Leadership and Illusion - leadership in school administration

School Administrator, Sept, 2000 by George A. Goens

Beware of those soldered to tangible proof, benchmark data and tables of numbers, If they were right, we would have won the Vietnam War and Truman would have been defeated by Dewey in 1948. Subjective judgments, intuition and hunches sometimes overcome the limitations of logic. People accomplish great things when conventional wisdom dictates it is not rational. Leaders move beyond tangible measurement and help people believe in the richness and poetry of human spirit, imagination and heart that lifts people to great heights.

* Illusion 4: Power is finite and should be hoarded.

We read about the powerful and are mesmerized by them. Some people thirst for power and perceive it as being limited in abundance. We jump to grab it and try to hoard it. But what is power?

Historian James MacGregor Burns stated in his book Leadership: "At the root of bureaucratic conflict lies some kind of struggle for power and prestige. This struggle pervades the bureaucracy ... ." Max Weber, the German sociologist, wrote that he believed power "enables a person to carry out his own will despite the protestations of others," emphasizing involuntary compliance, supremacy and command.

Typically power is associated with strength: To be powerful is to be strong. But Irish poet John O'Donohue said, "Frequently, people in power are not as strong as they might wish to appear. Many people who desperately hunger for power are weak. They seek power positions to compensate for their own fragility and vulnerability. A weak person in power can never be generous with power because they see questions or alternative possibilities as threatening their own supremacy and dominance."

Admittedly, there were times, particularly early in my career as a superintendent, when I resorted to power plays or manipulating people because of my fear of being perceived as weak, indecisive or incapable.

Another view of power exists. When electricians say, "Turn on the power," they refer to energy. Leadership and energy are tightly connected. Creative energy. Imaginative energy. Collaborative energy. This "power" is at the root of successful people and organizations. Leaders who perceive power in this way energize, rather than dominate, people. Creative energy is unlimited if the conditions are there to nurture it.

* Illusion 5: Structure concerns roles, role expectations and organizational charts.

Schools have been restructuring their organizational arrangements for years. In most cases, restructuring refers to how work gets done and how decisions are made. While organizational arrangements are important, they do not trigger change if roles and procedures are built on bureaucratic control or task and authority relationships.

What structures people's behavior when they are not at work? They don't have job descriptions or bosses in their personal lives. Administrative regulations, procedures or master contracts are nonexistent. Yet people are productive because they shape their lives around a core of values and ethics, beliefs and principles and ideas and philosophy. These are the "strange attractors" around which people act and make sense of the world, particularly through times of change and turmoil.