ABSTRACT

In Chapter 9 of the book the authors contend that delegation is not distributed leadership and importantly, from a leadership perspective, that it is better to be a leader among leaders than a leader of followers. A sign of organisational maturity is a staff willingness to embrace distributed leadership opportunities.

The authors maintain that a distributed leadership paradigm is characterised by a leadership culture where collaboration exists and grows within the school as an organisation, underpinned by both respect and trust between its staff. Such a collaborative school culture is seen as being personally rewarding for both its leadership and staff.

Unfortunately, it appears that many schools are over-managed or micro-managed by their leadership, but in fact they are under-led. School leaders who primarily manage tend to focus on manipulating the three domains of management: human, material and financial. However, this by default does not necessarily result in a school that is well led. While management may ensure that a school may be running effectively it is based on the presumption that the school is a static organisation, which of course it is not. Hence, the argument that school leadership must be pedagogically focused.

To put the issue simply, if a school’s leadership does what it has always done then it can anticipate getting the same results it has always got.