of many nuanced expressions and iterations. While the ability to examine options puts us at our most creative, it can also be somewhat of a distraction. We’ve all had the experience of spending more time considering our options than bearing down and getting to work. Therefore, in terms of carrots and sticks, if the job at hand is excruciatingly simple, the performance level will go up if the brain can associate some sort of punishment or reward associated with the simple choices in front of it.
Quite remarkably, however, there is an avalanche of research suggesting that the more complex the challenge, the more ineffective the carrot-and-stick routine becomes (Pink, 2009). In fact, even if you take away the notion of the stick and just focus on incentives, this research is clear that offering an incentive can become a distraction to an otherwise open and creative mind. What’s important to understand is that the evolution of our culture certainly saw a time when jobs were simple, tasks were boring and routine, and people weren’t asked to problem solve or collaborate with any great depth at work. Those days are over. However, just like the algebra problem, we unfortunately are living through a time in which the accelerated demands of the economy and new working environment in conjunction with our ideas about what it takes to get the best out of people have outpaced the leadership strategies available to us.
Before going further, I want to make it clear that we did make some progress in the latter half of the 20th century in terms of how we think about leadership, organizational behavior, and systems. Younger readers may find this hard to believe, but it wasn’t that long ago when this simple notion that workers should be comfortable and somewhat happy on the job wasn’t assumed and had to be taught as a matter of undoing old management principles.
The Humanist Movement
In what’s generally referred to as the Humanist Movement, leaders were advised to treat workers with a greater sense of humanity and concern. Rather than seeing them as replaceable parts of a big machine—as was the design in the industrial model—leaders were taught to show concern for people and offer reinforcement and encouragement (Rogers, 1959).
For the first half of the 20th century, it was common for workers to fear their bosses. In the second half of the 20th century, bosses attempted to portray a kinder, gentler, and more understanding image of management. Thanks to technology and the acceleration of the skill level needed in most jobs, the feelings that workers have about their bosses are perhaps less relevant than they once were. If you’re the boss, bluntly put, it isn’t all about you. In the most highly productive organizations, the workers don’t spend their days perseverating on every nuance of behavior from their boss or manager. Their focus is on their own work. They have the autonomy to lead in their own right and are busy finding solutions to problems rather than focusing on the maladies in management or leadership.
It should be clear that leading with a fear orientation simply doesn’t work (Reason, 2010). The learning and growth challenges that students and staff (including you) face each day are adequately complex, and the simple application of sticks and carrots won’t improve your performance. In fact, there is a significant amount of evidence that shows when fear is introduced, it actually shuts down learning (Lipton, 2008; Wood, Norris, Waters, Stoldt, & McEwen, 2008). Clearly, if you want the best in human performance in terms of creativity and learning, leading with fear isn’t leading at all.
The LEAF model is constructed with this evolution in leadership in mind. You will see that this new leadership model is, indeed, quite contradictory to many of the old presuppositions about managing from the late 1800s. Instead, it’s designed to take advantage of our natural learning rhythms as well as all the research we have at our fingertips about maximizing individual and collective human performance.
The Leading for Excellence and Fulfillment Model
The emphasis on excellence within this leadership model represents the continuous pursuit of the very best. Too many modern leaders aim to simply get by or for outcomes that are “good enough.” The best leaders in schools are striving for excellence in everything they do. They recognize that it will take excellence to do more with less, as is the cold, harsh reality of many schools today. Leading in a way that achieves unprecedented excellence in a humanistic way to maximize learning and innovation certainly isn’t easy.
The emphasis on fulfillment is not simply an extension of the Humanist Movement. It goes deeper than that. You will see that human performance is significantly impacted by the degree to which individuals or groups feel that the work they’re doing is meaningful and important; the feeling that one’s work is part of a bigger and more important mission has a tendency to maximize effort and engage individual and collective learning systems (Reason, 2010). This isn’t a motivational moment. It’s a scientific fact (Cheung & Chiu, 2005). Therefore, leading with an emphasis on fulfillment is good for the human spirit, is motivational, and is enormously productive. Following are six priorities these leaders exhibit.
1 Maximize learning potential—When using the LEAF model, you should always be looking for opportunities to maximize the individual and collective learning power and potential that exist in every school. Having visited thousands of schools over the years, I’ve never been to a building without pockets of excellence waiting to emerge. The passionate pursuit of maximizing this learning potential is paramount to this type of leader.
2 Create engagement—Engagement is a learning term that references the amount of mental energy a learner is bringing to any learning situation. As you know, levels of engagement vary depending on learner interest, learner commitment, and the relative stimulation of the learning situation. We’ve all had the experience of tuning out what’s in front of us and only providing enough mental engagement to capture the major talking points. The best leaders understand this dynamic and make it their mission to maximize high-engagement learning opportunities for the staff.
3 Create autonomy—Psychologists and brain researchers agree that in order to get individuals and groups to perform at their creative best, leaders must provide autonomy whenever possible (Volmer, Spurk, & Niessen, 2012). The advantage of autonomy is that it opens up the art of possibility and gives the individual and collective learning systems a chance to flourish. Without autonomy, those wonderful “what if” questions never get asked. Leaders who lead with excellence and fulfillment understand that autonomy can’t come without responsibility, accountability, and necessary checks and balances. Many of the challenges accompanying change have high levels of prescription that make this autonomy harder to achieve. That said, these successful leaders never stop pursuing that autonomy whenever possible.
4 Relentlessly pursue excellence—These leaders don’t give lip service to the pursuit of excellence. It is a cause they chase relentlessly. It’s so easy in a moment of fatigue or distraction to lower our standards and come to accept what should be unacceptable. These leaders hold a standard of self-excellence and create a culture within the school in which heightened sensitivity to excellence and high performance is everywhere.
5 Identify and advocate purpose and fulfillment—When individuals understand that their work has meaning and purpose, they are far more likely to bring their creative best to the situation. This is true of individuals and groups, and the best leaders today understand this dynamic and consistently infuse purpose in the conversation.
6 Make work fun—Research has shown that one of the advantages of having fun is that it breaks the tension and allows the brain to go back to whatever it’s been focusing on with renewed energy, focus, and heightened levels of neurological engagement (Reason, 2010). Research also clarifies that institutions or groups that play all the time without meaning or purpose generally don’t gain this benefit, because the pursuit of fun isn’t connected to a bigger purpose (Meyer, 2000). Those schools that have a clearly defined meaning and purpose can pursue their goals and objectives with stalwart seriousness and can laugh uproariously at themselves in the process. The best leaders understand this and make this working condition possible.
Unfortunately,
