News & Views
Leaders and managers
By Terry Freedman
Tue, 20 Dec 2005, 07:46

Back in May 2005 at the latest I had a rant (online) about leadership and management. Unfortunately, I can't find it now: I think that when I uninstalled the blog I forgot to take a backup of the posts and comments, which is pretty infuriating. Still.

I wanted to find the entry because I wanted to quote it in an article I'm about to write (nothing like being self-referential is there?)

So before I can quote from it, I have to reproduce it, as far as I can, which is quite interesting in itself if you think about it. Anyway, here were the points I made back then, and which are still true now. In fact, even more so under the new inspection framework in the UK.

"Management" is old, unsexy and unwanted. The key thing is leadership.

Presumably that is because "management" implies rolling up your sleeves and actually doing something, whereas "leadership" sounds much more visionary. After all, most people would, I am sure, prefer their epitaph to read "... was a great leader" than "... was a great manager". Management sounds so blue collar.

This preference for leadership over management can be seen in school organisation charts, at least in the UK. Whereas once at the top of the tree there was the headteacher and the senior management team, there is now the headteacher and the senior leadership team in many cases. You can always tell the really dreadful schools: they're the ones where the senior leadership team get annoyed if you refer to them as the senior management team.

Middle managers are now middle leaders. I know this, because they are encouraged to go on a course called Leading from the Middle. As far as I know, there is no course called Managing from the Middle.

Headteachers are encouraged to go on a course called Strategic Leadership in ICT. As far as I know, there is no course called Strategic Management of ICT.

Until recently, the inspection framework in England drew a distinction between leadership and management, but in the new framework they are both lumped together. That is a great pity. They are not the same, and they should be assessed separately.

In my experience, many people who think of themselves as great leaders may be charismatic, and know how to appear decisive, but do not do the boring business of following through. It's almost as if they believe that by saying "X must be done" or "X will be done" or "Let there be X", their job is now finished and they can move on to the next issue that requires their incisive insight.

In the meantime, a lot of the time when you say to teachers "is X happening in your school?" you get the response: "Well, we had a training day on it, and it was mentioned in a staff bulletin". In other words, there seems to me to be something of a preponderance of, as people say in the north of England, fur coat and no underwear.

I look forward to the day when the pendulum swings once again towards those who actually make a difference rather than the ones with big smiles and fine words.

© Terry Freedman Tue, 20 Dec 2005