Leadership Skills in School and Business

School Administrator, Oct, 1998 by James H. Stronge

What theorists say about applying leadership attributes from the corporate world to the school arena?

Research on the principalship identifies multiple and varied roles: defining the school's vision and mission, managing curriculum and instruction, promoting positive climate, fostering healthy school-community relations, serving as change agent, promoting high expectations, managing fiscal resources, and contributing to the overall effectiveness of the school.

While merely a partial list of duties and responsibilities, the words vividly paint a portrait of the lofty expectations we hold for principals. We expect school principals to be organizational leaders.

What I explore here is the leadership role of principals through the lens of the business and general leadership literature. How, if at all, do the leadership attributes described by popular writers and theorists apply to school leaders? And more to the point, does effective leadership as conceived and practiced in the business community apply equally well to the school community?

Defining Leadership

It's important to realize that no commonly accepted definition nor set of attributes exists for leadership. While any dictionary may offer a concise definition of the construct, the research and writing on leadership are far less clear.

Warren Bennis, in his 1994 work On Becoming a Leader, wrote that leadership is like beauty: It's hard to define, but you know it when you see it. "Of all the hazy confounding areas in social psychology, leadership theory undoubtedly contends for top nomination. Probably more has been written and less is known about leadership than any other topic in the behavioral sciences," he wrote 35 years earlier.

The pre-eminent historian and political scientist James MacGregor Burns once stated that our shortcomings in making sense of leadership aren't from a lack of effort. "Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomenon on earth," he wrote in his 1978 work Leadership.

Despite the vagrancies, common strands run through the leadership literature. In an effort to summarize this literature, I applied Robert Katz's classical framework from his Harvard Business Review article, "Skills of an Effective Administrator," to the key organizational leadership concepts and themes described by several influential writers (see table, page 22).

Desirable Skills

While leadership is far too complex to be reduced to a set of attributes, the framework is useful in exploring the skills leaders possess and how they interact with others. Thus, in varying ways and in varying degrees depending on the context, effective leaders would demonstrate desirable technical, conceptual and human skills.

* Technical skills. The technical aspects of leadership reflect the specialized knowledge, tools and techniques that leaders either possess or employ (either themselves or with and through others) to accomplish the task at hand. Stephen Covey's "habit" of knowing how to put first things first and John Gardner's call for possessing task competence are examples of technical skills.

* Conceptual skills. Leadership authors consistently describe leaders as possessing and practicing strong conceptual skills such as intelligence and judgment. However, the essential elements of leadership that often are emphasized are creative and encompass the organization as a whole: the ability to see the big picture, to imagine and to speculate, to envision change. James Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of The Leadership Challenge, described this ability when they wrote about leadership practices of "challenging the process" and "inspiring a shared vision."

* Human skills. Although technical and conceptual skills are vital components to the makeup and behavior of leaders, it is the ability to work with and through others in a morally elevating way that epitomizes the leadership literature.

Two of the top four characteristics desired in business leaders, according to Kouzes and Posner, are being honest and inspiring. They also cite two other qualities as central to a leader's effectiveness: the ability to enable others to act and to encourage the heart. Kouzes and Posner's description of the true test of leadership has much in common with Covey's philosophy of win/win thinking and with Burns' description of transformational leadership since all share the fundamental premise of ethically working for the good of others. According to Burns, transformational leadership is "a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents."

Applying Business Principles

In some respects, the principles of effective business leadership apply easily to school leadership. In other ways, they don't.

Thomas Sergiovanni, in his book Leadership for the Schoolhouse, makes a compelling case against trying to force ideas that work in corporate life onto contemporary educational leaders. "It is not likely that much progress will be made over time in improving schools unless we accept the reality that leadership for the schoolhouse should be different, and unless we begin to invent our own practice," he says.