Distributed Leadership in Education
Has Covid really changed things with regards to distributed leadership in schools?
Overview
Some recent journal articles suggest that covid has fundamentally changed the environment in schools and distributed leadership is now essential
Despite this recent glowing press, both the literature and practitioner experience suggest a much more nuanced picture about distributed leadership which includes some downsides and risks.
These downsides need to be planned for rather than overlooked if distributed leadership is to live up to its potential.
The golden child
A recent open access article on the impact of Covid on educational leadership concludes with the following remarks on collaboration and distributed leadership:
Distributed leadership has become the default leadership response in this current crisis requiring more school leaders, at all levels, to connect, share, learn and network their way through issues.
This is one of a recent spate of similarly breathless articles such as this and this. The catch? These glowing conclusions in support of the power of distributive and collaborative leadership lack nuance and don’t fully reflect either the extant literature or the work of practitioners. It’s a shame really, as a more accurate and nuanced picture of distributed leadership, warts and all, is actually much more interesting.
Maintaining the status quo
This powerful point by @peterabarnard, gets right at the first major area of nuance around distributed leadership, that it can be used to maintain existing power structures. Alongside these existing power structures, are the creation of barriers preventing true sharing of power across the organization, often while claiming the exact opposite.
Insecure leaders particularly those leaning towards a dominance based strategy, are likely to use a distributed model to favour certain followers over others. This is the classic “divide and conquer” style, the primary aim being to undermine group cohesion, and prevent the emergence of talented subordinates who are potential rivals, perhaps by setting them up to fail or isolating them from coworkers. Another, intriguing secondary strategy as @cijane02 hints at below, is the “test of allegiance” where the creation of distributed roles is used as a gatekeeping and loyalty test by the insecure leader, and in so doing ties subordinates to the leader.
Coordination remains hard
As @suzyg001 points out below, often distributed models lead to a lack of cohesion and in turn exacerbate coordination failures. This is partly because coordination is hard at any size of organization at the best of times, and a more distributed model is likely to make it even harder still by adding another layer of complexity.
Class is probably an issue
Lastly, @michael_merrick raises the possibility that there is a social class element to calls for distributed leadership as well. While he didn’t elaborate on this, he is most likely correct, and there are almost certainly social class interactions and differences around open hierarchies with a more distributed model (even if in name only) potentially being more palatable to middle class employees.
The jury is still out on distributed leadership
While it seems likely that a distributed leadership model is likely to have some real benefits particularly around developing future leaders and managers by giving them actual responsibility, it equally seems likely that there will be substantial drawbacks as well. Furthermore, Covid is unlikely to have changed underlying organizational conditions and existing limitations with distributed leadership models are likely to continue. In short, if distributed leadership is to live up to its potential in educational leadership then it is important that we study it through the lens of how things are, rather than how we wish them to be.