The foundational school leader: using this new model of dynamic leadership, administrators can build strong foundations for schools that thrive by engaging the entire school community.

The economy is changing at a dizzying pace and school leaders the world over are finding it hard to keep up. On a large scale, recent federal and state budgets have compelled school leaders to take on drastic restructuring measures, such as cutting programs and significantly reducing staffing at all levels. These far-reaching cutbacks, coupled with the accountability measures outlined in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, bring about an era that necessitates much more than our traditional, autocratic school leader.

It's a revolution that calls for a type of leadership whose goal should be not only to grow resilient schools, but to make them thrive in the face of distinctly new challenges. This puts tremendous stress on schools, but it also opens up untold opportunities to develop a new model of dynamic leadership, which I identify as the "Foundational School Leader."

Leaders are in the unique position to work out the solid "foundations" they need to create or maintain thriving schools. By definition, Foundational School Leaders go about building strong foundations above all by tapping into the collective intelligence of the entire school community.

Finding a sound foundation

A foundation is "the basis on which a thing stands, is founded, or is supported" (Dictionary.com, 2009). For the purposes of this article, the "thing" referred to here is any kind of process initiated by a human agency--planting a tree, constructing a house, building a resilient school. With respect to any of these "things," the failure to find a sound foundation may lead to different results from those anticipated.

This is not to say that a given foundation, however sound, offers an absolutely certainty of outcome. Rather, taking the time to build a foundation improves the chance of achieving the goal as humanly possible. There are no guarantees in life, after all, a piece of wisdom every school leader should keep in mind in unstable, turbulent times.

Consider an everyday example like planting a tree, which requires proper preparation of the soil (regular watering, mulching and fertilizing). Poor soil, no less than inclement weather, is likely to keep the seed from developing of the seedling from growing into a blossoming plant. When the soil is healthy, on the other hand, the roots will grow strong enough to buckle sidewalks and the seedling should withstand natural adversity.

Here's another example. In order to lay the groundwork for a house, one has to pour a cement slab, grade the lot, assemble the pipes, configure the electrical wiring, etc. Done improperly, none of this work is likely to do much good. If the foundation is meager, then the house will be vulnerable to the elements.

Schools aren't much different in any of these respects. They need a proper foundation that enables them to prevail over present or future difficulties. I have chosen to write about the Foundational School Leader because I firmly believe that this is precisely the type of leader who can provide schools with the chance not merely to survive in unpredictable times, but also to thrive.

The four foundations

This article centers on the four foundations needed to overcome hard times in our schools:

* Foundation No. 1: Listening to the organization

* Foundation No. 2: Building agreements

* Foundation No. 3: Co-creating purpose

* Foundation No. 4: Fostering teamness

All four are essential to school effectiveness. Together, they determine if a school has the capacity to reach new heights of achievement. More specifically, they allow the Foundational School Leader to build an organizational, not just individual, capacity for change. Although these foundations--discussed separately below--are interconnected, they are also hierarchically structured.

Foundation No. 1: Listening to the organization

I consider listening as the bedrock foundation. In its absence no school can hope either to survive or to develop, and none of the other three foundations can be built. By listening, the Foundational School Leader is open to information from every quarter and people of every station. An effective listener can also communicate his readiness to hear both the employees and the environment within which they work. Short of this communicative skill, any attempt to move the other foundations into place would amount to little more than spinning the wheels.

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For the Foundational School Leader, there are two types of information-gathering. The first one has to do with the information that comes out of large- or small-group processes where staff members routinely disclose to each other. This leader knows that carrying out change requires participation by everyone--not just a select few. People who have the opportunity to offer their input and lend a hand are more likely to support change. They are also more likely to be satisfied with any decisions affecting their environment and more committed to the overall goals of their respective group.

The second type has to do with information pertaining to what the Foundational School Leader learns while taking time out to view activities "from the balcony," so to speak (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002). The leader scans the environment carefully in order to sharpen the intuitive sense he needs to build each of the four foundations, while watching for both obvious and hidden clues.

In the listening foundation, there is a caveat worth keeping in mind: Hearing too much of one thing can lead to misinterpretation and blurred judgment in problem solving and decision making. Such distortion is bound to create hurdles as the leader moves to deal with the four foundations.

Listening to the members, while paying attention to the environment from "the balcony," allows this new leader to maintain a sense of balance between two pulls. Not only that, but this aerial-view perspective itself has to be weighed against the input of the school members. Both aspects are critical and must be given due consideration.

Foundation No. 2: Building agreements

The second foundation, building agreements, occurs on a large scale and involves the collective development of productive norms, or ground rules. It offers members a high-leverage approach to developing and conforming to those norms. Unconstructive communication produces needless tension in schools that may lead to ineffective processes and poor work relationships.

Without a deliberate effort to develop shared ideals and principles, schools will only see their capacity to overcome conflict plummet. Left unattended, dysfunction in schools--no matter how limited--has the potential to spread. Every action, inaction and interaction shapes the school; their cumulative effect can have dramatic results.

Given its unavoidability, employees have to take control by creating an environment where productive group norms clearly point to "how we do things around here." The context of our schools is not automatically given. How school employees elect to act may well create a hospitable, sustaining context, or it may create one that is hostile and adversarial. A positive context is hardly possible without the vehicle of the school that engenders it.

School leaders often expect every member to be familiar with expected behaviors and norms well before productive group norms are explicitly established. They figure common sense should do the trick. Too bad human behavior doesn't always work out this way. Diversity of opinion or background in the workplace, for example, can make for some pretty harmful tension.

Rather, the Foundational School Leader tackles the development of productive group norms with the mind-set that "not everyone knows how to behave in a group." And a one-shot meeting to this end will not cut it. Expected behaviors have to become common currency in the school, reinforced with a daily dose of dialogue that advances productive norms.

Foundation No. 3: Co-creating purpose

Under traditional school leadership, small groups become notoriously inept at developing their own goals, mission, or visions. Co-creating purpose is about combining a clear, compelling school vision with values rooted in personal ideals and aspirations. It's about purpose strategically formed through sustained dialogue among the school community and the development of shared goals.

On the one hand, there's the traditional leader who is content to assign the task of developing a mission and vision statement to a small group of people who work separately from the rest of the school. On the other hand is the Foundational School Leader, who seeks to create a coherent narrative from a host of individual experiences, world views and perceptions by bringing as many school members together as possible.

Within this narrative, the values and goals of all the players unite into a single set of themes and meanings. The project of co-creating purpose must take place in an open exchange of ideas; in other words, the dialogue has to be authentic.

Collective purpose cannot be created overnight. As we saw, building agreements, the second foundation, is a precursor to an open, honest climate where employees begin to explore individual and organizational values, beliefs and goals. However, purpose requires strategic initiatives that can take the dialogue on the individual and joint goals of stakeholders to a higher plane, rather than cause the school to shelve its output in the hope of revisiting it sometime later.

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Lickona and Davidson (2005) argued, "Struggling schools feel fractured; there is a sense that people work in the same school but not toward the same goals." The Foundational School Leader understands this and becomes the vehicle that brings others together to re-invent the school's overarching values, beliefs and goals.

Foundation No. 4: Fostering "teamness"

This last foundation is about creating a culture of collaboration through teamwork. The Foundational School Leader exemplifies teamwork because no one person can master all the sources of information to make good decisions (Ulrich, 1996). Schools that aim to forma collaborative culture routinely focus on teamwork and encourage their employees to discuss and share their particular learnings, and they privilege the application of this knowledge (Hord, 1997).

Leaving teams in their dysfunctional state will not only uproot collaboration, but eventually also wreak havoc in the school. On their own, teachers are not likely to be skilled enough in the art of building or entrusted with sufficient authority to build effective teams. The theory and practice of teambuilding presupposes a continuous process of fostering teamness.

Fostering teamness has to do with nurturing effective teams throughout the school. One major problem with many schools is the speed with which leaders assemble teachers into teams, allocate timelines, and then sit back expecting high performance and big results. That just won't cut it.

During my doctoral research, I examined how teams contribute to the institutionalization of collaborative cultures in learning communities. Prior to this, I reviewed the literature on the role of teambuilding in the development of learning communities where collaboration was the norm.

Although many published works then argued that team effectiveness was critical, they offered no empirical data to support this view. So, I thought to myself: What if practitioners striving for learning communities were paying no more than lip service to the concept of the effective team?

I decided to gather data from the principals of 51 schools and a total of 1,467 teachers from those respective schools. Not surprisingly, the evidence clearly showed that those schools that exhibited the attributes of learning organizations had better functioning teams than their counterparts.

This implied that if a school leader desired collaboration as a norm, then dysfunctional teams could not be tolerated. It sounded like plain common sense, but the point needed emphasis.

Another piece of information that emerged from my research was that most team members within schools were not schooled in teambuilding techniques. To remedy this, I concluded, school leaders had to allocate time for training both themselves and their staff members (especially the team leaders) in the rudiments of team synergy.

Interconnections between the foundations

It is important to note that each of the foundations is significant alone, as well as strongly interrelated with one another. Purposefully, the initial foundation, listening to the organization, is a precursor to all the other building blocks because it is so critical for leaders to challenge the conventional command-and-control leadership style and begin facilitating large- and small-group processes that tap into the collective wisdom of the school.

Next, using inclusive-oriented processes, the Foundational School Leader generates productive norms by building agreements. Once these commitments are jointly developed and agreed upon, then there will be an open, safe climate that will allow individuals to share their personal values, beliefs, and goals--without repercussions from their supervisors or their peers. These individual principles are then merged together through dialogue and an assortment of activities to strategically co-create purpose.

Lastly, the Foundational School Leader fosters teamness by guiding teams to work effectively and interdependently toward the newly established shared vision and values.

Building the foundation for success

Schools evolve continuously. With each passing day, some get stronger, while others spiral downward toward certain demise. Economic conditions and accountability can be merciless. The single most important lesson to be learned is that those schools that meet with success happen also to be the ones that take the time to lay the four foundations. Their success is built on the engagement of the whole school community. These are all the elements of a successful school that is able to overcome adversity.

The time to change is always now. The true Foundational School Leader has to cut the Gordian Knot to free the school of its dysfunctional past. In this task, there is always a beginning and an end to every cycle, but the secret is in keeping the process of renewal going for as long as the school exists.

Foundational School Leaders create schools that are almost like self-cleaning ovens. Their people have the capacity to respond effectively to messes, because they have created a culture that wants to sparkle in the midst of chaos. Their focus is on the four foundations, without which the future would not look promising.

In trying times, schools are flipped upside-down, bent out of shape and stretched to the limit. They take a real beating. But it's never too late for the Foundational School Leader to take the helm.

References

Heifetz, R., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the line: Staying alive through the dangers of leading. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Hord, S.M. (1997). Professional learning communities: Communities of continuous inquiry and improvement. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

Lickona, T. & Davidson, M. (2005) Smart and good high schools: Integrating excellence and ethics for success in school, work, and beyond. Cortland, NY: Center for the 4th and 5th R's (Respect and Responsibility), and Washington, D.C.: Character Education Partnership.

Ulrich, D. (1996). "Credibility X capability." In F. Hesselbein, M. Goldsmith, & R. Beckhard (Eds.), The leader of the future. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Perry Wiseman is a principal in the San Bernardino City Unified School District, where he recently had an opportunity to use the four foundations as the core for opening a new school. To read more about the four foundations look for his forthcoming book, "Strong Schools, Strong Leaders: Creating a Culture for Success," available in December.