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Middle Leadership Matters

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middle leadership meeting

At the heart of an educational organisation are its middle leaders. Middle leaders often describe their position as rewarding, yet challenging. On one hand, they believe that they can directly influence teaching, leading and learning, and on the other, they feel a real tension between their dual role as teacher and leader. As influential leaders within schools, they are expected to drive curriculum, change, and innovation (Ministry of Education, 2012). However, many middle leaders perceive that they are not adequately prepared for their leadership role, nor effectively appraised as middle leaders (Bassett, 2016, Cardno & Robson, 2016). Whilst the onus is on senior leadership to develop and appraise their middle leaders, evidence suggests otherwise. In the absence of government initiatives, we’d like to offer an online course that specifically supports middle leaders to meet this need.

According to the latest Education Review Office report (2017) on Communities of Learning | Kāhui Ako, the priority for our education system is to achieve equity and excellence in learner outcomes. This requires effective leadership, which “builds collective capacity to do and use evaluation and inquiry for sustained improvement” (p.11). The advantage of an online course designed for middle leaders is that it provides ubiquity, connectedness, and flexibility, regardless of geographical location, or size of organisation. One of the key outcomes of this course is to build a community of leaders, and utilise a specific model of middle leader inquiry to enable critical reflection which has the power to improve outcomes for all, collectively. Enabling leaders to connect across communities offers them opportunities to curiously inquire into their own leadership practice, with a view to challenging their existing skillset, assumptions, and capabilities. In the online course, facilitators offer the external expertise required to ensure that middle leaders matter.

Organisations are complex, and as such, extremely challenging to lead and manage. Bassett (2016) asserts that middle leadership demands a set of leadership and management skills that require specialised knowledge and training. Drawing on the work of Bolman & Deal (2013), a set of principles are outlined to navigate the complex nature of leading from the middle. Using a multi-frame approach, middle leaders are supported to improve their leadership practice by exploring multiple perspectives “to understand and influence what’s really going on” (p. 40). These principles are: shared vision, developing culture, building relationships, and implementing systems/structures, each of which is unpacked within the middle leaders’ context, during the online course.

Ultimately, middle leaders matter. For our middle leaders to feel valued and developed as leaders, meaningful appraisal experiences and middle leadership development opportunities need to be a priority.

References:
Bassett, M. (2016). The role of middle leaders in New Zealand secondary schools: Expectations and challenges. Waikato Journal of Education, 21(1), 97-108
Bolman, L. G. & Deal. T. E. (2013). Reframing organisations: Artistry, choice and leadership (5thed.). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Cardno, C. & Robson, J. (2016). Realising the value of performance appraisal for middle leaders in New Zealand secondary schools. Research in Educational Administration & Leadership, 1(2), 229-254.
Education Review Office (2017) Communities of learning/Kāhui Ako: Collaboration to improve learner outcomes (Wellington: Education Review Office).
Ministry of Education. (2012). Leading from the Middle: Educational Leadership for middle and senior leaders. Wellington: Ministry of Education.

Interested in learning more about ensuring Middle Leadership Matters?

Joanne Robson, CORE Education, Tātai Aho Rau, is leading the Empower online 20-week course: Middle Leadership Matters.

Martin Bassett, Unitec Institute of Technology, recognises the Empower Middle Leadership Matters course as prior learning for postgraduate qualifications in Educational Leadership and Management.

Check out:

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collective

Memes for change.  Getting out of the CAVE.

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The Internet is a wonderful thing. It has given us everything from dancing babies to cat videos. It is also an astounding place for the creation of communities of practice, the sharing of professional knowledge, and for people who are interested in quite narrow topics to find communities of affinity with others around the world.

One of the quite interesting things to come from the rise of social media in particular is the meme:

‘A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem) is “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.’
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Memes are exemplified by the fast spreading of things, like the dancing baby above, through social networks and social media. The wondering for me is:

“How do we make effective leadership and school change practices into memes?”

How can we make effectiveness and high performance contagious and for them to spread like some sort of disease that has no cure?  How can we develop the super-bug of effective school change?

Some of the key influencers of the effectiveness of change that I see in my work with schools and in the literature are:

  • Relationships — people need to develop trust and agreed ways of working before the ‘hard stuff’ of change can be a focus.  Only surface and ‘safe’ things can be explored.  There is a saying that equally applies to change:Maslow

This challenges us to ensure we have agreed ways of working and high levels of professional and personal trust before we can get to the really meaningful conversations and change efforts.

  • Understanding — I have written before about getting ideas outside the echo chamber and avoiding the Medici Effect.  Are you really getting to the underlying cause, or simply looking at and dealing with the symptoms? I think we often do this with assessment data – perhaps our literacy results are lower than we would like, so we do literacy Professional Learning and Development. But if we dug a little deeper and explored the information available to us a little more, we may find that engagement or home-school partnerships are larger causal factors than teacher pedagogical content knowledge specifically in an area of literacy. Sometimes, we don’t really understand the underlying causes of the data we are seeing, and, therefore, put our intentional change efforts in the areas that will not give us the best ‘bang-for-buck.’
  • A focus on comfort and happiness — change is often difficult and uncomfortable.  If the index of success is the degree to which everyone is comfortable and happy, then change becomes impossible. Comfort and change are, at least to some degree, mutually exclusive.  Understanding this (perhaps through models like Fullans’ Implementation Dip, or Nottingham’s Learning Pit) is a key element of beginning change processes and ensuring change and improvement are continuous and ongoing processes in a school.
  • Planning and Checking — we often make changes without a clear set of measures for what ‘good’ or ‘effective’ looks like, or what we are expecting to see as outcomes of the initiative. We know we want things to be better than they are now, but without agreed measures how will we know if we are on track or have achieved them?

So we do know what some of the key influencers of change are. We know what works!  We also do know what some of the highly effective processes are. We do know what highly effective practices and outcomes look like.  So this begs the question — ‘Why are we not able to pull things together to achieve the package that makes the gains for students which we are all hoping for’?

Most of the things I see answering this provocation come down to people. How we work together; our mindframes around achievement; and more particularly our mindframes around change.

To simplify things a lot, people tend to sit somewhere on a continuum with respect to change:  From the CAVE mentality to those with a high BIO quotient.

CAVE BIO diagramme

cavemen

So my pondering becomes how to make the BIO mentality sticky and contagious.  How to get people onboard with change.  And conversely, how to get those who live in the CAVE out into the daylight and revelling in the excitement and challenge that highly effective school-change brings.

I would love to hear what people have found works well in your context!  A big part of spreading a meme is enabling the contact and having the conversations.  Let’s share our effectiveness ideas in the comments below.

Image sources:
Maslow quote: Future Classrooms (slide) Dean Shareski CC
Diorama of cavemen — Wikimedia – Public Domain

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change

Who navigates change? — A learner’s view of change leadership…

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What is changing?

I have been thinking a lot lately about how people are supported when facing significant change in their lives, especially in the complex and ever-changing world of education. Research tells us that we can no longer prepare learners for the 21st century and beyond through industrial and content-driven models. We should be creating learning opportunities that harness and spark innovation, creativity, collaboration, digital literacy, and curiosity for the world around us. We should be encouraging educators to continually inquire into practice through a future-focused lens.

Lichtman (2014) states that, when a school is facing organisational or cultural changes, it can be very uncomfortable, cause displacement and even grief, but that all of this is OK, and that we should welcome the uncomfortable. He also unpacks the difference between ‘hard’ and ‘uncomfortable’. Hard is where you are fighting against every odd and the chance of success is highly unlikely. But, uncomfortable is where we get to challenge and make some really tough decisions. I guess, that means that it is not impossible and can be achieved with the right support? At times of significant change, though, it can be very challenging to move out of the “this-is-just-too-hard” and into the “I-am-just-uncomfortable-but-will-get-through-it” frame of mind. Isn’t it?

 

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leadership

Leadership in a (permanent) crisis

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leadership

The (permanent) crisis

The notion of a crisis and leadership often go hand-in-hand; we’re led to believe that true leaders rise to the fore in times of crisis; they show their heroic leadership skills as they navigate their organisations through an exceptional period of turmoil.

But the title of this blog post is borrowed from an article by Ron Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky, which proposes that we are living through such rapidly changing times that periods of turmoil are in fact no longer exceptional, they’re the rule. Organisations no longer attempt to get through a crisis in the hope that one day things will return to normal; the new normal is ongoing disruption.

It’s against this background that Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky wrote 'Leadership Without Easy Answers' and proposed the idea of adaptive leadership. They argue that challenges can often be divided into two categories:

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Highway

“Readiness is all” — Building change readiness in organisations

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When Shakespeare wrote for Hamlet his famous line ‘readiness is all’, he certainly wasn’t thinking about teachers implementing Chromebooks in the 21st century, but the phrase (and its translation ‘what’s important is to be prepared’) is a great piece of advice for those of us living in changing times.

All people have different levels of openness to change based on things like the context, our previous experiences, our personality type and whether we prefer the familiar or the novel. (Robbins, 2005). However, in a fast-moving world (where change is constant) we must all be ready to embrace change to varying degrees. For educators, this change might be the implementation of new, high potential technologies, new research findings related to pedagogy, or new practices as a result of the changing needs of our learners.

Highway

Readiness for change

Our level of readiness for change directly influences our individual decisions to either resist or support a change effort (Choi, 2011). So what increases a person’s readiness for change? Researchers point to three things:

  1. a belief that change is needed, and
  2. a belief that the proposed change is appropriate for the challenge at hand, and
  3. a belief that the organisation has the capacity to implement the change (Choi, 2011).

Let's look at each in a bit more detail.

Is change needed?

The first condition centres around establishing a 'why' for the change (sometimes called 'a sense of urgency') and this often involves looking at things such as:

  • Your organisation's vision and values and how well these are being enacted
  • Data and evidence that what we say we value is actually what is happening on the ground,
  • Changes taking place in the wider environment that may impact on your work: new technologies, changing community or demographic contexts, new policy directions etc.
  • Self-review process which may identify areas that need further attention or different approaches.

However you do it, you should explore the drivers that sit behind the change so that everybody involved in the change should be able to answer the question “Why are we doing this?”

Is the proposed change appropriate for the challenge at hand?

The second element that increases a person’s level of change readiness is for them (or us) to believe that the proposed change is appropriate for the challenge at hand. There are two key elements here: the first is about the level of fit with the organisation, the second is about the likelihood that this change is right for this challenge.

The level of ‘cultural fit’ is essentially the degree to which this change is appropriate to your organisation. The link to your organisation's vision and culture is important, because organisations that try to adopt change initiatives that run counter to who they are, seldom find success- even in cases where that same change has been successful elsewhere. Changes that are ‘low-cultural fit’ rarely succeed in the long term, often being ceremonially adopted, significantly adapted or simply abandoned (Canato, A., Ravasi, D., & Phillips, N.,2013).

A second way that leaders can increase people's sense that a given change is appropriate is to make be participatory and transparent in the process by which the decision is made to proceed. This is about making visible the factors that guided the choice of a given change effort in comparison with other possible courses of action. It's a public examination of the pros and cons so others can see the reasoning at work. It might also include helping people to understand the research that has informed thinking.

Can we successfully implement this change?

The third component of change readiness is a belief that the organisation has the capability and capacity to successfully implement the proposed change. This component can sabotage sensible, well-planned change initiatives: imagine an organisation that knows change is needed, believes that the proposed change is the right one, but is so disillusioned about prior attempts at change that they still think it is going to fail. It's a recipe for disillusionment and cynicism about change.

There are a number of different things that leaders can do to increase an organisation’s sense of self-efficacy when it comes to implementing change:

  • Ensure that every change is well considered, thoroughly researched and carefully implemented. False starts, or misguided initiatives can be potentially damaging.
  • Provide timely and adequate information about the change (McKay, K., Kuntz, J., & Näswall, K., 2013). This consists of keeping everyone informed about transactional 'small picture' details (timeframes, consultation periods, scope and sequence etc.) as well as overarching 'big picture' considerations (big trends driving the change, alignment with current practices, research informing decision-making etc.)
  • Establish participatory decision-making processes (where participants are part of the problem-finding as well as the problem-solving).
  • Prototype wherever possible. This helps to build participants' sense of self-efficacy around small changes, ultimately increasing their appetite for larger ones.

Implications

One of the key challenges surrounding the building of change readiness is that it is difficult to do any of this quickly: if an organisation doesn't have a sense of urgency about change today, it's unlikely to suddenly develop one tomorrow. Similarly if individuals are disillusioned about the failure of previous change initiatives, it takes time for this self-confidence to return. One of the clear implications for change leaders is that readiness for change should be constantly and carefully developed well before change is needed. Paradoxically, by the time change is upon you, it may well be too late.

Reflective questions:

As a way of exploring your level of change readiness (either as an individual or as an organisation) consider a change initiative you’re undertaking ask these questions:

  • Why is change needed?
  • Is this change right for our organisation?
  • What confidence do we have that the change will meet the challenge at hand?
  • Do we believe we can successfully implement this change? If not, what support will be needed?

Conclusions

Woven through all of these finds are the notions of transparency and participation. These build trust in an organisation, and in the leaders taking that organisation through the change process. Trusting and believing in the people who are leading your organisation is perhaps the most important precursor to taking the first step.

Bibliography:

Canato, A., Ravasi, D., & Phillips, N. (2013). Coerced Practice Implementation in Cases of Low Cultural Fit: Cultural Change and Practice Adaptation During the Implementation of Six Sigma at 3M. Academy of Management Journal, 56(6), 1724–1753.
Choi, M. (2011). Employees’ attitudes toward organizational change: A literature review. Human Resource Management, 50(4), 479–500. http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.20434
McKay, K., Kuntz, J., & Näswall, K. (2013). The effect of affective commitment, communication and participation on resistance to change: The role of change readiness. New Zealand Journal of Psychology, 42(2).
Robbins, S. P. (2005). Essentials of organizational behavior (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Mark Osborne is presenting a session on Leading Transformative Change at the coming Emerging Leaders' Summit (ELS) in June. These are to be run in both Auckland and Wellington.
Check out the details:

Mark is the founder of the Emerging Leader's Summit event in New Zealand.

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