Transformative Leadership An Introduction Carolyn M. Shields What s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1 2) Would that which we call transformative leadership by any other name have the same import? Indeed, it is tempting to become cynical about the proliferation of leadership theories and to argue, as Shakespeare apparently did, that names and labels are but artificial and meaningless conventions. At the same time, as Juliet protested so powerfully, it is the inherent characteristics the qualities of the person so labeled that are important. Indeed, Juliet s appeal is to find agreement over the characteristics and not to battle over the label and, of course, given the extent to which so many leadership theories overlap, it is the qualities of the leader and his or her beliefs, values, and practices that are of paramount importance. The roles and responsibilities of leaders are increasingly complex, the contexts within which leadership is exercised are ever more diverse, the pressures for performance accountability are progressively greater, and the challenges presented by declining resources are severe. Strewn throughout this landscape are traditional and emerging theories of leadership, each purporting to help educational leaders to operate effective and efficient schools, to respond to parental and community wants and needs, and, invariably, to meet the needs of all students. Because the metaphoric landscape of educational leadership in the 21 st century is as convoluted and diverse as natural geography itself, it is important to carefully consider which elements, commitments, skills, beliefs, knowledge, and so forth are inherent in different leadership theories each represented, of course, by a particular name. Despite the myriad of leadership theories and reform strategies, the critiques and complaints about the current state of education continue unabated. In developed countries, educators repeatedly protest high-stakes testing, lack of funding and resources, and pressures for performativity
2 Carolyn M. Shields (Foucault, 1995; Perryman, 2009). There is still an achievement gap between dominant-culture students and their peers from other ethnic, linguistic, religious, or cultural backgrounds. There are still too few students from minoritized groups accessing advanced or international baccalaureate or gifted classes, too few successfully attending or completing college or university, and too many of these same students dropping out (or being pushed out) of high school before completion. Worldwide, 75 million children never have the opportunity to attend school at all. Many who do attend school encounter poorly trained teachers, few resources, and low expectations; moreover, high numbers of students in developing countries fail to even complete elementary school. It is little wonder that, in recent decades, forms of leadership related to advancing social justice (Bogotch, 2002; Brown, 2004; Larson & Murtadha, 2002; Theoharis, 2007), democracy (Ryan, 2009; Woods, 2004), equity reform (Oakes & Rogers, 2006), or transformation (Foster, 1986; Shields, 2003, 2009) have arisen. Psychologists and scholars tell us that names are important. Volumes are published explaining the histories and qualities associated with names. Parents spend hours deliberating over choices for unborn children, and in many cultures a naming ceremony celebrates not only the birth of a child but the inherent hopes and dreams of the parents for the child s future. The powerful naming ceremony of Haley s Kunta Kinte in Roots (1974) is a case in point, as the name itself, according to the traditions of the tribe, helps a person to know who he or she is. Studies also indicate that a child s body build, ethnicity, gender, and name all affect how a teacher may respond to the child and, in turn, how that child will be expected to perform (Vail, 2005). This suggests that there may be some import to choosing a name (or a theory), especially, perhaps, one that might guide and ground one s leadership practice. Here, we offer for consideration the concept of transformative leadership a theory of leadership that is increasingly delineated and conceptualized as distinct from its etymological sibling transformational leadership. Situated squarely within a number of new approaches, transformative leadership emphasizes the need for education to focus both on academic excellence and on social transformation. Although, as indicated earlier, we can quibble over an appropriate name or label for the kind of leadership we believe to be desirable, we must ultimately find a way to describe and embody it. This is the goal of the Transformative Leadership Reader. In the 24 chapters of this volume, you will find theoretical work that explains and conceptualizes transformative leadership in various contexts, and you will read empirical studies that demonstrate its practical utility on several continents and, thus, in contexts that vary considerably. First, I provide an overview of transformative leadership itself, its historical development, its underlying principles, and its distinguishing features, and attempt to provide an argument for adopting a form of transformative leadership to further the transformative goals of education in this century. Transformative Leadership: An Overview Elsewhere, I have provided an overview of some of the salient aspects of transformative leadership. These include starting with a global perspective that attends to the material realities and daily experiences of the community from which members of an organization come; deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge frameworks that perpetuate inequities in the status quo; offering a balance of critique and promise related to existing beliefs, structures, policies, and practices; acknowledging the pervasiveness and hegemony of power and privilege; and focusing on liberation, emancipation, deep democracy, equity, and justice as prerequisites to achieving the more specific goals of an organization. Hence, for educational institutions such as schools, colleges, and universities, as well as less formal educative sites, creating learning contexts of liberation, democracy, equity, and justice is
Transformative Leadership: An Introduction 3 necessary for fostering the high achievement of all students as well as for the fulfillment of requisite accountability measures. Although the goals of liberation, deep democracy, equity, and justice are generally supported by most citizens, their conceptualization is deeply embedded in ideological perspectives. Hence, the goals will play out very differently from site to site in the details of their implementation. At the same time, there are some general, underlying principles that, together, inform the theory and practice of transformative leadership principles I will expand upon in a later section. At this point, it is sufficient to assert that transformative leadership requires the leader to have a clear sense of the values and beliefs that undergird his or her own identity, be willing to take stands that may require moral courage, to live with tension, and, to some degree, to engage in activism and advocacy. Although these characteristics are rarely placed in the forefront of leadership practices, none is new as we shall see in a brief examination of the historical development of transformative leadership. Historical Development 1 The emergence of formal scholarly leadership studies in the United States is sometimes attributed to what has become known as the Chicago School a group of more than 50 scholars from 20 leading universities who travelled by car, train, and plane to Chicago, Illinois on November 10, 1957, to attend a seminar entitled Administrative Theory in Education (Culbertson, 1995, p. 34). What has become known as the theory movement emerged from this seminar. This movement, as Halpin explained, centered in large part on the belief that theory must be concerned with how the superintendent does behave, not with someone s opinion of how he ought to behave (in Culbertson, 1995, p. 41). This approach, as has often been discussed and critiqued, undergirded the strong positivist approach to administration and leadership studies of the last half of the 20 th century, an approach in which scholars and practitioners generally believed that ought questions for example, questions about ethics and moral purpose or right and wrong have no place in science, and thus lie outside of the study and practice of educational administration. Unfortunately, the influence of this approach is pervasive, and too many elements of it still dominate thinking about leadership in the 21 st century. More recently, of course, the concept of moral leadership (Evans, 2000; Starratt, 2007), with its emphasis on ethics and justice, has re-emerged as central to many leadership theories. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that these concepts were never totally repressed, with a minority group of scholars and practitioners continuing to recognize the importance of beliefs and values in educational leadership. Culbertson (1988) reports, for example, that in 1875 William Harold Payne, Superintendent of Schools in Adrian, Michigan who wrote the first book on school administration, Chapters on School Supervision said: that educational organizations are not objective phenomena regulated by general laws; rather they are mental constructs that reflect the perceptions and interpretations of their members. Students of organizations should turn their backs, then, upon logical positivistic science and adopt interpretive modes of inquiry. (p. 3) A century later, Greenfield (1975) picked up on this argument and restored it to prominence in educational administration. He emphasized the importance of understanding organizations as invented social reality, saying that when one does so, the notion of discovering the ultimate laws which govern social reality becomes an ever receding fantasy (p. 79). Transformative leadership takes the notion of invented social reality further and draws on critical theories, theories of cultural
4 Carolyn M. Shields and social reproduction, and concepts of leadership for social justice to help leaders understand how to create educational organizations that combine excellence with equity, inclusion, and justice. Recent origins of transformative leadership are sometimes traced to Burns s (1978) seminal book, simply called Leadership. His discussion ranged widely, covering topics such as moral leadership, social sources of leadership, political leadership, reform leadership, and even revolutionary leadership. To introduce his discussion, Burns stated that he would identify two basic types of leadership: the transactional and the transforming (p. 4). In differentiating between them, he explained that the result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents (p. 5). He then added that it was this last concept, moral leadership, that concerned him most. He described moral leadership as the kind of leadership that can produce social change (p. 4) and suggested it is one of the most important and salient characteristics of transforming leadership. One additional important element of transforming leadership, according to Burns, was the concept of intellectual leadership [that] brings in the role of conscious purpose drawn from values (p. 142). The intellectual leader stands inside society and fully embraces the conflicts and tensions of social and political combat. As he described the intellectual leader, Burns emphasized that, like the French philosophes of the 18 th century, these leaders need to be hommes engagés (p. 145) communicating, exchanging, and vigorously debating their ideas. Indeed, the intellectual leader, according to Burns, is embattled but not lonely. The contrast between this embattled leader, standing for a conscious and controversial purpose, and the administrator described by Halpin, for whom ethics and moral purpose play no role in his daily activities, is striking. For Burns, the absence or presence of the foregoing characteristics moral and conscious purpose, social change, and engagement formed the basis for his now well-known distinction between transactional and transforming leadership. It is interesting to note that, despite frequent acknowledgement of Burns as the originator of transformative leadership, he never used that term. He did, however, write about transformational leadership in a way that is evocative of the current use of transformative leadership. For Burns, transactions that include an exchange of valued goods (economic, political, or psychological) are an acceptable and normal part of organizational processes, but they do not bind leader and follower together in a mutual and continuing pursuit of higher purpose (p. 20). Through transforming leadership, on the other hand, purposes become fused (p. 20): Transforming leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with followers who will feel elevated by it and often become more active themselves, thereby creating new cadres of leaders. Transformative leadership is leadership engagé. (p. 20) Thus, as Starratt asserts (this volume), the current iteration of transformational leadership has moved away from these radical and revolutionary roots to emphasize organizational effectiveness and internal operations, while transformative leadership remains closely tied to Burns s original concept of leadership. Thus, transformational leadership remains clearly focused on the need to improve employee performance (Leithwood, Harris, & Hopkins, 2008, p. 30), and on the tasks of building vision and setting directions, understanding and developing people, redesigning the organization, and managing the teaching and learning program (p. 30) all broad practices that uphold the effective and efficient operation of any organization and are necessary, but likely are not sufficient, for achieving the transformation implied by the theories discussed here. Transformative leadership, on the other hand, could be said to pass Burns s test of conscious moral purposing and intellectual leadership:
Transformative Leadership: An Introduction 5 The test of transforming power is the capacity to conceive values or purpose in such a way that ends and means are linked analytically and creatively and that the implications of certain values for political action and governmental organization are clarified (p. 163) To be truly transformative, the processes of leadership must be linked to the ends of equity, inclusion, and social justice. Extending the conception of educational purpose in such as way as to engage political action and governmental organization is fundamental to the recognition of social injustice and to the organization s ability to address (and attempt to redress) inequities that emerge from the uneven playing field experienced by students in their daily lives. To that end, Burns later explains that transformational leadership is more concerned with end-values, such as liberty, justice, equality. Transforming leaders raise their followers up through levels of morality, though insufficient attention to means can corrupt the ends (p. 426). Here we can clearly see how and why the two concepts of transformational and transformative leadership have become confounded, and can understand the necessity for the clarification offered by this present volume. What Burns called transforming leadership as exemplified in his mind by the term transformational leadership has become, in the 21 st century, closely associated with the theory of transformative leadership. Indeed, this is the concept picked up by Foster (1986) when he calls for leadership that is critically educative, that not only looks at the conditions in which we live, but it must also decide how to change them (p. 185). To confuse matters even more, one finds in most dictionaries reference to the two terms as synonyms. Nevertheless, despite the common, vernacular confusion and confounding of the two concepts, in terms of scholarship and educational leadership theory, it is important to clarify the basic tenets of transformative leadership and to clearly elucidate how it can form the basis for leadership that is truly transforming both for individuals and for society as whole. Transformative Leadership: Underlying Principles and Distinguishing Features Transformative leadership is grounded in a number of principles that distinguish it from other leadership theories, although it does not eschew the practices of other theories as strategies for accomplishing its goals. Negotiating acceptable transactions, distributing leadership responsibilities, and even demonstrating servant leadership may well serve to advance its desired goals. However, the following tenets, to be discussed in turn, are basic to transformative leadership. It focuses on: acknowledging power and privilege articulating both individual and collective purposes (public and private good) deconstructing social-cultural knowledge frameworks that generate inequity and reconstructing them balancing critique and promise effecting deep and equitable change working towards transformation: liberation, emancipation, democracy, equity, and excellence demonstrating moral courage and activism.