Seth Godin and Educational Leadership: Are You Leading or Managing?

What do you provide to your school, educational leadership or management? Seth Godin believes you need to be a leader. You need to lead your school, your district, and your “tribe.”

“You can’t have tribe without a leader-and you can’t be a leader without a tribe.”

Your school, your district, your “tribe” is waiting for you to lead.

“Tribes need leadership. Sometimes one person leads, sometimes more. People want connection and growth and something new. They want change.”

A leader is someone people will want to connect to because they know that it is the leaders who can bring change. And they want change.

Notice Seth didn’t say, “manage.” Management is not leadership.

“Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done. Burger King franchises hire managers. They know exactly what they need to deliver and they are given resources to do it at low cost. Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and the react to the outside world striving to make process as fast and as cheap as possible.”

Managers do thing right.

Leaders, however do the right things, including bringing change to the tribe.

“Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in.”

How can you tell the difference?

“Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.”

“Managers make widgets. Leaders make change.”

What are you doing at your school, making widgets or making change?

“Managers manage by using the authority the factory gives them. You listen to your manager or your boss or you lose your job. A manager can’t make change because that’s not his job. His job is to complete tasks assigned to him by someone else in the factory.”

District wants their budgets, reports, plans, evaluations, paper work, and emails; does this sound like your job? Is that management or leadership?

“Leaders, on the other hand, don’t care very much for the organizational structure or the official blessing of whatever factory they work for. The use passion and ideas to lead people, as opposed to using threats and bureaucracy to manage them.”

That’s leadership, and you don’t need the title to be one.

“Management often works to maintain the status quo, to deliver average products to average people”

Is this what your school or district expects from you?

Are maybe your principal, or director, or superintendent is too busy managing to notice.

“…many people (many really good people) spend all day trying to defend what they do, trying to sell what they’ve always sold, and trying to prevent their organizations from being devoured by the forces of the new.”

“The forces of the new.” Does that sound like life in the 21st century? How is education doing adapting to life in the 21st century? How are we doing with teaching the 21st century student?  Are educational leaders looking tired these days? Are we spending all our time fighting disruption, instability, and mediocrity?

“Defending mediocrity is exhausting.”

Are you tired? Are they tired? Are we all tired? Is mediocrity, an average product what we want for our students? We need some tribal leadership.

“In unstable times, growth comes from leaders who create change and engage their organizations, instead of managers who push their employees to do more for less.”

Is your school, your district, or your state asking you to do more with less?

Tribes need leadership, often, though we are simply asked to manage. We are asked to complete our paperwork on time, attend our meeting on time, and answer our emails on time. Managers do things right. Education likes when we do thing right.

Maybe it is time for us to become leaders and do the right thing. What do you want to do?

Disrupt? Change? Destroy? Renew? Connect? Create? Innovate? Yes. The you want to lead! You want Education Innovation.

Comments

[ginac]

I have to say that I agree with you on leadership vs. management. The public education system is set up to be 'manageable' because they have to have measurable results (quantitative vs. qualitative). Unfortunately, people (especially children) cannot be 'measured' adequately by standardized test scores or how well they 'memorize' nonsense like multiplication tables.

As a homeschool parent, I like to think I provide exceptional leadership to my child and the homeschool community (and anyone else interested) by sharing my ideas and resources for engaging children in critical thinking and for presenting ideas through exploration, creativity and fun! I know teaching large groups of children is not the same as group teaching, but more opportunities for one-on-one (especially for the bright students) might be a good start.

Thanks for this post.

[Rob Jacobs]

There is a freedom in homeschooling the public school will never have.

Management is key for any organization including a homeschooling parent. If you are not managing the process, you will not get the best results for your student.

[Fabio Platero]

Thank you, Rob, for re-establishing in me the notion that the principles that govern leadership (when applied properly) are superior to those that govern management.
May the revolution begin. Long live the revolution.
Happy 2009
Fabio Platero
São Paulo, Brazil