Mysterium Tremendum #2 - How Much Energy Should Leadership Put into Management?

Context
Leadership has shed some skin in recent years.  Management use to be the sole responsibility of admin. Now we are asked to both manage (paperwork, discipline, organizational work) and to innovate, especially via becoming experts on curriculum.

When discussing with a fellow administrator the amount of effort one should put into managerial tasks, we came to the conclusion that while managerial tasks are necessary, and they should be done well, highlighting one's abilities and insights, they should also occupy a minor portion of one's creative attention.  

Exploration

How does this work?  Well, it appears that the answer lies in relationships and systems. 

Relationships allow us access to two very important assets in management. Firstly, they allow us to create a true team for each managerial project.  A team, in this case, recieves instruction that leads to both the delegating of responsibilities and the distributing of key tasks. Without this support, we are mired in a mix of time consuming work and minutia.  The relationship work should open up the possibility of finding the strengths of others and allowing them to highlight and strengthen the project with their insight and capacity. 

Relationships also allow us access to advice from those who have experience in stretegic execution.  Especially with the new administrator, but also the case with veterans, strategic advice can save a lot of trouble in the long term. 

When working on managerial tasks, systems are the underlying operating factor. When one comes into a task, the current system must always be revised and corrected to make the system sustainable and repeated in the absent of the current work force carrying out the tasks. If a system depends on one person, a quick fix or informal agreements, then the risk is run of depending too mich on the individuals who allow for the system to run so informally. Systems also require attention to the synergetic networks depending on the current system, so that when change occurs to the one system, adjustments are also made to other linked systems. 

Conclusion

If relationships and systems are maintained and kept relevant, then the administrator is allowed the space and time, and especially the security and confidence, to focus on the more innovative projects that should be occupying the mind of the creative person. The administrator as manager should be considered with keeping things running, but only to the extent that he or she is concerned with those things running virtually self-sufficiently. 

Organic Initiatives Start with Relationships

Lately, school leadership has been tasked with organizing systemic approaches to local problems.  When literacy is low, we take on literacy initiatives.  When teacher resourcefulness is stretched, we implement coaching initiatives, ad nauseam. The initiatives, while well-meaning, are often instituted school-wide as a blanket solution. And they tend to show initial success.  While blanket approaches may begin to solve the problem, the pieces of fabric used in each department, even each classroom, resemble the other swatches to such a degree, the a deeper, systemic solution is never reached.  What we see working, that x-factor, is the relationship resonance between those tasked with carrying out the initiatives.

The cookie cutter research-in-practice approach to school initiatives will always fall flat.  This is because the culture that produces a model initiative necessarily differs from the culture that will apply it later. The general framework and truths of a good practice will hold in spirit at any school site, but the course of the initiative must grow anew at every new application of theory.  That growth only happens when the school and district provide the cultural space to have real conversations that devise real solutions.

Viviane Robinson ("Student-Centered Leadership") asserts that the task of school leadership is to assure a proper place for learning. The problem, she points out, is achieving student gains "to scale" among all schools.

The answer lies in situational, relationship based solutions. Just as I have discovered that the true laboratory of teaching is in the classroom, and the true observer is the teacher, I can extend this to say the true laboratory for school programs is in the school itself, and the instructional leaders are its true observers. An analogy for this falls in the physical sciences. The heart of oceanography happens in the ocean, while the conditions for these studies are set in the think tanks and research facilities where the conditions for the science to happen are formulated and assessed.   However, the quality of these initiatives depends on the resonance between those involved in the experiment.  The scientists in the research facility, and those in the depths of the sea need have a dialogue that resonates as it develops.  They don't have to agree, but they have to synergize.

I would say, on a practical level, that all schools that wish to cause change, should ask local school leadership to devise an initiative. The leaders should pull from research to inform the conditions of the initiative, but the heart of the initiative must come through a transformational process via conversation, data analysis, and culture building.

Systemic work must be done through relationships.  This is the consensus of my peers at leadership conferences and courses.  It's not that any old initiative will work. But an initiative, addressing the problem of practice, can be grown organically and effectively at each school site. It must be specific to the school and the culture of the school.  And it must happen through developing the resonance among those involved in the groundwork.  The classroom shows the prima materia for observation, and the leadership team's primary task is to grow those observations into information that guides the course of the initiative.