Distributed Leadership: Developing Leaders for Tomorrow

Citation

Timperley, H. (2009), "Distributed Leadership: Developing Leaders for Tomorrow", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 47 No. 4, pp. 521-523. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230910967482

Distributed Leadership: Developing Leaders for Tomorrow is more than a book on leadership. It is a bold statement about how educational organizational structures and cultures, along with their leadership practices, must change to meet the demands of a twenty‐first century educational system. Alma Harris situates the need for different forms of leadership in a mix of global forces. On the one hand are issues of entrenched poverty that form both a moral and educational challenge to any form of leadership if our education system is not to continue to expand the numbers of students belonging to the permanently poor. On the other hand, changes in technology are creating a global communication revolution with the potential for schools as we know them to become irrelevant to the students of the 24/7/52 generation who spend more time on social web sites than in school.

These challenges as Harris identifies them, however, do not remain in abstract global spheres. The more mundane issue is that in many educational systems there is a critical shortage of those wanting to take up formal leadership positions in schools. Harris provides statistics for the UK, but those of us from other countries know that this problem is more widespread. Leading schools as a principal or head teacher is becoming increasingly unattractive, rendering our present system unsustainable. Alternative approaches to leading schools are needed.

The book is organized into ten chapters. The first two identify the imperative for developing alternative forms of leadership. The next three chapters provide the theoretical basis underpinning the key concepts of distributed leadership identified in the book and the supporting evidence. Notions of distributed leadership explicitly reject portrayals of the (Camburn et al., 2003, p. 348), “… heroic leader sitting atop a hierarchy bending the school community to his or her purposes”. Rather they focus on the practice of leadership and how those practices create collaborative learning networks across organisational and inter‐organisational boundaries. In a networked society, leadership that promotes the collective capability to co‐construct knowledge for the purpose of achieving important outcomes is more relevant than hierarchical leadership where standardization and conformity are the organizing principles. Importantly, Harris defines what distributed leadership is not because there is the ever‐present danger of interpreting new concepts in established conceptual frames. It is not a flattening of the hierarchy or delegation of tasks within an established hierarchical system. It is not the bossless team or leadership substitute approach. Rather it is a more fluid concept in which leadership is a web of activities and interactions stretched across people and situations (Spillane et al., 2004). Its effectiveness depends on the utilization of expertise focused on the co‐construction of knowledge.

It is possible to romanticize such leadership as the way of the future and ignore the fishhooks. Harris, however, spends some time explaining that it is not the distribution of leadership per se than determines effectiveness, but rather how it is distributed. She outlines the knowledge and capability‐building needed, together with the organisational accountabilities. Knowledge creation and organizational growth do not just happen if patterns of leadership are changed. Indeed, one of the greatest barriers to developing distributed leadership that she identifies is the entrenched assumptions and capabilities within the present system.

Chapter six examines the need for distributed leadership to go beyond individual schools if its knowledge and capability building potential is to be realized. Each part of the education system is embedded within a larger system with leadership needing to be distributed both within and across networks of systems. The case studies in chapters seven and eight illustrate how such an approach can work effectively in practice. The first of these chapters focuses on within school leadership, and the second within networks of schools. These chapters are important because distributed leadership can be a nebulous concept with fluidity as a central idea. The book concludes with two chapters drawing together the lessons from the cases and the earlier theoretical work into new directions for leadership.

While Harris is articulate about the vision, and grounded in its realization, my main hesitation is the limited empirical base to support it. This problem is more a comment on the state of the research than on the book itself. Spillane et al. (2007) describe the research as “pre‐adolescent”. I believe a more accurate description would be “in infancy”. Although many of the underpinning ideas have been in circulation for some time (e.g. Etzioni, 1965) and Spillane's work in particular (Spillane et al., 2004; Spillane et al., 2007) has provided us with powerful analytical tools to examine a distributed perspective on leadership, the empirical base on its effectiveness is weak. Proponents of distributed leadership have taken the stance that a central leadership responsibility is to impact positively on student outcomes. Case studies showing this impact abound but more systematic testing remains limited partly because of the difficulty involved in testing the complex relationships between distributed leadership and student outcomes. Many of the case studies, including those described in this book, show that greater distribution of leadership practices have brought leadership closer to core work of teaching and learning. The question remains, “Is this sufficient to improve valued outcomes?” Distributed leadership undoubtedly has promise but Robinson (2008) argues that to achieve this promise more focus is needed on the educational content of the leadership influence process. My own work has shown that distributing leadership is a risky business and has the potential to result in the greater distribution of incompetence (Timperley, 2005). It is not the distribution of leadership per se, as Harris so often reminds us, but how it is distributed.

Distributed leadership is undoubtedly an idea whose time as come. The idea of distributing leadership has gained rapid acceptance among the research and professional practitioner communities. This book makes a valuable contribution to understanding both its potential and its practice. The failure of its heroic forebears to deliver either the quality or numbers of leaders required for our schools has led many to search for alternatives. Leadership tasks are becoming more complex in schools, knowledge economies require knowledge workers rather than compliant employees, global communication systems render many of our ways of learning and teaching obsolete. The fluidity of a distributed perspective on leadership resonates closely with these societal shifts and certainly has the potential to make a difference to our entrenched educational problems that run the danger of becoming more entrenched if we continue to organize and lead our schools in traditional ways. Harris helps us to understand how we can better distribute leadership to realise the vision of leading schools that belong to this century rather than to those of the past.