There is not one single example anywhere in the world of a change in organisational performance
without some change in leadership. And by change in leadership, I don’t necessarily
mean replacing the principal; I mean a change in leadership practice. That’s how powerful
leadership is. In any organisation, that’s how powerful it is.
So what do we actually know? Well I think it’s important to say what we know because
there are things that we know about leadership and it’s important to underline them. The
first is it is the key lever of organisational performance. You take it out and the chances
of you improving your organisation are pretty slim indeed. The second is, what we’ve learnt
is in the most successful organisations you have what’s called distributed leadership.
Now I’m going to be talking a bit about distributed leadership in a moment but let
me be clear, when I'm talking about distributed leadership, I am not talking about delegation,
I am not talking about giving people tasks you really rather wouldn’t do yourself.
That’s not distributed leadership. That’s delegation. And the important point, what
the best leaders do is actually they grow other leaders. You see, we’ve been, I guess,
misinformed if we think that leadership resides in just the formal responsibilities within
the organisation. It resides elsewhere and tapping that leadership is absolutely key
in terms of raising organisational performance. So let me just say a few things about what
it looks like and I guess you’ve heard what I’ve said about the importance of putting
learners at the centre of everything that we do and I guess I put learning there for
the centre of this particular exposition of distributed leadership. There are different
versions of this but mine, I guess, is very much a practical interpretation of what distributed
leadership looks like and, more importantly, what it looks like when it makes a difference.
I think what we’re seeing in some schools is changing structures in order to allow people
to work together more effectively, but there’s a caution here. We were in a school relatively
recently and one of the principals there had actually physically taken down the walls to
allow her teachers to work together more effectively. The walls had gone but the practice was still
the same. So I think there's something that we can do structurally to get people to work
together more effectively but the skills of collaboration, the way people work together
has to be learned, have to be practised, otherwise it becomes sort of loose co-operation. And
the analogy I have, I suppose, is when you get a group of students, you can put them
on a table, they can be called a group but they can be working individually. It’s exactly
the same with teachers. So how do we get teachers to work interdependently,
not independently? So moving structures is one way we can do it but that’s necessary
but not sufficient. The second thing is about roles, recognising and giving people more
roles, more responsibility. If you just think about the leadership roles as being three
or four people in a school, then you are actually confining the leadership to just those roles.
So thinking about roles in a completely different way, the informal leader I talked about in
your school, yeah, using their expertise, bringing them in, making sure they’re part
of a leadership endeavour. And this is where I think we’re going to
be going next, is teams: easy to say but hard to do. If you think about the England football
team—which I try not to—if you saw the last world cup, fantastic performers individually
but as a team, atrocious because they didn't play as a team. And one of the interesting
things from the Beyond Expectation study, the sports teams we looked at—and this is
fascinating—sometimes the managers of those sports teams said they wouldn’t play their
best player because it would demoralise the others in the team. So there’s something
there about the team configuration that is important. And ultimately what we want to
get to is we’re not talking about distributed leadership, we’re not talking about collaboration,
because that’s the way we really work around here. It’s the cultural way we work around
here. Again, I wanted to emphasise that the evidence
shows that collaboration, when it is disciplined, when it is focused, when it is most effective,
can make a significant difference to student learning outcomes. The same is true of distributed
leadership. There is however a paradox and some principals say to me, Yeah, but if I
distribute leadership, Alma, what am I doing? Where’s my job gone? They misunderstood
what distributed leadership is. Distributed leadership is not giving away your power or
authority or control. It’s saying, As a leader, how can I create the conditions in
my organisation where people will feel able to offer their expertise? You know, nobody’s
going to rush up to you and say, Can you give me more work? I don’t know if that’s ever
happened to you but it’s just not going to happen. But if you’ve got that slightly
invitational style, there are people with expertise in your organisation today who are
just not able to share it or demonstrate it because the opportunity isn’t there. So
the formal leaders provide the opportunity for the informal leaders to come forward.
If you are an autocratic, hierarchical control freak, no one is going to offer to take on
any more responsibility because ultimately they see it as your role, your responsibility.
It’s not delegation by another name. I think I’ve sort of commented upon that, and sometimes
those two terms are used interchangeably and that’s not helpful because the idea of distributed
leadership then is giving things away rather than empower others to bring things to you.
That’s what distributed leadership really is.
There is, however, a dark side of distributed leadership. You know, let me just ask a question
of everyone here, and you can put your hands up like this if you don’t really want to
put your hands up like this. How many people here have ever worked for a bad leader? … Okay,
have a look around the room. Put your hands down. Very rarely talked about. Go to any
bookshop, look at the leadership literature. It will all be I did it my way, it will all
be inspirational leadership, it will all be positive. And yet, if we think about leadership
and leaders, that influence can be used for bad as well as good but it’s rarely, rarely
written about, it’s rarely, rarely expressed, because some of that leadership is bullying,
some of that leadership is to do with intimidation, some of that leadership is to do with making
people feel small so they are controlled. So there’s a dark side to distributed leadership
like there’s a dark side to any other leadership, if it is misused and I think this is a government
health warning, I think, before you go into your sessions. I am not saying distributed
leadership is a fantastic thing. It can be, but only with the right conditions. It’s
not automatically a good thing, a positive thing. It depends. It depends on how the principal
sets up the conditions within his or her school for people to take on leadership responsibilities.
If the power is misused by the people who are invited to come forward, it won’t work.
If it's really sort of more workload for teachers but we’ll call it distributed leadership,
it’s not going to work. It’s inauthentic. People will know. If it’s to do with overturning
the formal leadership in the school—because realistically, it’s like collaboration:
once you let collaboration out of the box in your school, I mean authentic collaboration,
you can’t put it back in. But if you use it wisely, it can be a real positive force
for improving performance and there are some barriers to distributed leadership.
If I had the time, I’d ask you to think about what the barriers are and I can guarantee
that the first barrier would be time on the list, how you get the time to do this, the
opportunity, the resources. So distributed leadership and collaboration are not a panacea
but there are some real opportunities if we do it well and if we do it wisely.