Journeys to Success.
Barbara has been recognized for her contributions to leadership and professional learning. She was the inaugural recipient of the Women of Achievement Award (Western Australia, 2005), is an Honorary Fellow of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, and is a National Fellow of the Australian Council for Educational Leaders. Her expertise is regularly sought out to contribute in an advisory capacity as a member of numerous university, departmental, school, and professional boards.
Her Australian and international projects include emerging, executive, and system leadership programs. She has a special interest in the links between leadership sustainability, well-being, and impact on performance.
To connect with Barbara, follow @BarbKW on Twitter.
To book Jane A. G. Kise or Barbara K. Watterston for professional development, contact [email protected].
INTRODUCTION
I
THE WHY AND HOW OF WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP JOURNEY
Women in educational leadership—What does that mean to you? Women have incredible potential to bring about change in the world of education if they step up to lead at all levels. Yet, grasping how to make the valuable contributions they envision—by influencing others, empowering others, and commanding attention with self-assurance and presence—challenges many women globally, and with whom we have had the privilege to work.
Perhaps you’re reading this because you’re ready to step up. Or, perhaps you have someone telling you, “You’d make a great teacher leader [… principal … curriculum director …].” Or, perhaps you’ve already stepped into school leadership and you’re wondering how other women navigate this terrain that men once exclusively navigated—and that still often seems colored with overtones from that era. At all these stages, we find women asking, “Do I truly wish to lead?”
If you hesitate to lead because you find the responsibilities of leadership rather daunting, take heart that women we have spoken with who are already on that journey unanimously tell us that they find the rewards worth it, especially the positive impact they have on students. If you hesitate because you wonder if you’re cut out to become a leader, know that we’ll guide you through creating a plan for your own development as a leader.
If, however, you hesitate to lead because you worry that others might see you as too ambitious, eager for control, or some other negative definition or view of power, we’d like to help you reframe that thinking right now.
Leadership and Power
We became acutely aware of women’s uneasiness with power at the 2016 Women in Education Leadership conference in Australia. To most people, leadership and power are intertwined. As we facilitated sessions at the conference, we clearly saw that many attendees connected power with abuse of power, or with ego and self-aggrandizement. Women saw having power as a negative. We heard the following comments and the same sentiments at other similar events.
• “I don’t tell anyone I’m a school principal. I don’t want to put on airs that I’m more important than others at the school.”
• “I keep my voice soft and my comments in a questioning mode. I don’t want to be seen as aggressive.”
• “No one likes a female who speaks her mind.”
Can you imagine a man saying, “No one likes a man who speaks his mind,” or “I never tell anyone I’m the school head”? We can’t, but we’ve certainly seen women regularly criticized for leading “like a man.”
With these concerns, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that women are underrepresented in positions of power. However, how can you influence people so they view women who engage in high-impact leadership behaviors—sharing ideas, adding to collective wisdom, guiding a vision, and encouraging a shared purpose—as competent, rather than … well, you’ve heard the labels! These leadership behaviors aren’t wrong; rather, people have inadequate and incomplete definitions of power.
Mary Beard (2017), professor of classics at Cambridge University, captures the problematic big picture of why women struggle to lead: “We have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man” (p. 54). And, she offers a solution: “If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?” (Beard, 2017, p. 83). She suggests separating power and prestige and including the collaborative power of followers in the definition. Not power over but power with sums up her message.
Power … is not an end in itself, but is an instrument that must be used toward an end.
—Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006),
first female U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
We agree that power with resonates with archetypal feminine values, such as behaving cooperatively and having empathy—those values and characteristics that, through millennia and across cultures, people have connected more with women than with men. However, striving for power with ignores the upside of positional power—the power to influence what will be done, when, in what ways, and by whom—that it can provide. Leaders, and especially women leaders, need to identify the impact they wish to have and where they might make it happen. And for women in education, this is the moral imperative of their why—for students to learn and flourish. To have an impact requires clarity of vision and courage.
What would you like to have the power to accomplish in education?
WORDS FROM A LEADER
Women have learned to turn power into empowerment. They get the urgent work done. Women know the power of collective leadership through experience and do not find power over others a satisfactory way of working. Women have learned to listen carefully, critique options, and meaningfully integrate a variety of options as they lead change—often in small, subtle, and not-so-overt ways. When women use power with and not power over, new directions emerge. Often other voices from the margins feel empowered to make decisions alongside their women leaders. The strength is that women leaders see power as multidirectional and multidimensional. They embrace co- in collaborative leadership. Co-learning, co-leading, and co-laboring are three words for us all to live by. (Dr. Lyn Sharratt, Canadian teacher, principal, superintendent, and researcher, personal communication, April 12, 2018)
The Why of This Book
Why does this book focus on women? Don’t men need to know these things too? Yes, they do. The path to effective leadership shouldn’t create a male-female dichotomy, but in many ways, the masculine path to effective leadership differs from the feminine path, with men generally taking a more direct and intentional approach to the journey. As you explore our research, theory, and practice, you will see that women face more barriers and different challenges than men. The existing gaps in gendered paths to leadership mean that talent falls through the cracks. And education needs that talent—both because it needs great leadership and because research confirms that women lead in a different way that positively influences organizational success. In this book, we’ll apply that research to what might blossom in education
