Moral Leadership Chapter 9 Leadership as Stewardship: "Who's Serving Who?"

The leadership that counts, in the end, is the kind that touches people differently. It taps their emotions, appeals to their values, and responds to their connections with other people.

Stewardship in Practice
In the end, it is servant leadership, based on a deep commitment to values and emerging from a groundswell of moral authority, that makes the critical difference in the lives of Blaine's students and their families.

The Many Forms of Leadership

• If command and instructional leadership are practiced as dominant strategies, rather than supporting ones, they can breed dependency in teachers and cast them in roles as subordinates, with the consequences discusses in chapter six.
• Command leaders and instructional leaders alike are being challenged by the view that school administrators should strive to become leaders of leaders.
• Successful leaders of leaders combine the most progressive elements of psychological authority with aspects of professional and moral authority.

Servant Leadership

• People's confidence is strengthened by their belief that the leader makes judgments on the basis of competence and values, rather than self-interest
• It is best to let those who will be served define their own needs in their own way
• All members of a community share the burden of servant leadership
• The more crucial role of the principal is as head learner, engaging in the most important enterprise of the schoolhouse - experiencing, displaying, modeling, and celebrating what it is hoped and expected that teachers and pupils will do

Practicing Servant Leadership

• Purposing- that conscious stream of actions by an organization's formal leadership which has the effect of inducing clarity, consensus and commitment regarding the organization's basic purposes
• Empowerment- derives it's full strength from being linked to purposing; everyone is free to do what makes sense, as long as people's decisions embody the values shared by the school community.
• Leadership by outrage- it is the leaders responsibility to be outraged when empowerment is abused and when purposes are ignored... As important as leadership by outrage is, it's intent is to kindle outrage in others

Power Over and Power To

• Power over emphasizes controlling what people do, when they do it, and how they do it.
• Power to views power as a source of energy for achieving shared goals and purposes.
• Myers understands the difference between charting a direction and giving people maps, between providing a theme and giving teachers a script

The Female Style

• Female principals need to feel free to be themselves, rather than have to follow the principles and practices of traditional management

Servant Leadership and Moral Authority

• Moral authority relies heavily on persuasion
• Servant leadership is practiced by serving others, but it's ultimate purpose is to place oneself, and others for whom one has responsibility, in the service of ideals
• One theme of this book is that administrators ought not to choose among psychological, bureaucratic, or moral authority; instead, the approach should be additive.

Stewardship

• The rights and prerogatives inherent in the administrator's position move to the periphery, and attention is focused on duties and responsibilities- to others as persons and, more important, to the school itself.

Thoughts...
Successful leaders of leaders combine the most progressive elements of psychological authority with aspects of professional and moral authority. the people trust that the leader will use their influence for the benefit of the organization, and not self-interest. When an organization gets to the moral level, leadership is flattened and widened across the organization, and the organization becomes the servant of one another. In this situation, authority is spread across the organization. Therefore the leader is responsible to make the choice from power over others to power to empower others. This empowerment and sense of purpose are the hallmarks of schools of virtue with moral purpose for student success.

This concept of wider, flatter leadership within the organization is not new, it is shared amongst many other leadership philosophies. But the association of moral purpose to the leadership and virtue in the organization are what distinguish this theory. Achievement and success are not the end goal, but a byproduct of the accomplishment of becoming a virtuous school. If you do things the right way, positive results will follow.

Works Cited

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