Leading by Example

Leadership within the schooling system is a complicated subject that requires many hours of research and practice to fully comprehend. Leadership, itself is a very difficult quality to ascertain and maximize, making the role of leaders in schools dependent upon their own ability to be self-educated and provide the necessary guidance toward the environment that that leader is a part of and directs. The purpose of this essay is to personally reflect upon the book Leverage Leadership: A Practical Guide to Exceptional Schools.

This essay will describe both the ideas that I resonate with inside this book and develop some arguments that suggest some things this publication is essentially missing. Overall Impression To many the main theme of the book is perhaps oversimplified and trite. The book's core idea suggested that "Exceptional school leaders succeed because of how they use their time: what they do and when they do it, " (p.2).

While this idea is extremely obvious, it does cut to the issue and suggest that at the heart of school leadership success is the choice of the leaders themselves. The main and underlying theme is to but the leadership responsibility back on the shoulders of those who can manage it. Too many times in today's school systems blaming others for problems is substutibuted for leadership.

In many instances school leadership is so destitute of the right ideas that they must look everywhere and anywhere for solutions, meanwhile the school is slowly crumbling away into a disorganized mess. Make no mistake, the intent of this book is to place the responsibility of school leadership back onto those who believe that is their duty to lead. Critique of the Book The book takes a very idealistic and romantic tone about the role of the principal and other key leaders within the school system.

While I agree with this idea that leadership is essentially about demonstrating characteristics to motivate others, the approach this book offers is rote, trite and somewhat boring. As the book clamors about the importance of system, method and habit as integral parts of a successful school system, their revelations are not revolutionary or even partially novel. Too much rigidity and structure appears to be emphasized in this book in my opinion.

Data and material information is overwhelming viewed as a sort of panacea in this presentation and ignores some of the more subtle qualities that leadership emanates. The language the authors used in this book suggested that data and information are holy and irreplaceable pools of motivation that should be held with the utmost respect. While I do see the value in these types of feedback, the leader's job is much more nuanced than simply the processing of mathematical data.

Personality, charisma and empathy are mostly ignored in this book as beneficial tools that can help school leaders. These ideas are touched upon in the second part of the book dealing with culture. Culture is addressed as a means of control and not a result of it. The book tends to ignore my own personal feeling on culture that suggests that culture is merely a reflection of the sum total experiences of the group contributing towards it. Culture cannot essentially be controlled it can only be experienced and dealt with.

Leaders set the culture with their actions and words, and is nothing more than a mirror. The book tends to use culture like a whip, to be used to garner respect and develop success. This attitude does not.