Managing up, sideways and down
Do some leaders use the networking educational leadership conferences give to hedge against their greater risks of sudden failure?
Overview
Dominance style leaders are at greater risk of catastrophic career failure
Dominance style leaders will hedge against this risk by networking externally.
Prestige style leaders will network internally rather than externally.
Prestige style leaders will sacrifice organizational goals to maintain their internal network.
Dominance style leaders will tend to network internally to preserve existing power bases.
Taken together both these last two points are likely to be potentially fatal for some distributed leadership models.
The mystery of the Scarlet Pimpernel leader
“They seek him here, they seek him there
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere
Is he in heaven or is he in hell?
That demned elusive Pimpernel” -Baroness Orczy
If you haven’t worked for one you’ve certainly heard about the leader who seems to spend more time abroad at educational conferences or recruiting (perhaps in rather exotic locales if in international schools) than they do at school. Often the potential benefits of this constant traveling for the institution are vaguely alluded to, but never quite appear. This suggests that the true benefits lie elsewhere and compiling those air miles are only an added extra. One possible explanation for this lies in the many implications of dual strategies theory for educational leadership practice.
Dominance-based leaders, those who gain status in hierarchies through drive and implied threat, tend to fall much faster and harder than prestige-based leaders for the same offense. Probably because when the inevitable mistakes come, people are less forgiving of the former tyrant than they are of the more admired and less threatening prestige type, so when the opportunity to take revenge against the tyrant comes along, well they take it. Yet tempting as this story seems to be something doesn’t quite add up, after all, we see many examples of leaders “failing upwards” and moving onto new schools and leadership positions so there must be something else going on.
Hedging against risk
How to explain this contradiction? Well it seems very likely that one factor is the answer to the other. Yes, dominance style leaders have greater risk of career failure within their own institution, but they hedge against this risk by networking with external peers. This then is the true role educational leadership conferences and the like actually play, and also explains why the conferences programs themselves lean anemic in terms of content relying on feel good stories about leadership rather than actually improving senior leader performance. In short, by building their external network and focusing their attentions on that, the dominant leader is effectively “hedging” against their greater risk of career failure as the network will help them get another job when they’ve overstayed their welcome at their existing one.
Distributed leadership
This is not to say this type of leader does no internal networking at all but more that when they do it will tend to be strategically similar in aim, and focus on board management, a variation of the same upwards management style that helped them climb the greasy pole in the first place. Depending on the external conditions, the downwards management they do take part in is likely to be a variation of divide and conquer aimed at isolating talented subordinates with a goal of preventing them from emerging as potential rivals. Even if these types of leaders do use the currently en vogue distributed leadership approach, this may not be all that it appears to be and could well be used to maintain existing power structures.
In contrast, a prestige-based approach to distributed leadership seems a much more natural and wholesome fit….at first glance, yet even here there are likely to be issues. It seems that the more prestige based approach requires the leader to be hyper-vigilant to signs of in-group approval (and disapproval), and so their approach to internal networking can lead to organizational goals being neglected in order to keep insiders on-side and supportive of the leader.
Concluding thoughts
As the beginning example shows, a lot of what we take for granted in educational leadership, from leadership conferences to networking may not be quite what it appears to be, and its real purpose and stated purpose may be rather different. It's in identifying and exploring those differences that real progress is likely to be made.