Written by Brisbane Catholic Education Executive Director Dr Sally Towns. Originally published in Australian Council for Education Leaders magazine Australian Education Leader, AEL 46 Issue 2: Leadership Challenge. Republished with permission.
During the afternoon on 15 March 2019, news of an attack on two mosques in Christchurch began to emerge. As a nation, New Zealand had never experienced a terrorist attack. Although Jacinda Ardern had been New Zealand's Prime Minister for less than 18 months, the whole country turned to her to see how she would respond and lead the nation through this unprecedented challenge. What followed was a notable example of adaptive leadership in practice.
Leadership in contemporary times is concerned with how to lead and manage complexity in a volatile world, characterised by rapid changes and fluid boundaries. Complexity theory presupposes organisations, including education systems, are dynamic and have the capability to adapt and evolve within an ever-changing environment. Complexity demands a different approach to leadership. Previous top-down approaches and theories of leadership no longer serve contemporary organisations and societies. Instead, what is now required is leadership that is responsive and relational where clear communication occurs between and amongst people in order to harness collective intelligence and action at every level.
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre at Christchurch's mosques, Ardern was applauded internationally for her humanness. Images of a hijab wearing Ardern hugging, crying with, and being present to the victims and their families were broadcast around the world. However, Ardern backed up this immediate response with policy changes and public announcements. Some of these responses were swift, such as changes to New Zealand's gun laws, but others required a more systematic response to address the multi-faceted issues that the massacre brought to the fore - right-wing extremism, racism, and violence. This experience held Ardern in good stead as she navigated New Zealand through the global COVID pandemic some twelve months later. The hallmarks of Ardern's leadership in managing the pandemic included leveraging and utilizing the collective intelligence of key people, and communicating transparently about the uncertainty created by COVID (Le Fevre, 2022).
If adaptive leadership is a response to increasing organisational and societal complexity, a key question arises: are there capabilities and behaviours that leaders should be seeking to develop and emulate to be effective? From a capability perspective, adaptive leaders must reframe their leadership paradigm to view leadership as an emergent event rather than as an individual response. This requires the ability to monitor and influence non-linear causes and forces while being attuned to weak signals, by anticipating future needs, trends and options, to establish patterns of complexity. That is, adaptive leaders think ahead before the problem is at their door. However, adaptive leaders also have the courage to pivot and change direction when an initiative or direction is not working.
Across the literature on complex social and organisational systems, the behaviours required of effective contemporary leaders are those that allow them to operate in, and above, the fray as required; court the uncommitted; let conflict rise and then resolve, and empower people to do the work required (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002). Being optimistic is a leadership behaviour also identified by Salicru (2017), alongside having an internal locus of control, creating safe and trusting relationships and leading ethically. In their book on the challenges of leadership, Kouzes and Posner (2017) identified several overarching behaviours essential for exemplary leadership. These behaviours include inspiring a shared vision, having a common purpose, living values, strengthening others, establishing trust, collaboration, celebrating values and victories, and encouraging the heart.
The recent global pandemic has presented unprecedented opportunities and challenges for education systems, propelling them to shift to a new way of governing schools and delivering education and wellbeing outcomes for students. Education system leaders will need to become adaptive leaders, acknowledging and responding to the emerging complexities that education is facing, characterised by complex internal and external relationships and interactions with a variety of stakeholders (Brown & Duignan, 2021; Morris et al., 2022).
Fullan (2019) postulates that today's education leaders must be curious about the possibilities that lie ahead of them and have an openness to people and sensitivity for the context in which they lead. He states that education leaders will need capabilities to detect patterns and consequences for the system, connect with other people, have a capacity to orchestrate action, foster sinews for success, be humble in the face of challenges, build accountable organisations, and provide clarity for people in times of uncertainty. Education leaders must develop also their personal leadership qualities to lead and respond to opportunities and obstacles as they emerge.
In navigating their way through a dynamic and shifting education landscape, leaders will need to be clear about their core values, be guided by a strong moral compass, and ensure that student learning and wellbeing remain central to all that they do. (Brown & Duignan, 2021; Cantwell, 2015; Salicru, 2017).
Like all education systems across the nation, Brisbane Catholic Education (BCE) has numerous projects and programs to realise system improvement and to prepare itself for inevitable change. In recognising the integral relationship that culture has on long-term strategy, a key project for BCE is its new Culture Transformation Project which is aimed at building and fostering a high-performance culture through a connected and engaged workforce. Through an adaptive process of collecting, interpreting and acting on evidence, BCE has undertaken culture interviews and focus groups, established a culture co-design group, developed an ongoing communication strategy, and undertaken an all-employee survey to arrive at a culture to which we aspire.
The culture to which BCE currently aspires has been distilled through the adaptive process described previously as a culture where:
· BCE is committed to Catholic identity, student learning and safeguarding.
· BCE trusts and empowers its people and cares about their wellbeing.
· BCE pursues high performance and innovation.
While we at BCE recognise that as a system we have a long way to go to realise our aspirational culture, we have established a three- year roadmap which includes, but is not limited to, initiatives that will focus on work which prioritises “thriving teachers," “leadership capability," “high impact educators," and “students first." To ensure that we remain adaptive, we at BCE will continuously keep our eye over the horizon to stay attuned to emerging trends and issues; test and challenge underlying assumptions and beliefs; strengthen transparency, accountability, communication and inclusion; and, mobilise collective intelligence into action.
As leaders we have a lot to learn from Ardern's leadership of New Zealand through the Christchurch mosques' massacres. From her humanness and humbleness in the immediate aftermath, in which she stood in solidarity with victims and their families, to a strong stance she took against racism, violence, and right-wing extremism, there is no denying that her leadership of this crisis presents an excellent lesson in adaptive leadership.
References
Brown, S., & Duignan, P. (2021). System leaders scaling successful educational reforms in an uncertain future. In S. Brown & P. Duignan (Eds.), Leading education systems (pp. 1-36). Emerald Publishing.
Cantwell, J. (2015). Leadership in action. Melbourne University Press.
Fullan, M. (2019). Nuance: Why some leaders succeed and others fail. Corwin.
Heifetz, R., & Linsky, M. (2002, June). A survival guide for leaders. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2002/06/a-survival-guide-for-leaders
Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
Le Fevre, D. M. (2022). Leading through crisis: The adaptive leadership of Jacinda Ardern. In M. Raei & H. T. Rasmussen (Eds.), Adaptive leadership in a global economy (pp. 165-179). Routledge.
Morris, P., Park, C., & Auld, E. (2022). Covid and the future of education: Global agencies 'building back better'. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 52(5), 691-711. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305792 5.2022.2066886
Salicru, S. (2017). Leadership results: How to create adaptive leaders and high- performing organisations for an uncertain world. Wiley.
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