The more one studies education and leadership, the more one sees that they are two sides to the same coin. You can't apply one without the other.
Education is Leadership
The process of educating necessarily uses leadership styles, with predictable if not alway considered results. In Learning Online with Games, Simulations and Virtual Worlds, I outline different levels of interactivity with students:
- from the talking-head in Level 0
- to environments that use sims and labs in Level 4
- to environments where students decide their own curricula, grading, and processes in Level 7.
I then mapped the different levels of interactivity to a leadership spectrum, with "directive" (the leadership style of ordering people what to do using formal and other forms of coercive power) and "transactional" (I will do this for you in exchange for you doing this for me) at Level 0 compared to "participative" and "collaborative" at Level 7 (the leadership styles of supporting).
What is interesting is that, as reported in the leadership literature, the style of "directive" only gets you short term results (which, I happily acknowledge, are sometimes necessary). Which means that people (in this case, students) in a directive style education program at best simply passively comply, without any form of commitment. Thus you get a blip in test scores, but without any long term impact. It is only the "participative" and "collaborative" educational programs, meanwhile, consistent with leadership models, that actually develop long term behaviors.
| Education Interactivity Level | Corresponding Leadership Styles | Good For | Impact and Results Duration |
| 0-1: Lecture, Test, Graded Paper | Directive and Transactional | Predictable Process Performance | Very short-term, sometimes negative long-term |
| 3-4: Sim/Lab | Directive, Collaborative, and Participative | Applicable Skills and Conviction | Long |
| 6-7: Microcosm and Real world Project | Collaborative and Participative | Ownership of New Ideas | Very long |
Leadership is Education
Meanwhile, leadership involves the shifting of one or more of a target of influence's head, heart, and/or hands.
- Shifting a person's head means creating an intellectual argument for why the new way is superior (so called, "Learning to Know"). This is the traditional role of education. It often involves exposing students to complex inner-workings that explain why a naive approach is not the right approach. (Refer to the section on Systems in The Complete Guide.)
- Shifting a target's heart, in contrast, means appealing to a person's emotions and their own sense of who they are and even want to be from a values perspective (so called "Learning to Be") to move in the new direction.
- Finally, shifting a person's hands involves teaching them the new skills they need to make the shift (so called "Learning to Do"). This is the traditional role of training.
Any person's hands, heart, and head want to be aligned, and will be over time. And while a leader may focus on one of the three in the short term, ultimately all three have to shift. (By the way, there are
alpha strategies to directly attempt to move any or all of heart, hands, and head, and
omega strategies of focusing instead on removing barriers to movement, but that gets deeper than we need to). Thus leadership requires infrastructure and capabilities (including formal learning environments, such as those using collaboration and sims) in all three areas.
| Leadership Target | Requirement/ Infrastructure |
|---|
| Head "Logical" | Education |
| Heart "Emotional" | Passionate Rhetoric |
| Hands "Kinesthetic" | Training |
Three ImplicationsAre there implications to this? I believe they are three.
To talk up leadership without strongly supporting education, whether in a nation or corporation, is hypocritical and doomed to failure. Again, the successful application of leadership needs the infrastructure and capabilities of education, formal and informal, in all three areas.
A directive-style of leadership does not work in the long run. Neither does directive education. Ordering people what to do and using talking-head school programs often results in the opposite long term behavior of what the leader wants. Most of the industrial education complex, including most K-12, universities, and corporate training programs, is currently focused on a directive leadership/education style, overly relying on extrinsic threats and rewards, which is why it fails. (This is also why revolutionary schools such as those supported by The Action Foundation represent the real future of education, significantly more than those supported by The Gates Foundation or the current Department of Education.) And that is why more of the same in schools, such as longer hours, and a greater application of the philosophy of tops-down, such as zero-tolerance policies, makes things worse.
Finally, education must balance authentic experiences with guidance. Leadership must balance guidance with authentic experience.
The bad news is that both real education and real leadership eschew traditional organizational metrics. The good news is that both instead rely on the philosophies of stewardship.
