John Kotter on leadership, management and change: An interview with the author of leading change and what leaders really do - Interview

School Administrator, Feb, 2002 by Jim Bencivenga

Good leadership is like gravity. It's felt everywhere but little understood. For too many educators, leadership is present more as a felt absence or visible through a glass darkly. At its worst, those in charge are not up to the task.

For 32 years, Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter has been studying the presence and absence of leadership in business organizations. Much of his thinking can be applied to school organizations as well. His work is especially relevant to the needs of schools and school systems to create succession planning and the role of the superintendent and principal as both manager and leader.

Kotter has closely examined and detailed what CEOs and senior executives do, why they do it and how their decisions affect their own and the behavior of others in setting and accomplishing strategic thinking with its vision and direction. He is recognized as one of the foremost authorities on leadership in the world. Explaining and helping organizations understand and bridge a leadership void has been and is his life's mission.

After a career spanning thousands of interviews with executives and managers, directly observing hundreds of them in action and conducting 14 formal case studies at Harvard Business School, Kotter's conclusion was inevitable. He writes in his most recent book, John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Do: "I am completely convinced that most organizations today lack the leadership they need. And the shortfall is often large. I'm not talking about a deficit of 10 percent, but of 200 percent, 400 percent or more, in positions up and down the hierarchy."

If you've never read Kotter, this slim volume is an excellent place to start. It is refreshing to experience how lucid, practical and insightful he is. Kotter tells the stories of people who are responsible for making change happen. These stories link his thinking to actual practice, each in its distinct milieu--the lessons, the techniques, what worked and didn't work and how leaders learned lessons from their experiences.

In addition, the structure of the book, not unlike Kotter's whole approach, respects the time constraints of busy executives. He says he wrote it so that "You can pick up the table of contents, find something and in 15 minutes walk away with some ideas that you could use that same day."

The book is full of examples of how a vision for change, and then the process of change itself, can be brought about by staff and managers. It examines a nexus of critical actions that enable skilled leaders to transform large and small organizations.

Most corporations today are overly managed and underled, says Kotter. Management and leadership have two distinct, fundamental purposes. Management is about coping with complexity. Leadership is about coping with change. Good CEOs and senior management effectively do both all the while knowing where their strengths and weaknesses lie. They take steps that span a career--and that at times are personally painful--in working to improve their weaknesses. The key, of course, is to perceive and admit them.

Kotter is Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School. He is a graduate of MIT and Harvard and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1972.

The following excerpts are from a wide-ranging interview Kotter granted The School Administrator recently.

Q: What forces do you see in both business and industry that will grow even stronger and affect schools? What forces do you see that have an international dimension and that will come home to roost?

Kotter: Globalization has been a trend for a century and will continue for the next century. Technology, the Internet, is going to be humongous. There will be other sophisticated forms of technology that we don't yet know what it all means, biotech being the most obvious. The continuing trend toward decentralization and democratization, which has been going on for many centuries. All of these things hit everybody.

For schools there are two things in particular. The complexity of management-leadership jobs has gone up. Therefore, as schools have a bigger demand placed on them, the minimum skills for school leadership have gone up. And second is just dealing with all the changes this stuff creates. Helping people recognize that their lives will continue to unfold in a new way. They've got to continue to grow. They'll be in organizations that will be changing and school leaders have got to help people cope with that.

Q: What particular challenges should superintendents and school leaders be looking to take on to accomplish this? What structural changes in the system?

Kotter: I don't want to go out of my area of expertise here. The goals I can understand are much more sophisticated output and students who can better deal with a changing world. If the systems don't do a perfect job of that now, it isn't going to happen because somebody pushes two degrees to the left or right. It's going to require some leaps. Now exactly what those leaps are, I'm not entirely competent to say.