Uplifting  Leadership  Beyond  Expectations:

Andy  Hargreaves  Boston  College  

Research Staff Co-directors:

�  Andy Hargreaves, Boston College

�  Alma Harris, University of Malaya

Alan Boyle; Michelle Reich; Corrie Stone-Johnson; Kathryn Ghent Janet Goodall; Alex Gurn Lori McEwen

Research Questions �  What characteristics make organizations of different

types successful and sustainable, far beyond expectations?

�  How does sustainability in leadership and change manifest itself in education, compared to other professional sectors?

�  What are the implications for schools and school leaders?

PBE Criteria

�  Consecutive – Relation to past performance

�  Contextual – Relation to available resources

�  Comparative – Relation to peers

�  Ethical

Four Downers

1.  Aim to be top or best in class

2.  Copy how other people reached the top before you

3.  Set targets & define KPIs to push people to the top

4.  Race to the top as fast as you can

Six Uplifting Forces

1.  Dreaming with Determination

2.  Creativity and Counterflow

3.  Collaborating and competing

4.  Pushing and pulling

5.  Measuring with meaning

6.  Sustainable growth

1: Dreaming with Determination

The Dream  

Organizations that perform beyond expectations aspire to and articulate an improbable, collectively held fantasy or dream that is bolder and more challenging than a plan or even a vision. Martin Luther King had a dream, not a strategic plan - still less a set of key performance indicators.

The Fear  

The experience of success is often heightened by the emotional memory of a previous failure, or the fear of one that lays in wait. Organizations that perform above expectations often confront failure, humiliation, ridicule and even extinction in a way that galvanizes their commitment to change. An improbable dream begets an apparently impossible challenge.

The Fight  

The impossible dream and improbable challenge of surmounting failure or avoiding extinction produce a response of fight to overcome or avoid obstacles, instead of flight to avoid them.

Fundamental Futures

Long-standing organizations that exceed expectations (compared to new organizations like Internet firms) create an inspiring future by connecting cutting edge futures to a classic and honorable past. They bond change and tradition; they connect the destination to the origin.

2: Creativity and Counterflow

CounterFlow

PBE leaders of organizations that perform expectations are prepared to run against the mainstream, and to move ahead not by going with the flow but against or around it. These leaders are courageous, creative and counterintuitive.

3. Collaborating & Competing

Friendly rivalry

Collaboration and competition are often seen as opposites. The gene is either selfish or cooperative. Competition makes us succeed to survive or be superior while cooperation harnesses our capacities to succeed together. Leaders that perform beyond expectations go beyond these ideological oppositions and creatively combine collaboration with competition.

4. Pushing & Pulling

Fidelity

Leaders who perform beyond expectations keep people with them. Many of our organizations excelled and even turned themselves around, with long-standing staff members who had worked there for decades.

Fraternity

Organizations that PBE engage with and support communities that have importance for them: the communities of origin from which they recruit their talent, the communities of practice of those who work for them, and the communities of support, of customers, clients or fans, where they are often physically located.

Flair, Flow & Flexibility

It is not just teams and teamwork that keep these organizations aloft; it is the vibrant nature of the teamwork itself. Organizations that perform beyond expectations have cultures of creativity and risk-taking. They allow and encourage workers to have freedom and flexibility to innovate and play.

Pushing

In that teacher’s first week in the new school, two of his colleagues visited him and suggested that he should use word walls because they had both found them to be effective. When, two weeks later, he had not yet put up the word walls, his colleagues visited him again, this time urging him more strongly to put up the word walls, sitting him down to share why this was the practice in their school and the difference it had made for students. A few weeks later, by then well into the school term, he had still not put up the word walls. His colleagues stopped by again after school, this time simply saying: “we are here to put up your word walls and we can help you to plan how to use them”.

Pulling

Instead of adopting conventional push strategies of marketing, which advertise the product far and wide, Dogfish Head uses pull-marketing at craft beer events and the like that devote time face to face with people and that develop a cult following. “From the outset, it’s still this fun, funky thing that people just gravitate to”, they say.

Pulling

Limeside teachers were pulled as much as pushed forward by energizing innovations that yielded increased engagement as well as achievement.

* Philosophy sessions

* Meditation

* Key thinking skills

* Wizard learners

Pulling

“ The wizard learner is a real event and this wizard is able to ask questions. He's able to work with somebody else. He's able to do lots of home learning. He's able to know what to do when you don't know what to do.”. “It's a major high when you see a child that has struggled and struggled but persevered and has shown that ‘I am going to do this’ and they walk up on that stage at the end of so many weeks and they get there and what they say is, ‘I've turned a corner, I can do it and not only can I do it but I can show somebody else how to do it.’ That's a real high when you see that”.

 

Pushing……….

Pushing people outside of their comfort zone, as difficult as it is, it truly is successful because in time we were able to see changes in the content of discussion and the quality of the discussions that were happening around the table, but it took a lot of time.

Pushing Back……….

“I thought I was having challenging conversations with my staff”, to open up practice and raise expectations. “But since I read this report, I realize that what I intended to be challenging conversations have sometimes been experienced as oppressive conversations. That is just the perception of some of my staff but perception is reality and I have to learn from this and take it very seriously”.

5: Measuring with Meaning

Fast and fair tracking

Organizations that perform above expectations mark, monitor and manage their progress towards success. They use indicators and targets of progress and performance that are personally meaningful, publicly shared and demonstrably fair measures of what leaders and followers are trying to achieve.

Campbell’s Law:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

 

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DDIA: §  Measure what is valued; don’t value only what

is easily measured .

§  Create a balanced scorecard .

§  Insist on high quality data .

§  Test prudently, not profligately .

§  Move from thresholds to growth.

§  Narrow the gap to raise the bar.

§  Be the drivers, not the driven.

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Feasible growth

Beyond the swift actions necessary to counter any initial crisis, organizations that perform beyond expectations do not try to expand as quickly as possible and take off too fast. They are built on sustainable growth.

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Endurance

�  It is a common defect in men not to consider in good weather the possibility of a tempest

Machiavelli, 1532

�  All leaders, no matter how charismatic or visionary, eventually die

Collins & Porras, 1994

�  Few things succeed less than leadership succession

Hargreaves & Fink, 2006

2. Endurance

Six Uplifting Forces

1.  Dreaming with Determination

2.  Creativity and Counterflow

3.  Collaborating and competing

4.  Pushing and pulling

5.  Measuring with meaning

6.  Sustainable growth

@HargreavesBC  

andyhargreaves.com @hargreavesBC