needs stop once they become licensed. Poorly constructed professional learning experiences, inadequate resources, and little time for full implementation can be enough to give teachers a negative view of change.
Return on Investment
If a person clearly understands why change is logical and essential, has trust in leaders, and has received extensive training, adequate practice time, and essential resources to effectively execute the task, all that remains is to complete the task. This moment—when action can take place—marks the tipping point between support and accountability. Once leaders have made their investments, it is perfectly logical to expect a return on those investments. Demanding that a person change for the good of the organization takes courage; leaders must be willing to have some dislike them for the sake of a cause bigger than any individual. Here, the leader protects the organization’s heart and soul and draws a line between personal preference and organizational purpose. The willingness to coerce others when faced with illogical resistance solidifies a leader’s status as a person of principle. Allowing a few outliers to disrespect the will of the entire organization sends the message that change is a personal choice and, ultimately, that improvement is a choice. A transformational leader does not send this message, because it stifles change.
These investments tie in with the four skills of a transformational leader that we advance in the chapters that follow: (1) communicating the rationale, (2) establishing trust, (3) building capacity, and (4) getting results. Figure 1.1 illustrates this system of four skills.
Figure 1.1: The Why? Who? How? Do! model.
Conclusion
In an organization, resistance to change in practice or behavior is a symptom of individual or collective needs not being met. Those needs vary from person to person and from school to school. They include cognitive (why), emotional (who), and functional (how) needs. These needs are rational; they emerge out of negative personal and professional experiences. A perceptive transformational leader knows how to diagnose and respond to rational needs without taking the resistance personally.
While some resist change because of rational needs, others resist change out of an irrational and selfish need for power, without consideration of the impact that it will have on the organization, and ultimately on students. This behavior requires a leader to demand a return on investment and properly exercise leadership authority to ensure compliance without intellectual or emotional consent from the resisting party (do).
In the chapters that follow, we provide deep insight into developing a balanced leadership skill set that will equip leaders to meet these diverse needs.
Communicating the Rationale: Building Cognitive Investment
A principal stands before her staff, appearing unsure and apologetic, as she asks teachers to fill out a set of new compliance documents and templates from the central office. This latest mandate requires that teachers document every formal and informal intervention interaction they have with individual students during the course of instruction. The principal hears chatter from the back of the room as teachers ponder the purpose of yet another task that seems meaningless.
The principal reluctantly shares that completion of the task is mandatory and failure to do so will have a negative impact on their formal yearly performance evaluations. The principal appears defeated, and now the staff look defeated. The lack of dialogue and intellectual consent makes the staff feel devalued.
The lack of intellectual synergy and communication in the school has led to a culture of hopelessness and pessimism. This environment is not ripe for improvement. A leader who understands the power of communication could greatly improve the culture and productivity of this school.
As we discussed in chapter 1 (page 11), research and experience have shown that attempting to control others with external forces such as punishments and rewards is an exercise in futility. We argue that a crucial factor in motivating people lies within the individuals themselves. To set the stage for motivating those they lead, transformational leaders create the right environment and seek to critically understand the needs of the organization and motivate others to work together to collaboratively meet those needs.
Psychologist Frederick Herzberg (1966) believes that people’s internal capacities, both cognitive and emotional, give rise to feelings, aspirations, perceptions, attitudes, and thoughts that can lead to either motivation or demotivation. Herzberg (1966) states that leaders must recognize human beings as complex and need stimulation on several different levels in order to unleash their followers’ intrinsic commitment. When leaders do this, they create conditions that will more likely satisfy followers’ internal capacity, thus motivating followers to adopt the organization’s goal as their own. Herzberg (1966) calls this type of environment a growth-enhancing environment. Such an environment does not require authoritarian mandates to stimulate change; the members of the organization will drive change because of their intrinsic connection to the growth of the organization. Carol Dweck (2006) calls this a growth mindset. They will also consider the validity of externally developed innovation as long as it is congruent with organizational needs. In essence, they would view the organization’s needs like they would view their own personal needs. In this environment, innovation is not a disruption; it is a necessity.
Transformational leaders also appeal to people’s innate drive to understand the world, to make sense of it, to gain control over their lives, and to become increasingly self-directed. This cognitive perception, which world-renowned psychologist Jean Piaget (1977) advanced, assumes that a need for predictability, sensibleness, and logic motivates people when dealing with a vast and diverse world. In essence, a person’s need to understand the world and make sense of his or her environment would make him or her gravitate toward regularity, and deep understanding of a task and how it relates to his or her personal needs. Piaget (1977) calls this equilibration. If people clearly understand how the tasks that leaders ask them to complete connect to their natural need to solve problems, it will motivate them and make them intensely committed to solving the problem at hand.
Creating a growth-enhancing environment and achieving equilibration both require that leaders answer the question, Why? Asking and answering this question represents one of the most important things a leader can do to create intrinsic commitment to change. In doing so, the leader fulfills followers’ cognitive needs by communicating the rationale for change.
Communicating the Rationale as a Leadership Skill
Why? may seem like a very basic question with an easy answer, but the evidence proves that many leaders fail to address it, and failure to do so leads to apathy, disconnection, and resistance. And, in some cases, it leads to followers abandoning the profession of education.
A 2016 Learning Policy Institute report documents that U.S. K–12 schools lose about 8 percent of their workforce every year, and only about one-third of those workers leave the profession because of retirement (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, & Carver-Thomas, 2016). Nonretirement exits from the teaching profession most prevalently occur due to issues connected to school leadership effectiveness. Teachers who rate their school leadership ineffective are twice as likely to leave the profession as those who rate it effective. The most dominant factor in whether teachers rated school leadership as effective was decision-making input (Sutcher et al., 2016). Teachers want
