Leadership styles, Leader characteristics

The key to effective leadership

What are the essential characteristics for a school leader? Roger Smith reflects on what leadership is and what makes it work

I imagine that we have all got dozens of glib quotations about ‘leadership’. For example, ‘If at first you don’t succeed try leadership’ or ‘As a leader, aim low, reach your goals and avoid disappointment’ or ‘The team will follow him anywhere – out of morbid curiosity’ and finally ‘The difference between fiction and leadership is that fiction has to make sense’. I could go on but, out of kindness, I won’t.

What these attempts at a certain kind of cynical humour mask is the clear recognition that headteachers as leaders play perhaps the most crucial role in school-wide efforts to maintain and raise standards. So, quite obviously, successful leadership is essential. But, as well as trying to understand what makes headteachers effective, part of our leadership function is to promote successful leadership in our deputies and our staff with teaching and learning responsibilities (TLRs), our assistant heads and our SENCOs.

We have come a long way
Let’s begin by focusing on what was seen as poor leadership in school and use Chris Woodhead as the starting point (no irony intended). As Her Majesty’s chief inspector of schools he made some important comments in his 1997 annual report. He concluded that the following were characteristics of poor headteachers and ineffective leaders in school:

They are rarely seen in classrooms.
They do not monitor teaching enough to know the strengths and weaknesses of staff.
They fail to bring about improvements in teaching.
They are unable to delegate and spend far too much time on routine paperwork.
They fail to assess whether the school is giving good value for money.
They create a lack of a sense of purpose through their weak leadership.
They fail to give clear objectives and targets thereby causing staff to waste time and energy.
They add to discipline problems by not laying down clear rules for pupils and to support staff when they try to discipline children.

This list still makes dispiriting reading but there are very strong arguments to support the view that we have certainly moved on and that with better training and with a greater awareness of the importance of effective leadership most, if not all, of Woodhead’s criticisms have been addressed.

So what do we think leadership actually is?
At one level a leader is the person who not only influences what happens but is able to make things happen by initiating changes, organising how change happens and making all the necessary structures, decisions and activities meaningful. But, accepting this view of leadership shouldn’t mean that we manipulate colleagues and change their behaviour to fit our prearranged norm. It does mean that to be an effective leader we need to be able to give colleagues a sense of understanding of what they are actually doing in the school.

In trying to clarify leadership in simple terms – it is useful to summarise some of the common traits that characterise effective leaders.

This kind of summary can be divided into specific areas and include how leadership has to be concerned with:

a sense of responsibility
the need to complete tasks
being willing and able to take risks
having the capacity to handle stress
being able to influence and coordinate the efforts of colleagues.

Leadership styles and roles
In the late 1990s, in fact at the time of Chris Woodhead’s chief inspector’s list, school leadership was more about organising and managing the school. Now, raising standards and strengthening teaching and learning has to be at the centre of everything we do. To make this happen leadership has to be about building and maintaining a sense of vision, culture and interpersonal relationships as well as involving management issues that include the coordination, support and monitoring of our schools as organisations. We have to be able to balance both roles. There is a useful statement from an infant headteacher in an article called Effective School Leadership, published by the NCSL: ‘Leadership is about having vision and articulating, ordering priorities, getting others to go with you, constantly reviewing what you are doing and holding on to things you value. Management is about the functions, procedures and systems by which you realise the vision.’

What is important about our style of leadership is that it needs to be appropriate for what is happening and for the tasks or processes that are taking place. All styles of leadership have to take into account, firstly, how to complete tasks and, secondly, what is the best way to complete them. This is the process that everyone goes through in terms of effective teams and relationships between colleagues. Tasks will not be completed properly by disgruntled or browbeaten colleagues who are not motivated. There is a helpful continuum that tries to balance tasks and processes using four different styles of leadership depending on how important the tasks are, or how important team work and the relationships between colleagues are:

Telling colleagues what to do – this is high on getting tasks finished and low on developing and sustaining relationships and team work.

Selling an idea to colleagues – again, this is high on tasks but also means that relationships are important because a certain amount of agreement is necessary.

Persuading colleagues to participate – this is relatively low on tasks as the most important aspect of this style of leadership is to get colleagues working effectively together.

Delegating to colleagues – this is low on tasks and low on relationship and is a mature style in a school with committed and effective teams. Leaders are able to confidently delegate tasks to colleagues who themselves will have to decide what leadership style to use.

There are basically, two kinds of roles necessary for a leader. One derives from the position held – you as headteacher, your deputy or assistant head, the TLR as team leader and so on. The other from personal abilities and experience – many of these abilities are included in the earlier list of leadership, interpersonal and professional skills for leadership. Having the ability and expertise and using all the available skills will mean that you and, in fact, any leader at any level in the school’s hierarchy has the important role of:

forecasting what needs doing
planning how to do it
organising what needs to be done
delegating tasks to appropriate colleagues, teams and working parties
coordinating and controlling what happens
monitoring and evaluating its success.

Leadership at many levels
In many ways we are only as good as all the rest of the leaders we have in place. This is largely because leadership has to be exercised at many levels. All teachers are, for example, leaders in their own classrooms because the actual process of teaching is about influencing, directing, setting targets, using appropriate resources and monitoring and evaluating successes. As teachers develop their skills they will begin to lead colleagues as curriculum coordinators and TLRs etc. Their roles, like ours, will involve people, information and decisions. In schools – all our schools – we will need to lead and promote leaders and leadership along the following lines:

Relating well to people – this is where you have to act as a kind of figurehead and speak at functions such as PTA meetings, governors’ meetings, and curriculum subject meetings with parents. At the same time you will be selecting, supporting, training, mentoring, monitoring and motivating colleagues you work alongside.

Using information to lead and raise standards – there is a constant need to monitor, fact find and assess situations by collecting as much information as possible from individuals, teams of teachers and from documents and reports. Once the information is collected it has to be used to manage change and to raise standards by being disseminated and communicated to whoever needs it. This will mean clear and articulate meetings, written memos, well-managed discussions, reports and policy documents.

Leadership and decision making – all leaders have to take decisions and all aspects of leadership involve decision making. Some decisions are instant statements, for example those involving the dos and don’ts of health and safety and risk assessment. Many others, however, will involve consultation and consensus. This means meetings and meetings mean colleagues who may need convincing that change – and most decisions are related to change – has to happen.

In fact working with colleagues and leading them forward is far from easy. We all need to make sure that we place a high premium on the human dimension of leadership and the need to recognise and promote not only the development of our own considerable skills but those of all our colleagues. Perhaps ending as I started will form a neat circle. But rather than use a glib definition of leadership let’s quote from Ibsen who suggests that, ‘a community is like a ship and everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm’.

You might find it both useful and interesting to match the following traits against how you think of your own leadership skills and the skills shown by your senior managers and TLRs.

Leadership skills for management:

Providing clear direction.
Being proactive.
Taking decisions.
Being highly visible.
Delegating effectively.
Developing and involving other colleagues.
Being good at strategic planning.

Interpersonal skills for leadership:

Good communicator both orally and in writing.
Supportive, considerate and caring.
Assertive.
Encourages individuality but remains responsible.
Earns respect and promotes trust.

Professional skills for leadership:

Clear vision about the quality of teaching and learning.
Clear understanding of the curriculum.
Defines roles clearly and promotes a whole school understanding.
Fosters and insists on high standards and high expectations.
Promotes consistent and effective monitoring and evaluation of standards.

I am sure that we all recognise each of the points in each of the three sections but like many issues in education, they are easy to write, easy to talk about but very much more difficult to implement.

Roger Smith is a former primary headteacher

This article first appeared in Primary Headship - Mar 2008

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