In this day and age, organisational hierarchies are getting flatter and flatter, with decision-making devolved from traditional top-down levels of organisation to a more project-based responsibility. Of course, there’s a delicious irony with this and this is younger career-oriented ambitious folk, who are stoking the pressure for hierarchical change, do themselves expect recognition and promotion as a reward for the work they do. Extrapolate this out over a forty year working career and at a promotion every two or three years, that's between sixteen and twenty steps ‘up’ the corporate ladder. In an ever flattening organisational hierarchy, those steps may be rapidly disappearing, leaving many senior mangers and HR directors with a bit of a headache !
Devolving responsibility to project management level is the way which many businesses are going, however, this approach is not without its problems. Does this result in a lack of overall strategic leadership? will there be competing demands for senior management time from project managers eager to be noticed ? and will this looser structure really appeal to everyone, most of whom have been brought up in a command/control structure?
Maybe not. For as the reins of perceived power loosen up, very often the response is confusion, uncertainty, lowering levels of morale, and even grumblings of leadership ‘vacuum’. The signs might be quite overt, such as arguing and power struggles, or less overt such as lower productivity and increased sickness absence. Usually a lack of leadership is blamed for these organisational 'blockages' but maybe its not a lack of, but the wrong style of leadership which is to blame in such cases. Maybe, just maybe, it's leadership being practiced in the ‘old style’ and grafted on to a new set of operating circumstances rather than adapted for times of change, that causing blockages in these situations. To take this a stage further, perhaps leaders are clinging to their traditional styles of management and failing to make progress in order to cause change to fail and so preserve the status quo. So we see that in these cases and many others like them, it's the leadership ‘skills’ being practiced which are actually the root cause of this business constellation.
So the challenge for organisations is to break through their apathy and give change a chance. After all, managers may have perfectly rational reasons for resisting change and not wanting to take risks.
Real permanent change might be said to go through three stages:
1) Anticipation-the exciting stage of in change management when we are sure the benefits will be worthwhile and we plan for the change process
2) Regression- this is when things tend to get worse before they improve
3) Consolidation- when the benefits of change transform into normal everyday practice.
The biggest challenge lies with the regression phase, and our fear is that this regression will become permanent. However we must be prepared for a regressive stage, even though our greatest fear is that if the change fails this regressive stage will become permanent, and we end up with the worst of both worlds, inefficient practice and resentment at change which has failed to live up to expectations. So we tend to look for change models that skip this regressive stage, failing perhaps to realise that change is an evolutionary process and evolution, by it's very name, evolves through stages of change, one after the other. Its just not possible to skip stages.
A sporting analogy might be a snooker player trying to change his cue style or a golfer attempting to change his swing. Most of the time, you get worse before you improve. Two steps forward sometimes costs an initial step backwards but it's an essential part of most change processes, despite what the self-appointed 'change agents' might insist.
Therefore, any successful change management process must concentrate not so much on the desired outcome, but on this middle regressive stage in order to 'unblock' the pathway to a successful outcome. Rather like the Dylan William 'Inside the black box' educational research, it's the processing stage which is vital to a successful outcome- what's between inputs and outputs. And any leader managing change must be a successful 'unblocker' clearing the path to eventual success by removing the unwilling and immovable blockages so as to let change make progress and just as importantly, be successful in taking colleagues with them along this same road - a 'laxative' management style almost. But it's perhaps the only way to overcome the procrastination which kills many operational change processes, even when that change is sorely needed.
Now, transpose this scenario onto education, and specifically, schools. With the flattening of the career structure, might a similar leadership approach be necessary ?
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