the aim of leadership would be improvement in a whole range of outcomes, rather than the retention of individual power.

On the matter of whether everyone is a leader, Wilson takes a very limited view of leadership. Whether you believe absolutely everyone in a school has leadership qualities in some area or not, to use "the word leader to refer to that person who exercises leadership responsibilities and accepts accountability for everything in an organisation" is unduly restrictive.

To support his position that the third idea about leadership is wrong, he argues that management includes performance management, and is "about goals, values, inspiration, engagement, influence and vision, as well as resources, personnel, structures, procedures and accountability". It's hard to argue with this. School leadership roles do entail all this.

Where this leads him, though, is the problem, and it's not just a problem of a vision of management but a problem of logic.

He argues that "in particular, elements like performance management are characteristic of management rather than leadership" which he argues is really about goals, engagement and vision and so on. Anyone could, with ease, argue the opposite and say that the word "leadership" is really the umbrella term.

All he has really done is a bit of semantic juggling, but he uses it to move on to his main point: the real issue is that "the absence of performance management is one of the key weaknesses of Australian education". His definition of performance management with which he attempts to convince us that school leaders are failing begins with positive and desirable aspects such as "identifying and fostering talents" but ends with "disciplining and dismissing underperforming members of staff". And we tend to remember what we heard last.

Among the other presenters was Salisbury High School (South Australia) principal Helen Paphitis. The school is Australia's first "enterprise high school", although it never really became clear through the presentation what an "enterprise school" is. Enterprise is one of the Federal Government's latest buzz words, linked in the literature with career education.

Salisbury High has won numerous awards, including Best Schools Awards conducted by The Australian, and judging by the challenges the school faced and the successes it's had against a range of measures, one would be hard pressed not to be impressed. Yet, when Helen Paphitis said that one of the things that helped her the most was the power she had to choose her own staff, some in the audience could not help but worry about how other schools in the state were faring if they could not induce teachers to go there, and the effect this would have on the equitable distribution of experienced teachers.

Martyn Forrest on the other hand made an important distinction between "power" and "authority".

He said: "There is a great danger in trying to find the essence of leadership, as Bruce Wilson did, in the instrumental activity of making the big and unpopular decision that a small number of people must apparently do, by definition, to a much larger number of people....for their benefit of course."

He talked about the values and purposes of every day leadership and the way these guide judgements, and about dispersed leadership that is demonstrated in a school by educational leaders in classrooms, leaders bringing improvements to safety and amenities, leaders improving varieties of administrative systems, but all working together.

But most importantly he spoke about the context in which the sort of leadership he was talking about occurred -- in a public education system, where the responsibility is to all students not just those in an individual school, noting that "we are very much more than a sum of our parts".

The papers from the conference are available on the Curriculum Corporation website at www.curriculum.edu.au/conference/2004.

Wendy Currie is a Research Officer.

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