Building Middle Leadership Capacity
“Collaboration is not always a concept that is greeted with open arms. Educators who have had success working in isolation may view this process as an invasion of their pedagogy and a waste of time. The key to strong collaboration is recognizing that a student shouldn’t be the responsibility of only one teacher, but of all teachers.”
— Jason Perez, Head Principal at Heritage Trails Elementary, “Taking the Doors off the Classroom through Collaboration,” Blog Post Dated January 7th, 2015.
Coordinating the work of five people is a large undertaking when you are also teaching five classes or coordinating curricula or activities across multiple teams. However, as Vicki Vescio et al.’s A Review of Research on the Impact of Professional Learning Communities on Teaching Practice and Student Learning evidences, the positive correlation between teacher collaboration and student learning should be reason enough to put aside fears of “invasion of pedagogy” or of being evaluated. If we hold each other accountable for the success of all students, not just our own, then collaboration is not only necessary but should be our primary responsibility.
Collaboration, though, is not spontaneous and requires effective leadership. Therefore, once the team leader has been identified, the next step is to determine what training and resources they will need to succeed. Leadership training in and of itself only creates awareness of what is expected of a leader and provides additional lenses through which leaders should view their work.
Therefore, once the middle leaders have been oriented with the level of awareness and lenses commensurate with their duties, they need to invest an inordinate amount of time to transition from being a team leader to the leader of a team. The leader of a team is not at the center and supervising each team member’s work, but is tangled in a web of interdependent interactions.
In this article, adapted from Chapter 6 of Hidden in Plain Sight: Realizing the Full Potential of Middle Leaders, I will explain how to identify what a middle leader needs to learn, continue to make the argument for why middle leaders need more time set aside to build their leadership capacity, and the role failure plays in developing great leaders. First, though, let me define “building capacity,” as this is not a common educational term, especially among middle leaders. The best definition I have found for building capacity as it relates to my work with schools comes from a paper by Bill Hoag and a book by Linda Lambert.
The general definition that I subscribe to, as written by Bill Hoag, is:
“Building leadership capacity is a process that starts with understanding the concept of leadership capacity, defining the expectations of leadership within your particular organization, and then building intentional, implementable steps that help leaders assess and develop their ability to be a leader.”
The concept of leadership capacity has been explored thoroughly in the preceding chapters, but it is the strategy of the sandbox that makes the term tangible. The sandbox ensures the expectations and roles are explicitly defined. The sandbox also determines the requisite leadership capacity needed to achieve the desired outcome, which in turn should assist senior leaders to provide adequate support to build leadership capacity.
The process for developing leadership capacity requires more than just skill development, and senior leaders cannot outsource capacity building to training programs or achieve it with a few motivational anecdotes about their time in the trenches.
Linda Lambert’s book, Building Leadership Capacity in Schools, helps to contextualize the process of “understanding the concept of leadership capacity,” and her definition goes further by providing rich detail as to how to assess full capacity:
“Leadership is about learning together and constructing meaning and knowledge collectively and collaboratively. It involves opportunities to surface and mediate perceptions, values, beliefs, information, and assumptions through continuing conversations; to inquire about and generate ideas together; to seek to reflect upon and make sense of work in the light of shared beliefs and new information; to create actions that grow out of these new understandings.”
Lambert makes an important point in the opening chapter of her book, “We generally consider leadership to be synonymous with a person in a position of formal authority. . . . When we equate “leadership” with “leader,” we are immersed in “trait theory”: If only a leader possessed these certain traits, we would have good leadership... Although leaders do perform acts of leadership, a separation of the concepts can allow us to reconceptualize leadership itself.”
This point by Lambert further illustrates the problem of labels that are subject to different interpretations. We can’t expect people to lead unless we explicitly define and get buy-in for the values, beliefs, and expectations that will be the basis for how we define that label. With a commonly understood definition of leadership, relative to the needs of the school, senior leaders will have a better understanding of how to build their middle leaders’ leadership capacity.
The objectives for developing the leadership capacity of middle leaders should be to (1) free senior leaders to focus on strategic objectives; (2) capacity-build middle leaders to independently pursue team objectives aligned with the school; and (3) instil trust and confidence that, regardless of the outcome, the work of middle leaders still contributes to the success of the school.
Plan On Working A Lot Harder Than You Ever Have
Middle leaders that are (1) bought into the expectations that are being placed on them and (2) have a clear understanding of the outcome they are being asked to contribute to should expect to work 2-3 hours more per week than they may be assuming. To turn outputs into outcomes requires a great amount of energy and time, both of which middle leaders can’t expect to be remunerated for and they may not even get a single ounce of praise. The process to take a complacent team from a checklist approach to its work to a transformational collaborative team that challenges how things are done and works interdependently is a long and often thankless road. Very few activities and tools that are recommended by any expert can be fit into your normal work routine. These tools and activities require a deep level of consideration of the members that are participating in this process, confidence in the team leader’s ability to achieve the outcome expected of the team, time to focus exclusively on the desired outcome, and a strong resolve to see through myriad conflicts.
Unfortunately for many schools, regardless of if middle leaders are bought into the expectations being set and clearly understand those expectations, executive leaders still fail to provide the two critical types of support: time and training. Middle leaders are left to scrape together time from the remnants of periods and breaks that they use to covet to catch up with colleagues. Learning on the job takes up additional time, strains collegial relationships, and undermines team member confidence in the team leader.
The team leader needs to see their role as long-term, at least three years. To set the team leader up for success, senior leaders need to help them answer these questions:
How will the team leader build and support the culture fit for the desired outcome?
What skills and resources will the team leader need to guide their team toward the desired outcome?
How should the team leader scaffold the activities that produce the necessary outputs over the three-year period?
What changes in the team can the team leader prepare for and be proactive in facilitating?
The answers to these questions address the gap between what the team leader is capable of doing now and the additional time in learning and leading they will need to invest to develop the necessary capacity to achieve the desired outcome. In my book, and in particular Chapters 5 and 6, I offer 6 specific strategies for developing leadership capacity. For the purpose of this article, I want to share with you the 70-20-10 strategy, and how with answers to the above questions, we can design a personalized 3-year leadership development plan.
70-20-10
A well-documented and thoroughly researched development strategy is the 70-20-10 rule of leadership development, where research has shown that 70% of leadership development comes from on-the-job work experience, and specifically overcoming challenges. 20% is support provided by superiors or coaches, and 10% is formal and structured learning. However, for on-the-job experience to be an effective form of professional development, senior leaders need to understand the requisite capacity that must be developed so that they can monitor and provide support as needed, which is largely what the 20% entails. Lastly, leadership development is not only a matter of being able to demonstrate the requisite skills but also being able to develop those same skills in their team members.
An important consideration to understand to ensure the 70-20-10 rule is successful is that of time. Proportionally, structured learning would appear to have a very small role, such as external workshops, conferences, and diploma programs. However, they probably play the most significant role in the beginning, as this is where the seeds for development are planted and overtime senior leaders need to tend to those seeds and cultivate them into a flourishing culture that will propel the school to realizing its core purpose. The 10% in the first one to two years of capacity-building will actually be the bulk of the development activity, largely because middle leaders have full-time responsibilities to attend to, and opportunities to apply lessons will be few and far between. Opportunities to apply content will also need a large amount of support from senior leaders. It will take time for middle leaders to process all the new information. During this period senior leaders are reaffirming the learning objectives and helping middle leaders to understand the new content within their school context. In the beginning, senior leaders clearly also have a larger role. Over time though, as middle leaders become more effective at seeking out learning opportunities, reflecting on what they are learning, and honing their new knowledge and skills through application, the proportions take their proper shape.
Developing leadership capacity, in parallel with attending to regular work responsibilities, is a long process. In fact, it is a life-long process. The 70-20-10 rule for developing leadership capacity is the most effective process, but it takes a few years before these proportions can be sustained. This rule utilizes the positive attributes of all four professional learning strategies, emphasizes application, and makes the role of all relevant stakeholders clear. There are obviously many components to each part of the rule to ensure it is not only effective but also sustainable. Some of these I have mentioned throughout this chapter, such as:
Assessing learning needs;
Reflecting on how new knowledge can be applied in the current working environment;
Reflecting on the application of new knowledge; and
Honing this knowledge through repeated application.
These latter components, especially that of reflection, are too easily overlooked. Learning is a continual process. In the beginning, new or aspiring leaders rely on the facilitator to help them reflect on learning. This responsibility is then passed on to senior leaders. But if the aspiring leaders never take responsibility for this component, then their development can’t be self-sustaining.
