John Connell: The Blog

I have been work­ing my way recently through Don Led­ing­ham’s “Seven Sides of Edu­ca­tion Lead­er­ship”. As with every­thing Don does, his model demon­strates an intel­li­gence and a cre­ativ­ity that should imme­di­ately ren­der it wor­thy of con­sid­er­a­tion, I believe, by any­one need­ing to think about the pecu­liar­i­ties of lead­er­ship in edu­ca­tion. Like Don, I usu­ally think in metaphors. For instance, almost every­thing I do in ICT –whether using an appli­ca­tion, search­ing, trou­bleshoot­ing, devel­op­ing — is based on a whole series of internally-held metaphors. Some of them are extremely vague and would not look too intel­li­gi­ble were I to try to write them down or pic­ture them. But they work for me, and that is the impor­tant thing.

Don’s metaphors are derived from his own take on the pecu­liar­i­ties of edu­ca­tion and the def­i­nite and dis­tinct require­ments for effec­tive lead­er­ship within this domain.

So, the impor­tant thing about Don’s model is that it is aimed squarely at lead­er­ship in the edu­ca­tional con­text, a con­text, by the way, that is not nec­es­sar­ily con­fined to the school. Too many lead­er­ship mod­els are generic, all-encompassing — many have much to com­mend them, but few make explicit the assump­tions behind the men­tal or cul­tural model that under­pins them or the spe­cific context(s) in which they were first envis­aged. For Don, there are enough dis­tinc­tive traits and idio­syn­crasies in edu­ca­tion that he feels the need to define a model for lead­er­ship that meets those spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics. I agree with him on that — I know from long expe­ri­ence that edu­ca­tion is dif­fer­ent enough to war­rant spe­cial treat­ment. The var­ied and, often, con­flict­ing sets of stake­hold­ers in edu­ca­tion (think, for exam­ple, of the desired ends that par­ents and their chil­dren seek from school­ing — they do not always coin­cide — whose needs should take prece­dence?) means that being a leader in edu­ca­tion can be dif­fi­cult and chal­leng­ing.

With his lead­er­ship metaphor — really, an extended metaphor com­pris­ing a num­ber of sub-metaphors — Don explic­itly seeks, there­fore, to estab­lish a par­tic­u­lar cul­tural model for behav­iours through­out edu­ca­tion. For Don, this would be a cul­ture that eschews the con­stric­tions of hier­ar­chy, that val­ues gen­uine par­tic­i­pa­tion at all lev­els, that seeks, per­haps, a dis­trib­u­tive model of decision-making (puts me in mind of Greg Whitby on Dis­trib­u­tive Lead­er­ship), that engen­ders com­mu­nity, that trusts peo­ple, and that pro­motes crit­i­cal think­ing through­out an organ­i­sa­tion. This, of course, is a vast sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of Don’s think­ing, but it draws a pic­ture of an edu­ca­tional organ­i­sa­tion at work that I could eas­ily envi­sion as one that is sym­pa­thetic, adapt­able, trans­for­ma­tional, humane and intel­li­gent — how many organ­i­sa­tions can claim all of these epi­thets for them­selves? And how many edu­ca­tional organisations?

The point is, I guess, that any of us could come up with our own set of metaphors for lead­er­ship, at any level and in any con­text, but I agree with Don that any par­tic­u­lar set of metaphors brings with it its own explicit or implicit cul­tural bag­gage. If you like the cul­tural mes­sage out­lined above, then take a long hard look at Don’s ‘Seven Sides’ model.

Tech­no­rati Tags: don led­ing­ham, lead­er­ship, 7sides, edu­ca­tion

§ 3 Responses to Heptagonal leadership"

• Leadership Waves « HeyJude says:

  January 24, 2007 at 5:56 am

  […] Jan­u­ary 24, 2007 Posted by Judy O’Connell in Blog­ging, Aus­tralia, Future Direc­tions. track­back A recent post by John Con­nell Hexag­o­nal Lead­er­ship draws our atten­tion to atten­tion to the use ofmetaphor in mak­ing sense of our actions and reac­tions in our edu­ca­tional endeav­ours. John was respond­ing to Don Ledingham’s Seven Sides of Edu­ca­tional Leadership […]

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• Don’s Learning Log » Is educational leadership different from leadership in other fields? says:

  January 28, 2007 at 5:56 pm

  […] John Con­nell has made some very kind com­ments about the Seven Sides of Edu­ca­tional Lead­er­ship model which I’m cur­rently developing. […]

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• Cath Riddoch’s Blog » Blog Archive » Educational Leadership says:

  February 5, 2007 at 6:12 am

  […] Ive been strug­gling with the essay for some time now and am thank­ful for John Con­nell post­ing about hep­tag­o­nal lead­er­ship. Since I was strug­gling with the con­cpets of dis­trib­uted lead­er­ship, I thought I would inves­ti­gate Don Ledingham’s Seven Sides of Edu­ca­tional Lead­er­ship and what I found unlocked the writers-block that I had been suf­fer­ing. I espe­cially found the video using the 7 metaphors in the area of Glow enlight­en­ing on serveral dif­fer­ent lev­els. Not only was he the first per­son I’ve heard talk­ing about Glow in a way that inspired me but I devel­oped a good under­stand­ing of how the metaphors could be used in a real edu­ca­tional setting. […]

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