Seven principles of strategic leadership

Abstract

Prompted by a perception that many leaders may not invest sufficiently in strategic effort, we set out to examine what might give school leaders the confidence to take on more strategic leadership. Based on our work with school leaders over three years, we identified what effective and successful strategic leaders seem to do. We tried to capture this in terms of seven principles. The purpose of these interconnected principles is to enhance individual leader effectiveness in leading strategically. They are written to inform focused leadership reflection and action. We suggest that being strategic is more than strategic planning, or strategic intent, it is about deliberate and sustained practice. The principles assist those who are preparing for school leadership to assess their professional learning needs. They may also assist principals and others who are currently in leadership roles to reflect on the effectiveness of their strategic efforts. The principles can be used as a device for reflecting on the strategic focus of schools and for assessing why some schools are better than others at positioning themselves to take advantage of an ever changing educational milieu. Our purpose is to answer the question, 'What is strategic leadership and what do strategic leaders do?' and in the process to describe a framework that can be used to inform leaders' practice. We call this framework Seven Principles of Strategic Leadership. Schools as organisations are complex, interrelated systems, where leadership has intended and unintended outcomes. Leadership is deliberate - or should be - and is about focused action and considered decisions. Leadership should also be strategic, where strategic means positioning the organisation to its best advantage in order to maximise goal attainment. For schools, this means achieving the best possible student outcomes now and into the foreseeable future. Strategic leadership used to be defined as determining where an organisation was heading and how to get there. It was mainly about leaders engaging in strategic and 'long-range' planning, and was seen as a process that belonged to upper management alone, often taking place behind closed doors (Cheng 2000: 17). When leaders engaged in the management processes of analysing, planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating they were basically considered to be strategic. In this paper we argue that strategic leadership has grown to be more than this. It involves more than the rational linear processes of writing vision statements and establishing strategic plans. As Davies (2008) describes, strategically focused schools are those that use strategic approaches and strategic processes (which includes strategic planning), but they also must have strategic leadership.

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