Leadership is a mindset more than it is a position or title. Essentially, if you have people willing to follow, then you are by definition, a leader. In his book, ‘Lead From Where You Are,’  Joe Sanfelippo discusses how leadership happens at all levels in education. It is inherent to the role of educators since whether you are leading students as a teacher or adults as a school leader you have put yourself in that space. In adopting this mindset of leadership, it is worth exploring what that entails.

Robert K. Greenleaf coined the term Servant Leadership back in the 1970s. While there are so many virtues and right mindsets of this, I personally don’t love the term. It still represents an imbalance of power, albeit skewed more towards the people you serve rather than towards yourself. For many educators, this may be a bridge too far in terms of thinking about serving their students. To be clear there is an aspect of that since without students there is no role for a teacher, but the connotations that come with it at first glance can give the appearance that a servant leader is at the whims of those he serves. While this is partially correct in that you need to lead with the needs of those who follow in mind, you need to dig deeper into what it means to gain an appreciation for what it embodies.

As an alternative view, Jim Collins in Good to Great discusses the ideal leader as being a Level 5 Leader. For me, this term is preferable in some ways since you have to dig into it to figure out what it means. This helps in avoiding a surface-level misunderstanding of what it's all about. A Level 5 leader is one who values people over programs and has the ‘paradoxical personal humility with professional will’. These are leaders who push hard to create their organization, but often reduce their own role in it. Simply put, they are building something bigger than themselves that will survive without them.

I think a combination of these terms can be embodied in a term called Empowering Leadership, an idea whereby leaders understand their followers and help them to build the tools and skills they need to be more capable and competent in their roles. For school leaders, this is more apt since educators work in what is perhaps the most ‘people’ business there is. As such, we need to constantly be adapting and skilling ourselves and our teaching staff up to meet the needs of the modern learner. 

The ideal school leader needs to work towards building a system that will survive their absence. One mistake that many leaders make is tying the running of a building to themselves personally. In this model, no one can make a move without first going through the administrator and when they aren’t there then things tend to stagnate or fall apart. A mentor of mine used to call it having a bus plan, where if you got hit by a bus tomorrow what things are in place to ensure the building keeps going (being an optimist, I prefer to call it the Lottery plan where if you won 40 million dollars tomorrow and took an early retirement, how easily can someone take over the work).

It can be tempting to want others to recognize what you have built and your accomplishments, but remember that leadership isn’t about you, it’s about those you lead. When you focus on building the organization instead of yourself you can exponentially grow your school since good leaders create more leaders. In doing so, you do not create a zero-sum game where you are in competition with one another, but instead create a situation where a rising tide raises all ships. When you have a team that can push each other to be even better than they were before, there is no stopping what you can accomplish together. 

Empowering Leaders do this well, in that they give the tools and the opportunity for everyone to be their best. As such, you may find yourself with an embarrassment of riches in that you have strong leaders on staff who carve out a piece of the community for themselves to lead, which ultimately goes back into growing the school community as a whole and making it stronger. This of course makes for a much better experience for the students who are of course the reason educators have the roles they have.