Mitchell & Tucker: Leadership as a way of thinking

Mitchell, D.E., & Tucker, S. (1992, February). Leadership as a way of thinking. Educational leadership, 30-35.

Mitchell and Tucker do not think that leadership is the only way for people to carry out school improvement programs. They take an alternative perspective in which leadership is only one of several ways to serve schools well. They start by shooting down two popular assumptions, both of which emphasize the charismatic leader:

• the assumption that individual leaders can produce quick and dramatic differences in school performance keeps us from focusing on the importance of teamwork and comprehensive school improvement;
• emphasizing the value of melodramatic, media-grabbing, high-profile actions keeps people from providing desperately needed guidance for ordinary programs and day-to-day school operations.

Superintendents' leadership springs from the way they think. These are too richly textured and varied to fit into a single mold. School culture guies thinking and feeling, and influences behavior. It creates social norms and draws attention to opportunities for action, without specifying exactly what to do or how to do it.

Mitchell sees a 2 x 2 matrix: transactional vs. transformational leadership, and frontier vs. settled school cultures. Here are the differences:

• Transactional leadership depends on getting control over the incentive system. Transactional superintendents are concerned with structures, job functions, policies, and procedures.
• Transformational leadership arises when leaders are more concerned about gaining overall cooperation and energetic participation from organization members than they are in getting particular tasks done. Transformational superintendents give primary attention to the staff rather than to the structure; they are people-oriented.
• In frontier school cultures, schools are troubled, often labeled failures, and challenged to change their goals while at the same time radically improving performance in traditional areas of emphasis. Frontier leadership emphasizes culture building and problem solving. Individual differences may be respected, but there is an obvious need for common experiences and a shared commitment to the emerging community. Problem-solving activities are emphasized.
• In settled school cultures, well-established norms and shared beliefs interpret ordinary activities and guide all participants. They may baffle newcomers and prevent minority group members from experiencing full community membership. Programs are sensible and well-planned, tasks and relationships are well-specified, and effective leadership rests on coordination and expertise. Standardized work activities are emphasized.

These two cultural dimensions intersect in the table below:

• Supervision The supervisory approach gives superintendents and principals responsibility for identifying specific tasks and directing staff in how each is to be performed. They closely monitor staff to ensure that directions are being followed and that performance is high. Supervisors express the belief that better schooling results from longer hours, more requirements, stronger mandates, and above all, an accountability system that ties incentives directly to measured student achievement.
• Administration The administrative work orientation shares with the supervisory one the belief that the overall goals of education are well understood and supported. High quality teaching depends on giving teachers more professional autonomy, allowing them to creatively diagnose student learning styles and problems and developing their own techniques for encouraging achievement within established programs and practices. They use counseling, staff development, and day-to-day interactions to ensure tht their staffs fully participate in the established program.
• Management Managers, like supervisors, rely more on transactional than transformational relationships. They see effective teaching as the result of competence and skill. Task definition is more important than nurturing interpersonal relationships. They value effective analysis of school performance problems and staff training, emphasize the importance of performance indicators, and want explicit measures of school productivity.
• Leadership Leaders, like managers, recognize that support for their organizations depends upon making qualitative changes in their performance, but they do not believe that either the incentive system or the knowledge base for effective performance is adequately developed. Transformational leaders see themselves as responsible more for redefining educational goals than for implementing existing programs. They believe that teaching become effective only when it is integrated into cohesive, coordinated activity. School improvement is a matter of realigning school programs with the needs and interests of all stakeholders. They see the central issue as one of commitment rather than competence.

The authors feel that transformational leadership is not the only route to improved school performance. Often, the little failures of poor organization and technically weak programs may ultimately be more important than what is assumed to be a set of comprehensive and catastrophic failures. These can often be more easily remedied through energetic management, supportive administration, or directive supervision than by the melodrama of charismatic leadership. A balanced approach is called for, with attention given to supervising well-established programs, administering to the needs of teachers and students, and managing the utilization of scarce resources, as well as the popular emphasis on sweeping revisions and fundamental changes.

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