of leadership supposes that as long as you have just cause and clear evidence, change will happen naturally, like how children learn to speak or crawl. But organizational change does not happen that way. Leaders must establish the momentum and critical groundwork for success for any initiative in the first one hundred days. It is unreasonable to think that significant cultural change will simply bubble up from the bottom if the leader just gets out of the way and allows it to happen. Effective change is not an all-or-nothing affair in which the leader must lead either domineeringly or submissively. Ironically, meaningful bottom-up leadership requires exceptional top-down leadership in order to flourish (DuFour et al., 2016).
Essential Elements of Leadership
What leaders aspire to do often differs greatly from what they actually accomplish. The question, then, is, What leadership behaviors have links to improved results? A synthesis of the best research on the relationship between leadership and student achievement (Reeves, 2016b) reveals seven essential elements of leadership.
1. Purpose
2. Trust
3. Focus
4. Leverage
5. Feedback
6. Change
7. Sustainability
Consider the evidence behind each of these elements.
Purpose
Ordinary leaders might ask a colleague, “What do you do?” or “What is your job?” Extraordinary leaders instead ask, “What are you passionate about?” Real purpose stems not from a job requirement, but from passion. An excellent way to use a staff meeting is to ask your colleagues to complete the following sentence frame: “Because I passionately believe _______, I am committed to _______.” For example, a teacher may say, “Because I passionately believe that all students deserve the opportunity to succeed, I am committed to ensuring that every student receives personal encouragement, feedback, and support every day.” The leader does not simply launch into a workshop on formative assessment or effective feedback practices, but rather first taps into the passionate beliefs of the faculty.
A survey of teachers reveals that teachers are far less likely to change their practices due to administrative requirements than due to evidence and collegial interaction (Education Week, 2018). According to this survey, twice as many teachers receive their ideas from conferences and interactions with colleagues as teachers who receive their ideas from social media—a margin of 78 percent to 40 percent (Education Week, 2018). And how do teachers turn ideas into practice? Three times as many teachers say that evidence is their primary motivator as teachers who receive their primary motivation from endorsements from their administrators—a margin of 39 percent to 13 percent (Education Week, 2018). This strongly suggests that administrative commands will not influence teaching and learning as much as compelling cases that leaders make with evidence and passion.
Some leaders think that they will create a sense of purpose with their mission and vision statements. Rick DuFour used to joke that he could create a mission statement generator that would automatically produce what committees come up with after pondering and laboring for hours with the help of a strategic planning consultant. It would come up with something like this:
Our mission is to create productive citizens of the 21st century who will excel in creativity, critical thinking, communication, and every other alliterative word or phrase that we can think of as they prepare for a multicultural world, ready to face the challenges, blah, blah, blah, while valuing the unique contributions and skills of every stakeholder irrespective of differences in learning style or preference, and enhancing the blah, blah, blah.
You get the idea. The only people who remember mission statements like this, if only for a few days, are the people who wrote them.
Contrast the ponderous and useless mission statements that are so prevalent in schools with that of the Advent School (n.d.) in Boston: “Learn with passion, act with courage, and change the world.” A seven-year-old at this school could explain what the statement means.
• How do students learn with passion? “I go to the library anytime I want, not just when it’s library time!”
• How do students act with courage? “My friend has dyslexia, but she’s really smart. When the teacher gave her an easy book, I said, ‘She’s not stupid—she just doesn’t read very fast—and she should be reading the same hard books that I get.’”
• How do students change the world? “We collect canned goods for the homeless shelter, and we pick up trash on the street. We even came up with some ideas about how to not pollute water and how to make the playground safer.”
We’re not suggesting that this is the right mission statement for your school, but this experience does suggest a couple of acid-test questions. First, can a seven-year-old explain what your mission statement means? Second, does the mission statement resonate with everyone in the school who can use it as a springboard for guiding daily actions?
Trust
In their landmark leadership study, James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner (2011) identify credibility as the most important attribute for leadership success. Staff will forgive leaders for their mistakes in data analysis, communication, charisma, and myriad other leadership requirements as long as staff trust them. But if leaders lose credibility, it doesn’t matter how competent they are in other fields. Data analysis and charisma mean nothing without credibility. Credible leaders do what they say they will do. Therefore, within the first one hundred days of taking a leadership role, we recommend a rhythm of “promises made, promises kept” for every meeting: “Last week, I promised that I would do this, and here is how I have kept that promise.” Credible leaders should make this phrase the hallmark of every single encounter with their staff. This commitment to promises made, promises kept is an obligation of not merely the leader, but the entire system. It creates reciprocal accountability in which the leader makes and keeps promises and the staff do the same. Here are some examples of promises made, promises kept.
• “At our last meeting, we agreed to bring student work for collaborative scoring to our team meetings, and this week, we have that work and are ready to go.”
• “At our last meeting, we agreed to bring a list of individual students who need intervention and specific strategies to help them succeed, and this week, we have that list right here.”
In the ideal world we advocate, every board meeting, cabinet meeting, department meeting, grade-level meeting, and collaborative team meeting has the same rhythm of promises made, promises kept.
Focus
We can all agree that the amount of incoming information educational leaders, teachers, students, and society at large have exposure to has expanded markedly since the early 1980s. Yet it’s safe to say that the amount of learning has not markedly increased. Where does all of this transmitted but unused information go? It is lost to fragmentation, the inevitable result of futile attempts to multitask and absorb information at an increasingly frantic pace. Fragmentation, not focus, is the norm in the 21st century. Our research suggests, however, that focus—the prioritization of no more than six initiatives for any school or system—is strongly related to gains in student learning (Reeves, 2011b). Unfortunately, focus is elusive. Fragmentation does not occur due to malice on anyone’s part; it stems from noble motives. Have lots of high-poverty students? Here’s a new program! Have lots of English learners? Here’s another new program! Have lots of
