communicating, which are crucial to collaborative leadership.
Whether you aspire to leadership or have already spent years in a leadership position, this book can help. For those new to leadership, the reflection questions can hone your thoughts and strengthen your approaches. Experienced leaders know that finding new ideas and tools is worthwhile. Like a good collaborative leader, this book works with you and provides the information and resources you need to promote positive organizational growth.
This Book’s Framework
Each chapter title is a common collaborative leadership question, and the chapter contents explore each question in turn. In our look at collaborative leadership, we began with an internal approach—look at yourself as a leader first. Chapter 1 asks you to think about your leadership skills, and the action steps help you increase those skills. Building trust from others is one of the most necessary skills. Chapter 2 reveals the need for building trust when leading others collaboratively and offers steps for doing just that. After you build trust, it is time to build a team of leaders. Chapter 3 helps you build efficacious teams of other collaborative leaders. Ensuring that everyone on the team is on the same page and using that to promote growth occur when they develop a common vision. Chapter 4 helps you create a vision in a way that promotes shared beliefs. The vision not only provides direction but also helps define the work you need to accomplish. Chapter 5 helps you guide the work that occurs in a collaboratively led educational environment. It is easy to get immersed in the work and stop seeing the bigger picture. Chapter 6 focuses on what, when, and how to communicate regarding the work and the resulting success. The book’s epilogue brings home what we hope you’ve learned as you read.
Each chapter explores an aspect stemming from our work with administrators, superintendents, and teacher leaders in a variety of K–12 educational settings. The goal is to provide deeper understanding, strategies, and tools to support leaders who are working to grow other leaders. In hopes that you can examine your daily practices and compare them with what you learn as you read the book, we begin every chapter with several questions, prompting you to examine your current reality around leadership.
To help you think about possible changes, we conclude each chapter with action steps and reproducibles. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/leadership to access the free reproducibles in this book. We offer additional action steps there for creating and attaining goals and leading the right work. Because one of the best ways to move forward is to recognize individual staff members’ and the whole school’s accomplishments and progress, we also include a celebration idea or strategy in each chapter. You can implement these steps and tools as-is, or adjust them to fit your current reality.
In each chapter, we propose the following questions.
▪ What are you doing right now that fits with what you learned from reading this chapter?
▪ What might you stop doing after reading this chapter?
▪ What might you start doing after reading this chapter?
Reflect on the questions in light of each chapter’s topic.
Our Hopes for You
Rather than stalling out on theory, we want to push your collaborative leadership efforts forward. We want to move your leadership thinking from isolation to collaboration, with the goals of increasing your collaborative leadership efficacy so that student achievement increases. You want results that show student growth. If the end result is to improve and increase student learning, then your challenge is to figure out how to encourage and support those who are responsible for getting it done. This book helps you meet that challenge by guiding you on the aspects of leading collaboratively and providing tools that help you grow as a leader.
We hope that regardless of where you currently are, reading this book will help you increase your understanding. You can connect what you learn from the book with the way you practice leadership. Chances are you already have some sort of leadership team in place. Do you know and understand members’ strengths? Are you using them to reach team goals? If not, challenge yourself to expand your leadership abilities. What should you do first? Have you built the necessary trust? Do you have a common vision? You can choose new ways to look at leadership and new skills to practice. Finally, you can watch the impact your learning has on others. Is greater growth occurring? (We have included many reproducibles you can use to see various aspects of growth.) If so, you are a collaborative leader who is creating a successful learning environment that will profoundly benefit the staff, the community, and most important, the students.
CHAPTER ONE
What Kind of Leader Am I?
Are some people just born with the necessary charisma and drive to lead? Or do people learn the necessary skills along the way? Whether you believe leadership is innate or learned, self-knowledge is critical to its efficacy, a fact that debunks the myth that some people have just the right combination of characteristics to lead others. Harvard Business School professor Bill George (2011) says his research bears this out and that the “essence of leadership comes from not having predefined characteristics. Rather, it comes from knowing yourself—your strengths and weaknesses.” Collaborative leaders are at their best when they know who they are and what they can do.
Prolific leadership writer Jack Canfield (2005) confirms that “you have to believe in yourself. Whether you call it self-esteem, self-confidence, or self-assurance, it is a deep-seated belief that you have what it takes—the abilities, inner resources, talents, and skills to create your desired results” (p. 40). A collaborative leader has a strong sense of self. Think about this as you reflect on the current reality surrounding who you are as a leader.
In this chapter, we talk about the skills necessary for you to become a collaborative leader, including truly knowing yourself as one. We ask you to assess your trustworthiness, visioning abilities, and communication styles. Finally, we discuss how you can recognize and enhance your strengths. The end of the chapter includes action steps for increasing your leadership skills. Because improving general leadership skills is the goal here, the steps in this chapter assume you’re working with an assembled team. We explain how to assemble teams in Chapter 3 (page 27).
EXAMINING YOUR CURRENT REALITY
As you read this chapter, consider the following questions. Reflect on your personal growth as a leader and your support of growing leadership within your organization.
• What skills do you bring to the leadership position?
• Why are these skills important?
• What difference do they make?
• What are your challenge areas?
• What difficulties do they cause?
• How do you compensate for them?
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/leadership for a free reproducible version of this feature box.
Understand Yourself as a Leader
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