Distributed Leadership Essay

Leadership is the important activity that motivates an individual to achieve the predetermined objectives. This motivation nurtures inspiration that boosts us towards the goal. Now, comes the discussion of whether the leadership can be centralized or it can be distributed among various people. Once we start the discussion of distributed leadership, it should also be known whether it is a horizontal or vertical distribution. Horizontal distribution means distributing the leadership among the same level of people whereas vertical distribution again forks into top-down distribution and bottom-up distribution. Exploring these different approaches we identify two dimensions along which to consider the knowledgeable changes they raise about measuring how school leadership is distributed across school staff – data source and data focus. We should also observe the variations between schools and between activities that are adapted for distributing the responsibilities of leadership. Let us also consider different ways of studying how the work of managing and leading schools is distributed among people in schools and the methodological and philosophical pros and cons involved in this work. If we closely observe the daily lives of schools, we can think from a distributed perspective which has the potential to provide useful insight into how management and leadership unfold themselves. In the process of distributing the leadership, we can identify numerous entities in the school across which leadership can be distributed, including people in the aspects of the situation such as routines and imaginations. While there have been recent advances in articulating the conceptual frameworks for distributed school leadership, the empirical research base in this area is less developed. With a few exceptions, most empirical work has involved small samples of schools. While performing this study of distributed leadership, we come across two important observations to be made: Across which school actors do researchers hypothesize leadership and management is distributed? What aspects of leadership and management work are hypothesized to be distributed across people? These two questions lead to many sub questions like: Who should provide evidence of distributed leadership? Leaders, followers, or both? Among leaders, should researchers seek evidence on formal leaders, informal leaders, or both? Should the proof on distributed leadership come from self-reports or from more objective measurement plans such as the reports given by others through surveys? How do these various methodological choices about measuring the distributed leadership affect the validity of data? We can use multiple ways of identifying actors within schools among whom the work of leadership and management might be distributed. A distributed perspective serves as a new conceptual frame. It helps us understand leadership practice and how leadership practices might work more effectively in the context of schools. It is not a type of leadership or a style of leadership. It’s not a model of leadership. It’s not something you place on top of a school and say, ‘Now you are doing distributed leadership. ‘ A distributed perspective is thinking about the situation as an integral part of the leadership context; it is an integrated view of leaders’ thinking, their activity and behaviors, and the situation. The distributed perspective focuses on leadership activity. In an organizational context, leadership activity might be trying to sell a vision in the context of the school or trying to transform the instructional practice in particular classrooms within a school. It is the activity that we are trying to understand. Think about the constellation of people who are involved, how the context shapes what happens with that activity, and how artifacts might be an integral part of that activity. The distributed perspective is integrative thinking about all of those pieces and on leadership activity itself. The roots of distributed leadership is an outgrowth of activity theory and distributed cognition. Activity theory is about how an activity system works. Think of the cockpit of an airplane – the people in the cockpit, the instrument panel, the people who are trying to help the plane land – and try to think about the activity of landing the plane not as something an individual person does, not as something the instrument panel does without the people, not as something a pilot could do without the air traffic controller. Try to think about the whole activity system. This is comparable to what is meant by leadership activity. With distributed cognition, we are trying to think about how sense making is stretched over social interaction and artifacts in an environment. The context and social system matter. Distributed cognition suggests that people’s thinking and actions don’t happen in a vacuum. Thinking happens through social interaction and interaction with the environment. These impact how the leadership activity happens. Distributed leadership integrates these central ideas from activity theory and distributed cognition. We think of leadership as an influence relationship – the ability to influence the practices of others in ways that bring about a ‘major change in form, nature, and function of some phenomenon. But distributed leadership moves beyond trying to understand leadership through the actions and beliefs of single leaders. It is constituted through the interaction of leaders, teachers, and the situation as they influence instructional practice. Distributed leadership is a powerful way to understand leadership activity in schools in more complex and interconnected ways. Distributed leadership can also be called as ‘dispersed leadership’, ‘collaborative leadership’, ‘democratic leadership’ and ‘shared leadership’. ‘Dispersed’ appears to suggest leadership as an activity that can be located at different points within an organization and pre-exists delegation which is a conscious choice in the exercise of power. The idea of dispersed leadership is captured by David Green’s term ‘leaderful community’ which involves a community in which people believe they have a contribution to make, can exercise their initiative and can, when relevant to the task in hand, have followers. The Collaborative leaderships operates on the basis of ‘alliance’ or ‘partnering’ or ‘networking. ’ Network learning communities, sponsored by NCSL are an expression of collaboration across the boundaries of individual institutions. Collaborative leadership may also apply to an ‘inter-agency context’, expressed in schools’ joint work with community agencies, parents, teacher groups, and other external stakeholders. Leadership as ‘democratic’ is by definition antithetical to hierarchy and delegation. Elsbernd suggests four defining characteristics (i) a leader’s interaction with, and encouragement of others to participate fully in all aspects of leadership tasks (ii) wide-spread sharing of information and power (iii) enhancing self-worth of others and (iv) energising others for tasks. Democratic leadership can either take the form of consultative (where a leader makes a group decision after consulting members about their willingness) or participative decision-making (where a leader makes the decision in collaboration with the group members – often based on majority rule). Shared leadership is best understood when leadership is explored as a social process – something that arises out of social relationships not simply what leaders do. It does not dwell in an individual’s qualities or competencies but lies between people, within groups, in collective action, which defies attempts to single out ‘a leader’. A common message that runs through these definitions is that leadership is not the monopoly of any one person, a message that is central to the notion of distributed leadership. In distributed leadership, it is not only the headteacher’s leadership that counts but also the leadership roles performed by deputy heads, substantive teachers, support teachers, members of school councils, boards or governing bodies and students. Leadership is ‘dispersed rather than concentrated’ and does not necessarily give any particular individual or categories of persons the privilege of providing more leadership than others. In this light ‘distributed leadership’ cannot be said to be a new leadership technique but rather an intellectual label that seeks to re-enforce the fact that leadership needs to be a shared activity in schools. It should therefore be conceptualised, not simply as another technique or practice of leadership, but, just as importantly as a way of thinking about leadership in post-heroic terms rather than a heroic phenomenon. In this way, we can distinguish clearly between delegation – as a heroic phenomenon – in which distribution is initiated solely from the top (headteacher) and distributed leadership – as a post-heroic phenomenon – in which distribution does not solely depend on the headteacher’s initiative. Everyone in the schools should have the opportunity to exercise leadership from the youngest child through out and not just a selected few (Secondary head) and problems in the schools should be dealt openly and honestly with the involvement of other people (secondary head). Staff who have only been in the school for a short time could also be school leaders in that they show by their personality, by their vision, by their jobs, commitment, expectations and values that they have got the capacity to lead. In a sense, anyone can be a leader. It is a process that a lot of staff can demonstrate. Formally, the process of distribution is initiated by the headteacher who identifies and delegates leadership responsibilities to individual teachers. Schools, in some places are structured in terms of designated leadership and managerial roles through which the headteacher delegates responsibility. Such delegations may be driven by a headteacher’s recognition that others have expertise that he/she does not have. Distributed in this way, there is an expectation of delivery and the headteacher’s role is to ‘support and provide’. The formality characterising the distribution process gradually leads unto a less formal or informal approach as headteachers develop trust in their teachers and become more confident in teachers’ leadership capabilities. As headteachers become more comfortable with their own authority and feel more able to acknowledge the authority of others they are able to extend the compass of leadership and to ‘let go’ the more. This is evident in one headteacher’s comment: ‘I think initially from top-down through delegation and as it progresses it becomes both bottom-up and top-down. People who show willingness to take some levels of initiative from any direction are really encouraged. And I love to see it really happen and that’s when I become happy’.