COMPARING AND CONTRASTING TWO LEADERSHIP PRACTICES

Comparing And Contrasting Two Leadership Practices

Comparing And Contrasting Two Leadership Practices

Kouzes and Posner discussed in detail, their Five Practices of Exemplary leadership. This practice will be applied and compared with the practices that are portrayed within the leadership style of principals of famous managers from 2005 onwards.

We will begin with the first practice of exemplary leadership Model the Way. This is best explained by Kouzes and Posner as simply leading from what you believe. A passionate principal's belief and direction have demonstrated crucial to the lasting success of school change. The principal must "up-end the pyramid," some say, supporting the school organization from below, not leading it from above. The principal serves as the "pivot of the change process," keeping a refined balance between the often conflicting demands coming from professionals, community, district, state. The principal introduces a "blueprint for change," then modifies it persistently in response to individuals who will have to live with it (Kouzes, 2006).

Commendable leadership requires that educational leaders have a comprehensible vision of the form of school they want to have and operate again and again according to values and beliefs tied to that vision. These leaders rarely claim to have invented the vision or the essential values and beliefs; instead, they recognize themselves to be "keepers of the dream." They embrace it whole-heartedly and make sure that everyone else does too. The principal models the type of vision that are wanted within the school and continue to visualize that others will recognize this effort and struggle to model the vision as well (Kouzes, 2006).

This brings out Kouzes and Posner's next practice which is "Inspired a Shared Vision." In this regard, an effective principal must be much more than "keeper of the vision": she must foster a faculty capable of marshaling itself to keep the vision and to go forward as a governance system (Kouzes, 2006). As the school's intellectual conscience, as its resource for time and opportunities, as manager not of its product but its process, the principal carries the metaphor of "professional as coach" to the administrative level--provoking, modeling, and nurturing the thoughtful growth everyone in a good school should experience. In the literature concerning leadership, vision has a variety of definitions, all of which include a mental image or picture, a future orientation, and aspects of direction or goal. Vision provides guidance to an organization by articulating what it wishes to attain. Vision is a picture of the future for which people are willing to work (Molander, 2007).

During the 1980s, more than a few significant leadership events occurred such as the decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of glasnost in its post-bureaucratic successors, and the rejection of Thatcherism in the United kingdom and Republicanism in the United States. It became harder than ever for leaders to lead. Leaders have enjoyed the augmented exposure to, and attention of, the mass media. And traditional deference and goodwill towards leaders has quite rapidly ...