Importance
Overview
In their book School Leadership that Works, Marzano, Waters and McNulty define “flexibility” as the extent to which leaders adapt their leadership behavior to the needs of the current situation and are comfortable with dissent (p. 49). Specific leadership behaviors associated with this responsibility are:
- Adapting leadership style to the needs of specific situations
- Being directive or nondirective as the situation warrants
- Encouraging people to express diverse and contrary opinions
- Being comfortable with making major changes in how things are done.
Inherent within this leadership responsibility is the ability of a building leader and/or the leadership team to effectively exercise “loose” and “tight” leadership. Loose leadership refers to decisions teachers and teacher collaborative teams are allowed to make on their own. Tight leadership involves making specific decisions that must be followed for the good of the organization. An example of loose leadership is allowing collaborative teams to decide upon the specific teaching strategies they will use within their subject/grade level, the types of formative assessments they might use to assess student understanding of specific standards, and maybe how teachers intervene when students are having difficulty learning. Tight decisions of a leadership team might include the expectation that all teams meet on a set schedule, follow specific meeting protocols, or the specific systemic approach to interventions that all teachers will use to help children. Sometimes, building leaders and/or leadership teams must make the conscious decisions as to when to directly intervene when a decision is being made by a grade level or departmental team which may have a negative consequence for other collaborative teams.
Unpacking
This video has some good content, but is REALLY old looking.
In Action
It is also healthy for a leadership team to model and support cognitive conflict. During any change process, there will generally be differing viewpoints as to how to achieve the ultimate goal. Exercising flexibility in managing differing viewpoints and opinions not only provides teachers to think outside the box, it capitalizes upon the synergy created when multiple people are working in the same direction, but may come up with creative solutions as to how to get there.
Activity: Using your handout, continue the discussion of 2nd order leadership responsibilities by putting the “flexibility” responsibility in your own words, and identifying at least one practice you and your team can commit to in supporting this responsibility.
In Practice
I liked this video because it gave more than just one example of where they used tight vs loose leadership, but it’s a pretty boring video.
