Leadership for School Improvement: Cues from Organizational Learning and Renewal Efforts

Abstract

School improvement and school reform are about organizational learning and renewal. In successful efforts at organizational renewal, especially in business, leaders often play two related roles: critic/provocateur and learning advocate/innovation coach. Using examples from business corporations, the Army, and a college basketball team, this manuscript attempts to describe a model for leaders of school improvement based upon these two roles.

Creating and sustaining a culture of renewal is a challenge to leaders in all organizations. In education and business especially, organizational renewal has become a pressing concern for leaders who face mounting pressure to meet more demanding client expectations. In business management literature, there has been an increasingly distinct call for corporate leaders to attend to continuous improvement and innovation, and to operate more as a learning organization (Argyris and Schon 1978; Senge 1990). Senge, Cambron-McCabe, Lucas, Kleiner, Dutton, and Smith (2000) and Michael Fullan (2001), among others, have echoed this theme for educational leaders; but ironically, the role of school leadership in building and supporting a learning organization has been much less defined.

Over the past decade, studies of business organizations have revealed a number of leadership strategies and behaviors that contribute positively to organizational learning and renewal. One recent book (Mai and Akerson 2003) described several such strategies in terms of critical leadership roles: namely, the roles of critic and provocateur, and of learning advocate and innovation coach. These roles also might be used collectively to define a two-dimensional behavioral model for educational leaders as school renewal champions.

Leaders as Renewal Champions

A learning organization is one that actively works to improve itself by casting present practices under critical scrutiny and by seeking new and better ways of doing things. Learning organizations are about constant self-evaluation and about developing new approaches and practices to deal with the challenges of an ever-changing environment. This, in turn, invokes a paradox: successful organizations must strive both to standardize their operations around "best practices" and, at the same time, to look constantly for more effective alternatives-better best practices, if you will-to achieve their goals. What this means for leaders in the field is equally paradoxical: support the methods that are getting results, while at the same time questioning them to seek better ways to accomplish objectives.

This second charge is a difficult one, but a critical task for leaders of dynamic organizations that continuously assess present practice and invent new pathways to success. For education in particular, it is important to extend this leadership task to teachers as well as administrators (just as in business-and, as we'll see, in the Army and on a college basketball team-the expectation of "thought leadership" is increasingly extended to people without supervisory responsibility). In a growing number of organizations, including schools and districts, the need to challenge the status quo impels leaders to assume two related roles: critic/provocateur and learning advocate/innovation coach.

The Role of Critic/Provocateur

One of the hardest jobs to assume in an organization, particularly an organization that takes pride in the ways it presently accomplishes its goals, is to cast a critical eye specifically on those operating practices that define "the way we do things around here." Many of the best practices currently in place have been around for a considerable period of time and were developed by respected professionals who might have enjoyed promotions because of them. Indeed, there are vested interests in any organization in maintaining the status quo, and they're often personal as well as professional.

Yet, all too often the methods and practices in use today are driven by autopilot. They haven't been examined seriously and systematically to determine whether they are still the most effective and efficient ways of reaching goals. The challenge for leadership is to raise critical questions when others might prefer not to. The questioning role of the leader as continuous status-quo critic can be addressed as an issue of both climate (how to make it safe and easy to raise questions) and technique (what are the best ways to pose critical questions).

Climate: Making It Safe to Be a Critic

For some time the United States Army has employed a systematic method for questioning its own operations. Called "After Action Review" (Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja 1997), this method enables teams of soldiers who have just completed a specific operation to look back on it analytically and suggest better ways to accomplish similar objectives in the future. After Action Review is a group discussion process that invites participants to routinely dissect a military operation in the context of its objectives, with all participants having an equal voice and right to be heard, regardless of rank. While this might seem highly unlikely given stereotypes of the military model of management-where Rule Number One is to obey your superior and there are no other rules-the Army has invested in the process and made it work. Critical perspectives are demanded and valued within the ritual of After Action Review; so, in this process, it's acceptable for enlisted men and women to criticize their superiors.