18.3: What is Leadership?
-
- Last updated
- Save as PDF
The essence of leadership is to be found in relationships between motives, resources, leaders, and followers. (Leithwood & Duke, 1999, p. 49)
Leadership is generally defined as the ability to influence and persuade others to agree on purpose (Gardner, 1990; Bennis & Nanus, 1985; Bolman & Deal, 1995; Sergiovanni, 2001). Early descriptions of leadership focused on personal qualities of a leader, the “great man” approach. These traditional views of leadership emphasized a leader’s charisma and personal conviction, however fell short intellectually, as they served only to describe leaders as displaying leadership, no more compelling than arguing that athletes display athleticism. A list of personal characteristics was not sufficient to adequately describe leadership as a practice. Situational leadership began to capture the notion of leadership in context, but still emphasized managerial and operational functions. However in the past two decades literature has emphasized data-driven results focusing on the behaviours of leaders as they engage in activities affecting growth and learning (Leithwood & Duke, 1999). Recent models of leadership focus on relationships within community (Sergiovanni, 2001) and the ability of the leader to cope with complex change (Fullan, 2003) and organizational learning (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003; Mulford, Silins & Leithwood, 2004; Silins & Mulford, 2002).
If leadership is the art of getting things done with others, then it is also a shift from a “paradigm based on power and control to one based on the ability to empower others” (Silins & Mulford, 2002, p. 5), and this empowerment occurs within a learning community. Gardner (1990) emphasizes that “skill in the building and rebuilding of community is not just another of the innumerable requirements of contemporary leadership, [it] is one of the highest and most essential skills a leader can command” (p. 118). Sergiovanni (2001) describes leadership as both cognitive and moral—having more to do with values and purpose than bureaucratic need, less about position, personality and mandate and more about ideas. According to Bennis (1989, 1999), leadership is for the benefit of followers, not the enrichment of leaders, and is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
Leadership is “the process of persuasion or example by which an individual (or leadership team) induces a group to pursue objectives held by the leader or shared by the leader and his or her followers” (Gardner (1990, p. 1), or, as Leithwood (2003) puts it:
At the core of most definitions of leadership are two functions: providing direction and exercising influence. Thus, it may be said that leaders mobilize and work with others to articulate and achieve shared intentions (p. 7).
Leaders, then, pursue agreed purposes, shared vision, and serve others in achieving those purposes (Sergiovanni, 2001; Shields, 2003; Leithwood & Jantzi, 2005), and this pursuit is done in community. Leadership involves social relations and ends, purpose, direction, and influence. It is contextual and contingent on the setting, and educational technologies have changed the landscape of those settings.