Facing up to the demands of leadership
Do we take for granted the size of the challenge facing school leaders? Is there a sufficient appreciation for the range of leadership functions that they face each day? Are the professional development needs of leaders as adult learners really understood and addressed?
This article, will introduce the concept of Adult Ego Development and its relevance for how we conceptualise leadership and leadership development. First, it outlines why leadership in schools is particularly challenging. With a brief introduction to adult developmental psychology, I will demonstrate how many of the features recognised to be important in school leadership occur only in a small subset of individuals.
The demands of school leadership can be best understood by considering the problems that school leaders typically face . Schools are complex organisations where wicked problems are common. Such problems, according to Rittel and Weber are multi-faceted, require a bespoke solution, and can have ramifications for the organisation beyond the original incident..
In addition, schools and school leadership have large affective elements which will influence the course and interaction with the problem.
So the argument is that, to handle such complex and wicked problems in school leadership, leaders will need to:
- Recognise and appreciate the underpinning complex, wicked of the problem.
- Respond by working in mutual, collaborative manner with their teams. (Woods and Roberts 2018: Hargreaves and O’Connor 2018)
- Handle and support the feelings of individuals that can run those these incidents.
However, In my research exploring the applications of adult development psychology to school leadership, I argue that the three examples I have cited (complex thinking; collaboration; and handling emotion) are, for most adults, far more challenging then we currently give credit for.