Leithwood: Transforming Leadership

Leithwood, K.A. (1992, October). The move toward transformational leadership. Educational leadership, 8-12.

Leithwood is a believer in Burns' idea of transformational leadership, but with a twist - the restructuring and transformation of schools from top-down organizations to bottom-up organizations. A top-down organization, such as a traditional school, is based on competitive or top-down power - the power to control the selection of new employees, the allocation of resources, and the focus for professional development. Someone who is inside the organization cannot do away with this type of control without losing his share - just as in Burns' idea of intellectual or reform leadership.

Bottom-up or "type z" organizations. rely on strong cultures to influence employees' directions and reduce differences in the status of organizational members. They emphasize participative decision making as much as possible. Their idea of power is radically different - power is consensual and facilitative in nature, manifested through other people, not over other people. It arises when teachers are helped to find greater meaning in their work, to meet higher-level needs through their work, and to develop enhanced instructional capacities. It also arises as staff members learn how to make the most of their collective capacities in solving school problems.

School restructuring involves two kinds of changes:

1. first order changes: improving the technical, instructional activities of the school, and
2. second order changes like building a shared vision, improving communication, and developing collaborative decision-making processes.

School leaders must focus efforts on using their facilitative power to make second order changes. Transformational leadership provides this focus. Transformational leadership facilitates the redefinition of people's mission and vision, a renewal of their commitment, and the restructuring of their systems for goal accomplishment.

In contrast, transactional leadership is based on an exchange of services for various kinds of rewards that the leader controls, at least in part. These two types of leadership are complementary and necessary for maintaining the organization: transactional leadership for getting day-to-day routines carried out, and transformational leadership to provide the incentives for people to attempt improvements in their practices.

The results of three research studies by Leithwood and his colleagues show that transformational leaders continually pursue three goals:

1. helping staff members develop and maintain a collaborative, professional school culture,
2. fostering teacher development, and
3. helping them solve problems together more efficiently.

Successful strategies used by leaders to assist teachers in building and maintaining collaborative professional cultures include involving staff members in collaborative goal setting and reducing teachers' isolation by creating time for joint planning.

Developing a professional school culture: school leaders actively communicated the school's cultural norms, values, and beliefs in their day-to-day interpersonal contacts, and they also shared power and responsibility with others through delegation of power to school improvement teams.

Fostering teacher development: school leaders help teachers to establish professional growth goals that are clear, explicit, and ambitious enough to be challenging, but not unrealistic. Feedback from colleagues about discrepancies between goals and current practices is helpful.

Improving group problem solving: school leaders solve problems in collaboration with teachers during staff meetings. They also hold a belief that staff members as a group could develop better solutions than the principal alone. They actively seek different interpretations, being explicit about their own interpretations, and placing individual problems in the larger perspective of the whole school and its overall directions. They change their own views when warranted, checking out their own and others' assumptions, and remaining problem solvers and resource finders.

A study in 47 schools demonstrated highly significant relationships between aspects of transformational leadership and teachers' own reports of changes in both attitudes toward school improvement and altered instructional behavior. The author judges the evidence regarding the effects of transformational educational leadership to be quite limited but uniformly positive.

Sidebar by Mary S. Poplin, pp. 10-11.

• We are motivated through a sense of competence, control, and connection.
• We grow as we extend knowledge by experimenting and creating new meanings.
• We can advance community growth by promoting critical dialogue.
• Growth happens in conjunction with others to whom we feel connected and for whom we care.

Collaborative growth is equally important. A strong ethic of collective study can provide for the commonalities and differences in the way humans grow and counter the intellectual starvation many teachers feel. Through research and study groups, we can also promote the critical dialogue around important topics that leads to collective action.

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