The emotional work of leaders

The emotional work of leaders

Gronn also draws attention to the emotional aspect of leadership activity, not just in terms of its potential to enhance leadership skills, a strong feature of Goleman’s work, but also in terms of the emotional stresses on the leader him or herself, beset by the ever increasing stresses of their ‘greedy work’. ‘Greedy work’ is a concept which Gronn uses to characterise the constant pressure of the ‘new public management’ on public servants, a pressure which is never satisfied. He sees educational leaders as trapped in a ‘new servitude’, characterised by new understandings of the idea of service, reconfigured roles, reconstructed identities and new claims on leaders. Greedy work in public service is the creation of the new public management model, with “workaholicism rapidly becoming the grammar or culturally accepted norms of the new work order. .. thus when one signs up for or takes on a leadership role and joins the growing army of greedy workers, one is signing up for an implicit work contract , the terms of which are that ‘one lives to work, rather than works to live.’” (p159).

Brenda Beatty has also explored emotional aspects to leadership {{815 Beatty, B 2000}}(Leithwood 2007). Less analytically grounded, her research work illustrates the power of emotions to influence relationships and practice in educational communities. Belinda Harris (Harris 2007)is another author with a strong focus on the emotional aspects of leadership. She is concerned not just with the emotional dynamics affecting individuals and relationships among school staff, but also explores the impact of emotional pressures in school communities on the development of young people. Those involved in educational leadership, at whatever level, have a responsibility to take into account in their practice the impact of their actions on others. Leadership is a social, emotional and moral process, far removed from activities that simply aim to ‘get results’.

However Luckcock (Luckcock 2008) warns against an overvaluation of ‘emotional’ intelligence. Separated from an ethical perspective, emotional leadership skills can be used for manipulative ends. Luckcock uses Hodgkinson’s archetypes (Hodgkinson 1983) to explore the ‘spiritual’ (broadly conceived) aspects of leadership. The theme of ethical, moral or spiritual leadership appears as a strong feature across the educational literature. Education, in this account, is not simply a minimalist technical activity leading to fixed outputs or a clearly measured bottom line, although along the way some basic technical features may be important. It is seen as a complex activity of human formation, essentially concerned with values and purposes. Starrat (Starratt 2003)and Sergiovanni (Sergiovanni 1992)see moral and ethical leadership as the heart of the leadership task. This is the world of Fullan’s ‘moral imperative’ (Fullan 2003).

The moral work of leaders and leadership

Campbell (Campbell 2003), working within the Canadian context, has probably been one of the most powerful advocates of the concept of the teaching profession as essentially ethically based. This is true for every teacher, not just those in formal leadership positions. Her award-winning thesis, Personal Morals and Organisational Stress (Campbell 1992) identified moral complexity as at the heart of even apparently routine decisions of teachers and school principals. However the teachers she studied did not always recognise this. Their practice was essentially unreflective, and dominated by the organisational norms, the culture, of the schools in which they worked. Campbell’s thesis suggested that school principals often suspended morality while at work, allowing them to avoid conflict between what they saw as the organisational imperative of the organisation and their own personal values. Techniques used included false necessity (‘I have no choice’), self deception (‘if I don’t acknowledge the situation I won’t have to confront it’) and situational adjustment (for example ‘unenthusiastic compliance’). These teachers and principals appeared untroubled by the underlying moral complexity of decisions they were regularly making.

Others have found, however that this moral complexity can often be both personally troubling and professionally challenging for educational leaders. The Australian principals studied by Dempster and Berry (Dempster, Berry 2003) were ill-prepared for the challenges they faced, memorably characterised as being ‘blindfolded in a minefield’ as they grappled with the competing values and political pressures of the role. These moral challenges contributed greatly to the tensions experienced by the English primary headteachers studied by Day and his colleagues (Day et al 2000) and to the headteachers in the international studies of McBeath and his colleagues (MacBeath 1998). Duignan and Collins (Duignan, Collns 2003) and Begley and Johansson (Begley, Johansson 2003) also testify to the widespread character of these ethical tensions in contemporary educational roles - teachers, headteachers, supervisors/directors - across the international English-speaking and Scandinavian contexts. These tensions often give rise to ‘dilemmas’ for those involved: specific situations where conflicts of values and interests cannot be easily resolved.

Leadership preparation programmes in the United States often include specific treatment of these themes. Shapiro and Stefkovich (Shapiro, Stefkovich 2001)invite their readers to use the overlapping professional ethics of ‘care, critique and justice’ to resolve typical dilemmas that will confront those in leadership positions in educational institutions. Furman (Furman 2004) builds on this work by adding an ‘ethic of community’. For Furman, there is a moral responsibility to engage in communal processes which address the moral purposes of schooling and the ongoing challenges of daily life in schools. But if the community, not the individual, is the locus of moral agency, then which ‘community’, in a plural society, is to hold that responsibility? This takes the argument back to politics and to the governance of education. Should educational institutions such as schools adopt and promote a specific morality, or preserve moral neutrality, outwith a minimal set of civic obligations and tolerances associated with democratic notions of human rights and freedoms?

Murphy (Murphy 2007)aims to bring these different dimensions together. He argues that leadership in schools is inevitably engaged with three overlapping aspects of human interaction: psychological, political and ethical. The psychological dimension involves emotion, but crucially also involves perception and cognition – people can learn new ways to construct and make sense of the world and professional educators must consciously engage with that process. This kind of interpersonal and social learning, in which common understandings of issues and solutions are developed, is at the heart of relationships and learning in schools based in plural societies, where individuals bring different interests and values to the table. These differing interests and values must also be understood for what they are. Competing interests arise in the political dimension and involve flows of power – from the formal hierarchical power of national political policy to the microcpolitics of informal individual power in close working teams. Differing values require exploration in the ethical dimension. Values and purposes are often unarticulated and underpin disagreements or conflicts about more specific issues. Although his study focuses on those in formal leadership roles, he is clear that all those involved in education share similar challenges. Only by applying all three perspectives can the educational task be understood. The challenge for educational leadership is to ‘provide the citizens of the future with the resources to interpret and evaluate together the difficult social, political, ethical and environmental challenges they will face.’ (p85) This is an educational task, a task of understanding and joint enquiry into possible solutions.

Beatty