Strategic Leadership

Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch, Uncategorized

34 Points on Strategic Leadership in Schools

Modern educational leadership is complex and demanding. Challenges include reestablishing novel national visions, crafting new educational aims for schools, restructuring education systems at different levels, privatization, and diversifying school education, all at the macro-level, and being proactive in facing up to these contextual challenges using various strategies. Strategic leadership is strongly linked to the organization’s vision. Here are 34 points about strategic leadership in the school environment to prompt school administrators to action.

Vision is an essential part of strategic leadership. Without it, school staff and personnel aren’t working towards the same goal and therefore will find themselves at odds, slowing progress and impeding success. The following four points are essential for incorporating leadership vision in the school environment.

  1. Outstanding leaders must have a vision for their organizations.
  2. A school’s vision should be communicated in a way that secures commitment from other members of the organization.
  3. Communication of the vision requires communication of its meaning.
  4. Focus should be given to the institutionalizing of the vision if leadership is to be successful.

The development of strategic direction involves a process in which we don’t just look forward from the present, but we also establish a picture of what we want the school to look like in the future and set guidelines and frameworks on how to move forward to that position. As we have seen above, from the conversations with strategic leaders, there must a clear understanding of the direction the school is headed in. What strategic leaders need to do can be summarized by the strategic leadership points 5-8.

  1. Strategic leaders set the direction of the school.
  2. Strategic leaders challenge and question – they are dissatisfied with the present.
  3. Strategic leaders translate strategy into action.
  4. Strategic leaders prioritize their own strategic thinking and learning by building new mental models to frame their understanding and that of others.

One key characteristic of strategic leaders is their ability to envision the different ways their organization might perform in future. They always have a desire to challenge the status quo and improve for the future. This means that strategic leaders have to deal constantly with their dissatisfaction with present arrangements, while facing the challenge that they are not able to change things as quickly as they might want. Leaders, as change agents in their organizations, constantly ask questions such as:

  1. What are the things taught that have been clearly successful or unsuccessful in the past?
  2. What accounted for the success or failure?
  3. What do we need to do differently in the future?
  4. Which relationships between the school and students, parents, or the wider community have been successful or unsuccessful, and why?
  5. What can be done to change things for the better?
  6. How can we assess what we do to challenge the current understanding and operations?
  7. As a school, are we cruising and strolling or are we challenging and creating?

Wisdom in the context of strategic leadership is defined as the ability to take the right action at the right time. Strategic leaders need this kind of wisdom to successful foster school growth. Here are ten abilities that are central to using wisdom in strategic leadership.

  1. Creative ability to come up with ideas
  2. Analytical ability to decide whether the ideas are good.
  3. Practical ability to make their ideas functional and convince their followers that their ideas are valuable.
  4. To balance the impact of the ideas on themselves, others, and their institutions in the short and long run.
  5. Successful intelligence to adapt to varying situations and challenges.
  6. To balance the interests of various stakeholders in the school setting.
  7. To balance timeframes in a way that allows for optimal work to get done.
  8. To infuse values in a mindful way throughout the school environment.
  9. To align responses to the environment appropriately.
  10. To apply knowledge for the common good.

Strategic leadership is a powerful tool for school reform. These final nine points regarding strategic leadership deal with school reform, and specifically how administrators can create meaningful change within their school environment.

  1. Strategic leaders have a vision of the reformed system and how to achieve it.
  2. Strategic leaders create a broad understanding and support for the reform vision at the highest levels.
  3. Strategic leaders bring commitment of school and district leadership to the reform vision and its implementation.
  4. Strategic leaders rely on the use of interventions to translate the reform vision into practice.
  5. Strategic leaders recognize that, for reform to be achieved, one has to start small, refine activities as needed, and provide evidence that interventions lead to desired outcomes.
  6. Strategic leaders develop system capability and capacity to scale up reform with quality.
  7. Strategic leaders enhance and facilitate development of formal policies that provide guidance and incentives for reform.
  8. Strategic leaders avoid controversy.
  9. Strategic leaders develop capabilities for the next generation of reform leaders.

Strategic leadership consists not only of the vision element in leadership ability, but also encompasses other wide-ranging factors. The question thus remains how we can develop a coherent model that informs us about what strategic leadership truly entails. These 34 points offer administrators a powerful place to start exploring strategic leadership, or to deepen their practice of it in an effort to continue to improve their school’s ability to success.

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch

Elements of Strategic Leadership

To determine the traits in schools that provide short term effectiveness and long term success, we rely on a model of strategic leadership formulated by Davies, Davies, and Ellison. The model identifies two elements that make up strategic leadership: strategic processes and strategic approaches.

Strategic processes are a force for change in schools. One saying related to leadership and management that’s relevant here is: “how we undertake an activity is as important as what we do to build long-term success.” Therefore, care and attention should be given to the process of building strategic capability, because “process is policy.” This suggests that policy isn’t simply formed and implemented; there is an interaction of processes that create the complete policy. The “how” part of strategic processes consists of four elements that build strategic direction for the school. These elements are conceptualization, involving people, articulation, and implementation.

Conceptualization mainly focuses on reflection, strategic thinking, analysis, and creation of new ways of understanding. The “involving people” part of the strategic process involves encouraging greater participation, leading to higher levels of motivation and strategic skill. The element of articulation brings out the oral, written, and structural means of communication and development of a strategic purpose. The last element of implementing policy involves turning strategy into action, organization, strategic timing and knowing when to quit.

Strategic approaches are how strategies built through strategic processes is put in place. The Davies et al. model focuses on four approaches. First, it considers the most common approach to strategic planning, the pro-active approach., It assumes that the school understands the desired outcomes, and how to go about achieving them. The method in this approach is similar to the school-development and school-improvement movements. However, it differs s from the reactive approach of emergent strategy, which means using current experience to shape future strategy. This is a common practice in circumstances where schools learn by doing.

If the school is a reflective and learning organization, a pattern of success and failure is formed. The school formulates strategy by repeating successful activities, and avoiding those that caused failures. A pattern of actions emerges that, through collaboration, produces a logical strategic framework. Therefore, emerging strategy is a reflective, reactive process that uses experience to predict and improve future patterns of behavior.

The researchers also considered a redistributed strategy as a model of strategic development. This is where senior school leaders determine values and set the direction of the school, but allow other staff to put the policies in place. This strategy only works if values, and a degree of trust, exist among the various players in the school setting. The last approach is strategic intent, which involves achieving noticeable strategic change by building capacity and ability throughout the school community.

This approach sets clear objectives (intents) that the organization is committed to meeting, but recognizes the importance of building capability and capacity first, to fully understand how and when objectives can be achieved.

 

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch

Understanding Strategy and Strategic Leadership

Strategy leadership involves decision-making aimed at shaping the direction of the organization. In a school, creating strategy takes time, three to five years and beyond. Strategy also includes considering broader core issues and themes for development in the school, instead of day-to-day issues.
Strategic planning is held to be one among a number of development approaches. While strategy can be a framework to set future direction and action, it can also be used to judge current activities. A strategically focused school is educationally effective in the short term, but also has a clear set of processes to translate the core purpose and vision into an excellent educational provision that is sustainable over time.

Through strategic leadership, this broad activity is linked to shorter-term operational planning, responses to immediate events, and the long-term strategic direction. In simple terms, strategic leadership defines the vision and moral purpose of the school and translates them into the desired action.

In their analysis of data from interviews with leaders possessing high-level strategic skills, Davies, Davies, and Ellison (2005) split their research findings into two categories – what strategic leaders do and what characteristics they possess. Their analysis established that strategic leaders participate in five main activities.

1. They Set the Direction of the School

This activity relates to the traditional definition of strategy as a pattern of decisions that set the direction of the organization. Strategy is the actual framework of choices that is relied upon to determine the nature and direction of an organization. The following summarizes what strategic leaders do:

• They set the direction of the school.
• Dissatisfied with the present, they challenge and question..
• They turn strategy into action.
• They prioritize their own strategic thinking and learning by re-framing their understanding and that of others.
• They align the people and the organization with the strategy.
• They display strategic wisdom based on a clear value system.
• They know when to intervene.
• They network.
• They develop strategic capabilities within the school.
• They have high-quality people skills.

2. They Translate Strategy into Action

While most schools establish plans, few translate them into action. Strategic leaders are good “completer-finishers.” They were capable of not only “seeing ahead” but also “seeing it through.” This characteristic of strategic leaders is born of their ability to focus on a limited number of issues and move forward on those issues.

It is key that a leader be seen as a person who not only builds a sense of purpose and direction in the school, but also as one who translates them into reality.

There is a danger where strategy is seen as a desirable activity, and in consequence so much time is spent designing strategic frameworks and plans. Thus the question that emerges is: “How do we translate these frameworks into the capacity to move toward better outcomes in the school?” A strategic leader uses his or her strategic ability to translate strategic vision into action.

3. They Align the People, the Organization, and the Strategy

It is vital that school leaders build in-depth capacity within the school to deliver the strategy. Davies (2003) suggested a four-stage approach that, first, articulates the strategy in oral, written, or structural ways; second, builds a common understanding through shared experiences; third, creates a shared mental image of the future through dialogue; and fourth, defines the desired outcomes.

4. They Determine Effective Strategic Intervention Points

An important aspect of strategic leadership is timing. Knowing when to make a change is as important as the change itself. This critical issue arises from rational analysis or leadership intuition. Discerning when both external circumstances and internal conditions can be effectively managed toward successful change is significant in effective leadership.

The issue of strategic timing goes hand in hand with the concept of strategic abandonment. The issue that comes up is that of differentiating between abandonment of things that are not working well and abandoning those that were satisfactory in pursuit.

A key ability of strategic leaders is not only knowing when to make a change, but knowing how to free up organizational space to have the capacity to move into a new strategic direction.

5. They Develop Strategic Capabilities in the School

A good example of long-term competency is the fundamental understanding of learning and the varying needs of students. Strategic leaders agree that more focus should be on the development of long-term abilities.
If leaders develop strategic abilities, they would achieve more, in the form of a reflective-learning culture in teaching staff, a no-blame problem-solving approach, and a deeper understanding of learning.

  • no reactions
0
Share