COMPETENCIES

Becoming a Strategic Leader (Hughes, Beatty, & Dinwoodie, 2014, p. 268-269) identifies 11 competencies necessary for strategic leader development.  While I am not currently in a position of formal leadership, I have worked for numerous leaders with varying styles who always influence their employees.  Both effective and ineffective leadership examples have influenced my own career decisions so awareness of the powerful effect of strategic leadership infiltrates my workplace decisions. The three most immediate competencies required in my career include strategic planning, acting systemically, and building collaborative relationships.

Building Collaborative Relationships

Education is a career about people.  Investing in the strong teaching ability of my colleagues has no down side. Supporting, encouraging, assisting them in developing better practices in their own classroom and in broader school involvement reaps great reward for their students, the parent community, and our school’s peaceful functioning.  A positive work environment benefits everyone.

Having a strategic premise in thinking, acting, and influencing my work environment involves my relationship with my administrator.  Strengthening collaborative relationship also strengthens our administrator’s ability to fulfill their diverse leadership responsibilities; our school of 300 students has one 80% administrator and no vice principal with whom to share the leadership responsibilities. My colleagues and I need to develop a cohesive unit to best enable short-term leadership decisions which foster our long term MVV mandate and goals (Hughes et al., 2014, p. 249).  It is easy to criticize decisions without full knowledge of the factors involved and many staff members do this from the comfortable position of knowing they have no accountability.

Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning is necessary on both a personal level as well as a professional level.

Personally – “Behaviour change can be tough” according to Hughes et al. (2014, p. 269) which includes monitoring our own behavioural tendencies and not just our employees’ behaviours.  Wong (2018, para. 3), in his response to Kunal’s post, reflected on the need for self-management and self-regulation when developing any strategic leadership competencies.  Kunal was not as optimistic about the benefits of self-management in his organization (Kunal, 2018, para. 4).  The starting point for change is with me; I must model the changes and behaviours I hope to develop in others.

Professionally – The beginning of influencing others is consistency with positive results.  Most people want to fell valued (Lepsinger, 2010, p. 57), effective, and included in decision-making at work (Zhang, 2018, para. 11).  “Supporting individuals in changing the behaviours that will strengthen their leadership effectiveness is establishing an active learning and developmental support network” (Hughes et al., 2014, p. 269).

Acting Systemically

Since our new curriculum shift mandated by the BC Ministry of Education, I have witnessed an intense increase of complexities in decision-making at the school level.  Continual downloading of responsibility from the ministry to districts to schools demands strategic thinking for both short-term and long-term efficiency.  Decisions are interconnected which creates large impacts for even seemingly small changes in directions (Atha, 2018, para. 11).  A domino effect can easily occur if adherence to the MVV is disregarded; recovery is often slow as well as costly.  ‘Act in haste, repent at leisure’.  A vision for systemic growth or enhancement is connected to a broader understanding than the myopic view we often have of remedying our immediate discomfort.

Less Relevant Right Now

I agree with my course colleagues that a business perspective is not a particularly relevant competency in an educational setting (Seabreeze, 2018, para 12; Warkentin, 2018, para. 12).  The public schools have individual personas, but there is no real brand to promote, profits to consider, or market profitability to consider.  Independent institutions may need to consider the business perspective more closely due to the tuition and donation responsibilities which is a situation not in my immediate requirement.

Organizational decision-making is not even possible in my employee position right now, so this competency does not merit any immediate consideration. More information would be needed if I were to attempt real organizational involvement.  I intend to be more strategic in the decisions I do make to better prepare for the possibility of influencing organizational change.

3 IMPORTANT PRINCIPLES

Building up others.  Our greatest resource in schools are the people.  Teachers, educational assistants, administrators, parents, and students rely on us to rise above our self-serving tendencies to go beyond for their success.  Empowering others is essential for life-long learning, strong decision-making, and truly impacting the world beyond our school walls (Lepsinger, 2010, p. 102).

Personal management. Expecting top performance from others means it must be evident in my own life first; why would anyone want to take my lead if I don’t hold my self accountable?  “It means quite simple, that expectations matter” (Lepsinger, 2010, p. 55).  Five of my grandchildren were staying at our house this past summer when I was taking LDRS 503.  My oldest grandson asked me, “Does everyone have to study and work this hard when you grow up?”  I told him everyone has to work but not everyone has to do as much work as I have been doing.  I explained to him that this was the only way to achieve some of my goals and I have high expectations for my learning; he thought taking more school when you didn’t have to was crazy. He is 10. Managing self is a full-time job and is important for both leaders and employees (Ungerer et al., 2017, p. 366).

Balancing cooperation and competition (Lepsinger, 2010, p. 176). When everyone is not fighting to survive or trying to be heard (Zhang, 2018, para.11), there is more cooperation to work toward commonly held goals and expectations.  The human struggle for dominance can be disguised in many ways in the workplace and seems to come out when stress increases.  Interdependence (Galbraith, 2014, p. 9) seems obvious in any organization; success is more likely when synergy is created through common visions (Galbraith, 2014, p. 255).  Competition is healthy when it spurs me on to improve my own game; the same competitive spirit is detrimental when it causes employees to malign colleagues and usurp opportunities simply for personal gain.  Recognizing better strategic thinking and planning happens when I remove myself from possible competitive situations and support the success of others (Lepsinger, 2010, p. 59).

3 LEAST IMPORTANT PRINCIPLES

Strategic leadership is a series of skills which need to work in unison to varying degrees. It is not wise to lay aside any of the principles since I have learned to expect the unexpected: what you think is least likely to happen will most likely happen when you least expect it or are least prepared to deal with it.  While I understand the interconnectedness of strategic consciousness (thinking, planning, acting, influencing) and the danger of disregarding some principles, the following three principles are less applicable to my current organizational situation.

Involving the right people for the right decision. I have no control over choosing people nor am I in a position to allocate responsibilities or opportunities for my colleagues. People often have latent skills or talents which are not readily evident in the day-to-day functions of work, so it is important to keep an open mind about who may be the right person in any work situations.  Maintain a positive perspective about the possible contributions of others (Lepsinger, 2010, p. 111).

Establishing a reward system.  There are very few rewards in education beyond a compliment or card.  The idea of financial bonuses or job promotions as rewards for a job well done (Galbraith, 2014, p. 45) is foreign to education.  Paying for and completing course work may bring a kind of reward but it is self-acknowledged reward.

Staff rotations. Moving staff among the various grade levels or staff positions (Galbraith, 2018, p. 145) is not easily done or allowed in education.  While it may increase our understanding of the continuum of learning and child development, being adept at one or two grade levels or subject specialities is important for the strength of a program.  This principle is not as necessary as it might be in a business environment.

TEXTBOOK CONTEXT  

The more business-oriented texts of Galbraith and Ungerer, Ungerer, & Herholdt were challenging to decipher, embrace, and apply.  Galbraith was the most difficult to adapt to education.  Reading all the business examples did not translate well into the educational setting since we have much different data to consider for documenting our growth and success.

Ungerer et al. was challenging due to the online version being the only accessible text.  The search features of online texts, highlighting, and bookmarking are great tools to use.  When referring to text pages our team had to be clear about the content of the pages between online texts and hardcopies.  At least with Strategic Possibilities we were literally all on the same page.  Although uncomfortable, using the one digital textbook expanded my skills and made me aware of the work of learning many people encounter in new environments.  Empathy acquired.  I also became more familiar with WhatsApp, Zoom, and blogging as we used these communication tools to develop teamwork and synergistic focus.

References

Atha, D. (2018). Systems thinking: A systems thinking primer: Seeing organizations in action. [Course notes]. Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/ldrs501/unit-3-learning-activities/

Galbraith, J. R. (2014). Designing organizations: Strategy, structure, and process at the business unit and enterprise levels. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Hughes, R., Beatty, K. & Dinwoodie, D. (2014). Becoming a strategic leader: Your role in your organization’s enduring success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Lepsinger, R. (2010). Closing the execution gap: How great leaders and their companies get results. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons

Singla, K. (2018). Strategic leadership competencies. [Blog post] Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/ldrs501/2018/11/20/strategic-leadership-compoetencies/

Seabreeze. (2018). Blog 8.1 strategic competencies at work. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/seabreeze/2018/11/21/blog-8-1-strategic-competencies-at-work/

Warkentin, M. (2018). Contextualizing. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/ldrs501/2018/11/22/contextualizing/

Wong, S. (2018). The importance of building personal competency for success. [Blog post] Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/chiefanalyerofthings/2018/11/22/the-importance-of-building-personal-competency-for-success/

Zhang, L. (2018). Cooperation in a national company of China: Seems effective, yet conflicts lie underneath. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/ldrs501/2018/11/12/cooperation-in-a-national-company-of-china-seems-effective-yet-conflicts-lie-underneath/