Reviewing the leadership research for business and education

If you are familiar with the major developments in leadership/management practice over the last hundred years you will see that the best techniques have evolved greatly over that time. A hundred years ago you had the top down, directive, “scientific” style espoused by the likes of Taylor, Gantt and others. Since then those interested in performing well but also offering much higher levels of satisfaction for those in the organization have morphed into a participative leadership style where all inputs are valued and people have the chance to fully contribute to organizational excellence in its mission accomplishment. This participatory approach is vital to being able to effectively pursue a continuous improvement approach. The research suggests that in most organizations there is distrust for management and there is a call for a different kind of leadership--one that spreads the power (however one defines it) and responsibilities among the workforce.

Following are some excerpts from various writings about the research and conclusions of the journey from the old beliefs to the more modern and liberating ones of today.

Peters and Waterman [In Search of Excellence] (1982) stated the complaints against American management seem to fall into 5 main categories:
1. The business schools [and education schools] are perpetuating a top-down mentality;

2. Managers lack the right perspective;

3. Managers do not personally identify with what their companies do;

4. Managers do not take enough interest in their people; and

5. Top managers have become isolated from line workers.

They concluded, “Far too many managers have lost sight of the basics, in our opinion: quick action, service to customers, practical innovation, and the fact that you can’t get any of these without virtually everyone’s commitment”.

William Abernathy, in a Forbes interview, shared: “The Japanese seem to have a tremendous cost advantage. . . . They have developed a ‘people’ approach . . . . They have a work force that’s turned on, willing to work, and is excited about making cars”. Economists and sociologists warned American businessmen, as far back as the late 1940’s, that its adherence to specialized division of labor and aloof leadership would ultimately reduce productivity and result in the loss of a competitive edge. It wasn’t until Japan emerged as a formidable competitor that businesses started to re-examine the nature of and structure for leadership (Lewis, 1993).
Lewin and associates concluded that companies that have a more democratic attitude where workers actively participate in decisions are more productive and are more satisfied with their work as compared to groups under a more authoritarian structure.

Selznick, Barnard, and Follett, in addition to having a tremendous effect in moving management theory from the classical to a more social, “humanistic” approach, were probably collectively responsible for the introduction of the bottom-up or “participatory” style of management. This would influence the theory, which followed in what is called the “Participatory Management Model”

According to Argyris, “Following bureaucratic or pyramidal values leads to poor, shallow, and mistrustful relationships. Because these relationships do not permit the natural and free expression of feelings, they are phony or nonauthentic and result in decreased interpersonal competence” Argyris believed that in a humanistic-democratic value system, trusting, authentic relationships will develop among people and will result in increased interpersonal competence, intergroup cooperation, and flexibility, which will result in increased organizational effectiveness.

Sergiovanni takes the concept a step further and suggests, “When moral authority transcends bureaucratic leadership . . . the outcomes in terms of commitment and performance far exceed expectations”. Sergiovanni believes neither bureaucratic nor personal authority create innate reasons for people to follow leaders. Rather, he states: We ought to follow our leaders because they’re people of substance, because they have compelling ideas, because they’re able to share with us insights. Those who make a commitment to ideas and ideals together then have a moral obligation to meet . . . commitments to those ideas.

Gaining insight from the studies of Mayo, Barnard, McGregor, Argyris, Likert, Ouchi, Deming, and others, theorists of the nineties are defending the turn from bureaucratic, top-down managerial attitudes to a philosophy that provides individuals a greater voice in the work that affects their lives. In recent years, there have been many authors expressing dissatisfaction with top-down, autocratic methods of managing organizations and its workforce.

Peters and Waterman researched successful American companies and concluded that there are eight attributes that characterize innovative companies. They:
1. Have a bias for action--when a problem presents itself, this company acts quickly to move forward;
2. Are close to the customer--products are the result of customer satisfaction;
3. Foster autonomy and entrepreneurship among all workers--individuals are encouraged to make a contribution that will benefit the customer and the company;
4. Consider productivity results through the efforts of people--workers are empowered to do their job and to build-in quality up front;
5. Are “hands-on” and value-driven companies that care about their people and not only doing the right thing, but doing it the right way;
6. Stay close to what they know and build upon their strengths;
7. Have simple organization and lean bureaucratic structures--matrix organizational structures are too complex; and
8. Are both centralized and decentralized--autonomy is centered on the workforce.

Jim Collins in his seminal work Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t suggests great leaders are “level 5” leaders. These individuals build “enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.” Collins further stated: We were surprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good company into a great one. Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy—these leaders are a paradoxical blend of humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.

Further, Level 5 leaders “channel their ego needs away from themselves and into a larger goal of building a great company. Collins explains that Level 5 leaders have ego and ambition, “but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.” In his opinion, “Humility + will = Level 5” leaders. “Good-to-Great” leaders and companies share the following characteristics. They:

1. Hire the right people and assemble a competent team. “The old adage People are the most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”
2. Maintain an unwavering faith that you can and will prevail. In support of this Norman Vincent Peal, in his popular book titled The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) once stated: “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy. But with sound self-confidence you can succeed.”
3. Confront the “brutal facts” about your current reality. Level 5 leaders take an objective view of the company’s strengths and weaknesses and base decisions on data.
4. Transcend the curse of incompetence. Great companies are never satisfied to be good in their status with success. They continually seek to build quality in their product and by seeking input from the workers and the customers their products continue to meet the current and emerging needs.
5. Having a culture of discipline is imperative. “When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.”
6. Apply technology carefully and never use it as the primary means of eliciting transformation. “We learned that technology by itself is never a primary, root cause of either greatness or decline.”
7. Success is not based on a quick fix, but rather organized sustained effort, that gradually reaches such a momentum as to create a great cultural change

Educational leadership theory seems to be lagging behind business in its grasp and implementation of leadership theories that are proven effective. Similar to the frustration Deming must have felt when he tried to convince American business leaders following World War II, enlightened business leaders, having heeded the suggestions of Deming and Peters and Waterman, are now growing increasingly impatient with the indifference of public schools. There is some evidence in literature that educational leaders have been unaware or uninterested in the benefits of a change in leadership style. Robert Greenleaf, in particular, stated, “I have spent a great deal of time and energy trying to persuade educators to accept the obligation, and I am certain that, generally, they recognize neither the obligation nor the opportunity. Thus far in my experience, they appear unpersuadable”. The confidence level in public education and its leadership is decreasing according to such notables as Philip Schlechty who suggests private partnerships may result if public educational leadership will not listen and respond to the current needs of the customers.

Lessons from exemplary companies as outlined by Peters and Waterman and the reform measures suggested by Deming serve as a “call to action” for public education. The call is out for a more human-centered leadership style that has a clear understanding of its purpose and its customer, basing its foundation in providing quality service, not in being served.

Conyers and Ewy in their book Charting Your Course: Lessons Learned During the Journey Toward Performance Excellence suggest two important characteristics of educational leaders are will and courage. Peter Block stated of these two characteristics:

We need to stop asking how? We now have all the knowledge, the skills, the methods, the tools, the capacity, and the freedom to do whatever is required to serve all students well. All that is needed is the will and courage to choose and move on.
Educational leaders need to accept the model of their peers in business by observing forecasts (trends) for the future and meet the emerging demands. Educational leaders will need skills beyond their training. Reviewing trends and research and remaining current with what is effective is necessary for any leader wishing to be great.

Needed—skilled cross country race drivers

Whether you are talking about the famous Baja races or the ones run in other parts of the world (Sahara desert, etc.) these races put a premium on driving skill. The drivers need to be prepared to deal with any condition that arises from torrential rain, to wind driven sandstorms, to mud, to ruts, to rocky terrain, to crossing streams, to rutty suspension breaking roads, etc. Every race offers a different set of circumstances that the drivers must face and cope with. The winner is most often the most skilled but luck and educated risk-taking play a role in determining the winner in each race.

The above is a good analogy to being a leader in any organization that must perform against its competition. In today’s increasingly competitive global environment leadership skill can make the difference between surviving or not. While every good leader spends significant time planning their road to success, they know that they must be prepared to alter their plan to fit the unanticipated situations that arise in any endeavor.

When you look at our education system we have a “programmed to fail” situation. Processes are specified rigorously. Follow the recipe or you will be penalized by loss of funds or other sanctions. The whole enterprise is one of legislators and the bureaucracy they create with their legislation creating a lockstep army of educators who are not allowed to deviate from their process even if they are about to march over a cliff. The concept that anyone can specify the detailed operational regimen of such a large and complex operation is ludicrous. Of course, it isn’t funny at all, because it designates a process that is ineffective in providing the results that are imperative to serving our kids and our society well. The approach used in education has created a system where change is not allowed unless it is specified from on high. It is like the race driver in the above example getting to a river with a bridge washed out. In the education process example he would have to wait until the bridge was repaired because deviations from the process plan were not allowed. In an organization where the race driver (leader) has the end goal as the driving force there is freedom to detour to the nearest bridge to solve the problem that wasn’t anticipated when the plan was made.

If we were as serious as we say we are about improving education performance, we would do two things. Greatly improve the skill level of education leaders (retool them as Levine says is needed in his Educating School Leaders), AND take away much of the bureaucratic Gordian Knot approach of specifying process to nine decimal places, replacing it with a system that specifies desired results with incentives and penalties based on achieving those results.

Perfect Storm of Bad Educational Ideas

I wrote this in July 2006 after reading "The Knowledge Deficit" by Hirsch. It is still very timely. It contains direct quotes from his work.

The Infamous Four
They Sound Good But They Don’t Work
Why Johnny Can’t Read

E. D. Hirsch Jr. in his new book, The Knowledge Deficit, points out why American education is not succeeding in educating our kids well and why the achievement gap between minority and low income students is not responding to the current methods.

Hirsch calls the current situation a “perfect storm” of Bad Educational Ideas. The Four on his list include:

• Naturalism—“The reason for this state of affairs – tragic for millions of students as well as for the nation – is that an army of American educators and reading experts are fundamentally wrong in their ideas about education and especially about reading comprehension. Their well-intentioned yet mistaken views are the significant reason (more than other constantly blamed factors, even poverty) that many of our children are not attaining reading proficiency, thus crippling their later schooling. …[A] complacent faith in the benefits of nature. …reading is or should be natural.” Other names that are synonymous are romanticism, transcendentalism, progressive as in John Dewey. Caused Hirsch to write Cultural Literacy which pointed out that reading comprehension – literacy itself – depends on specific background knowledge. “The dominant ideas in American education are virtually unchallenged within the educational community. American education expertise (which is not the same as educational expertise in nations that perform better than we do) has a monolithic character in which dissent is stifled. This is because of the history of American education schools…the history of these schools, which are institutions that train almost all of the teachers and administrators who must carry out the provisions of NCLB, is the history of intellectual cloning. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the parent organism, Teachers College at Columbia University, exported professors and the romantic principles…resulting in an intellectual sameness across the nation’s education schools. Even today criticism of those fundamental ideas is hard to find in these institutions.”

• Formalism—“A lot of dead information is to be replaced by all-purpose, how-to knowledge (formalism). Naturalism and Formalism are the two principles that constitute a kind of theology that is drilled into prospective teachers like a catechism. In practice the two principles are not always compatible. …the how-to notion of reading comprehension that stresses clarifying, summarizing, questioning - will inevitably lead to drill-like activities which will be anathematized by the naturalistic principle that learning should be an engaging activity. The dominant principles of naturalism and formalism, being opposed to the systematic teaching of a great deal of information, are deadly enemies of the reading goals of NCLB. Advances in reading will depend on students gaining a great deal of information. This conflict of ideas is, then, the root cause of the impasse between the NCLB law and the schools, for the only way to improve scores in reading comprehension and to narrow the reading gap between groups is systematically to provide children with the wide-ranging, specific background knowledge they need to comprehend what they read.”

• Determinism—the belief that demographics determine ability to learn. “Determinism is nonetheless a flawed and dismal theory, which, while conveniently exculpating the schools, undermines the founding principles of democratic education.”

• Localism--"Along with the terrible trinity of naturalism, formalism, and determinism, localism deserves a dishonored place in American education. Among the wider public it may be the most powerful educational idea of all. On the surface it just implies that our state or our town will decide what should be taught in our schools. It says nothing about what those things should be, so localism is another content-free idea, and as a practical matter it powerfully reinforces an approach that is short on content. It brings liberals and conservatives together to collaborate in support of anti-content, process oriented ideas about education."

"This suspicion fed collaboration between liberals and conservatives helps explain why the process point of view has persisted despite its inability to raise achievement or attain fairness. Educationist, process ideas thrive on the liberal-conservative standoff, and our schools and school boards operate under a gentleman's agreement that unites these groups behind the process-oriented creed."

“The failure of romantic [naturalism, progressivism, constructivism, etc] ideas to improve educational achievement is an inevitable result of their scientific inadequacy and inaccuracy. Reading is not, as romantics hold, either a natural acquisition or a formal skill. But mere scientific inadequacy can be a practical irrelevance in American education. Professors, including those who teach our teachers, do not easily give up their long-asserted ideas, even under the pressure of unfavorable scientific evidence.” Thus, the professors blame society because they won’t face the lie they are telling themselves by ignoring the scientific evidence.

“Old people grow blunt; they haven’t time for slow niceties. Let me be blunt about the implication of the intellectual history I have traced…If its recommendations are followed, reading scores will rise for all groups of children, and so will scores in math and science, because, as common sense would predict, reading is strongly correlated with ability to learn in all subjects. Equally important, social justice will be served, because the reading gap between social groups will be greatly narrowed by following the …pro-knowledge recommendations.”