Moral Leadership Chapter 4 Substitutes for Leadership

• To have leadership, you need to have a person who will lead and others who will somehow tag along. Leadership has to do with the leader's working directly to get others to do what she or he wants and, if skillful, getting them to enjoy doing it.
• Interpersonal leadership represents an early stage, whose ultimate result is a shift of attention away from the leader and to something else.
• The "leader" can focus more on removing obstacles, providing material and emotional support, taking care of the management details that make any journey easier, sharing in the comradeship of the march and in the celebration when the journey is completed, and identifying a new, worthwhile destination for the next march. The march takes care of itself.
• The only way a principal can survive in a growth-oriented environment is to relinquish control in many areas and let people work in their own ways.
• When people are involved in solving their own problems and working out their ideas, a school has a rich body of creative energy to draw upon.
• Needs should be met because that is the right thign to do, not because we want to get people to do certain things.
• Buildings norms and providing opportunities for teachers and others to experience intrinsic satisfaction in work are bottom-up propositions.
• Promoting the professional ideal requires effort that involves legislators, professional associations, and the public at large.

Community Norms as Substitute for Leadership

• Establishing community norms within the school can serve as a substitute for direct leadership
• Instructional delivery systems are designed to be larger than people
• What people do depends on external motivation and monitoring
• Instructional delivery systems are management- and leadership-intensive
• Culture refers to "the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs tht are shared by the members of an organization, that operate unconsciously, and that define in a basic 'taken-for-granted' fashion on organization's view of itself and its environment."
• All schools may have cultures, but not all schools are communities. The idea of a school as a learning community suggests a kind of connectedness among members that resembles what is found in a family, a neighborhood, or some other closely knit group, where bonds tend to be familial or even sacred.
• Schools are much closer to families tht to large corporations, not only in size, but in affect and in focus
• Communities are defined by their centers - repositories of values, sentiments, and beliefs that provide the needed cement for bonding people together in a common cause.
• When nroms are violted, problems surface and become legitimate topics of discussion.
• As a collective practice becomes established in a school, the principal can afford to give much less attention to the traditional management functions of planning, organizing, controlling, and leading, for these become built in to the everyday life of a school.
• "Use shared leadership, with a heavy emphasis on following a vision rather tan a person."
• Core values are not set in stone, nor are they easily changed. They are resilient enough to withstand casual change yet flexible enough to accommodate new imperatives that may arise.

The Professional Ideal as a Substitute for Leadership

• There are two sides to the ledger of professionalism: competence and virtue. Enhancing the competence side is admittedly a long-term proposition, but school leaders can do much to enhance the virtue side while working in the broader context to improve competence. Enhancing the virtue side means establishing a moral basis for practice.
• Professional values is defined as the virtues that enable one to practice in an exemplary way, and which result in the accomplishment of valued social ends.
• Expertise and position are forms of power, which can be used by teachers and administrators to dominate, exploit, or otherwise take advantage of people with less power
• Conforming to a code, without making commitment to its ideals and values, means giving only the appearance of ethical behavior
• "It is important to note that acting ethically and being ethical are substantially diffeent. One can do the right thing, but for the wrong reasons, as, for example, when a person is honest as a way of manipulating another. We would not regard such a person as morally good person. It is this distinction that is obscured by restricting professionalism to the adherence of the rules."
• Commitment to exemplary practice and valued social ends requires one's practice to be linked to the professional's quest for a sense of goodness as a person
• School administrators have a special responsibility to share int eh professional idea of teaching, for whatever else they are, they are teachers first.
• From the moral perspective, one purpose of leadership is to establish substitutes like norms and ideals as conditions that make leadership no longer needed.

Thoughts...

The act of leadership requires a leader and followers. The goal of leadership is to get others to do what you want and enjoy doing it. It is necessary to provide followers with leadership opportunities and allow them to participate in the connectedness of the learning community. This can be accomplished by establishing norms that develop a culture of shared leadership through professionalism, developing competence and virtues.

I believe that the leader/follower relationship is the foundation for the establishment of the organizational structure. Developing organizational competence can provide the instructional direction for the school, but the true value that the school can provide for the students is in the virtue with which the organization develops their professionalism. This develops a community of learners working together for shared purpose.

Works Cited

Sergiovanni, T. (1992). Moral Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.