Elements of Leadership: What You Should Know

School Administrator, Sept, 2004 by Zach Kelehear

Sarah J. Noonan, in Elements of Leadership, invites us to enlarge our view of who leads and how one leads. She doesn't see leadership as a static list of attributes associated with one person or one position. Instead Noonan challenges us to embrace the situational influences in a variety of settings that directly influence our capacity to lead amid a storm of competing demands.

In the book's opening section, Noonan, an associate professor of educational leadership at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, highlights the difficulties and hazards of defining leadership too narrowly. She presents definitions from the perspectives of both leader and follower (whom she calls members) and speaks to each group's responsibility in remaining flexible but focused.

In the second portion of her work, Noonan offers practical advice for all members of the school community, not just leadership positions. I found this section particularly useful as Noonan encourages the reader to reflect on personal attributes of leadership, discovering what she calls the "authentic leader in you."

She concludes by asking the reader to imagine how those talents might apply in specific ways to the demands of leading. She moves easily from the theoretical to the practical.

Elements of Leadership offers a view of leadership that escapes simple solutions to often complex scenarios.

(Elements of Leadership: What You Should Know by Sarah J. Noonan, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md., 2003, 169 pp., $27.95 softcover)