Kinsey, S. B. Quiet Leadership: How to Create Positive Change Without the Noise and Negativity. Journal of Extension (ASCII Edition) v. 48 no. 5 (October 2010)
As my school undergoes huge amounts of change it is time to think about how we as a group handle change. This article is about quiet leadership. The three elements of quiet leadership as laid out in the article are tenacity, modesty, and restraint. How you use those three elements are important in the spaces between big decisions for administration and for most decisions for teacher leaders.
The article outlined six principles that are necessary for quiet leadership:
- Don't overestimate how much you understand about a situation or how much you control.
- Expect your motives to be mixed or even confused.
- Count your political capital, and spend carefully.
- Buy time before jumping into action when dealing with uncertain or hazardous situations.
- Search for ways to bend the rules without breaking them.
- Drill down into the technical and political aspects of a situation.
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ReplyDeleteMy question is, why is being a quiet leader better than being a non-quiet leader?
ReplyDeleteThe conditions for being a quiet leader could be identical to being a non-quiet leader as they are so vague that both camps would agree. For instance: both republicans and democrats agree that America’s government should be good. What qualifies the prescriptive analysandum (good) and how it is determined to be so is left out of the discussion. At least in America, there is a defined voting system. I feel that
Picture positions X and position non-X making claims about how a system should be conceptualized. They have parallel conditions for being X and non-X; which is more compelling in the end?
X: Quiet leadership approach:
Don't overestimate how much you understand about a situation or how much you control.
Expect your motives to be mixed or even confused.
Count your political capital, and spend carefully.
Buy time before jumping into action when dealing with uncertain or hazardous situations.
Search for ways to bend the rules without breaking them.
Drill down into the technical and political aspects of a situation.
Non-X: Some non-quiet leadership approach:
Don't overestimate how much you understand about a situation or how much you control.
Expect your motives to be mixed or even confused.
Count your political capital, and spend carefully.
Buy time before jumping into action when dealing with uncertain or hazardous situations.
Search for ways to bend the rules without breaking them.
Drill down into the technical and political aspects of a situation.
I think Kinsey’s article would benefit if she laid out more explicitly the distinction between quiet leadership and its competition. She may be right despite vagueness, (Not many would disagree that a country should be good) but the difference and reason why we should be quiet leaders as opposed to other thoughts about how systems should be run is not apparent under Kinsey’s current article. She might be right, but the competition could make the same claims and be just as right.
Similarly, if the defendants of the constitution didn’t spell out more explicitly the details of it, they’d be saying something to the effect, “We should be democratic because democracy is the best.” Why? Couldn’t their opponents make the exact same claim? “We should have monarchy because monarchy is the best system.” Why?
Is this criticism of Kinsey warranted? Does the criticism make sense? Just some thoughts.
A couple things:
ReplyDelete1) I don't know who you are. Please offer the respect of letting us all know who you are.
2) Don't feel like you need to talk if you disagree with something just to hear your own voice. This article was not meant to advocate quiet leadership vs. non-quiet leadership. It was meant to present some research about an alternative people may not have thought about. There is plenty of loud leadership out there.
3) Finally, I don't remember putting anything in about politics in either the post or the blog description, so I would appreciate if we left politics out of the discussion. Let's talk about educational theory and how we can become better teachers.
Thank you for commenting and I look forward to hearing more from you, provided you aren't just trolling for controversial topics.
Thanks,
TheMathProphet
I am sorry, my name is Kevin D. I only used politics insofar as it was supposed to show the vagueness of her claims. But, I can just ask the same about teachers I suppose.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to the conditions:
Don't overestimate how much you understand about a situation or how much you control.
Expect your motives to be mixed or even confused.
Count your political capital, and spend carefully.
Buy time before jumping into action when dealing with uncertain or hazardous situations.
Search for ways to bend the rules without breaking them.
Drill down into the technical and political aspects of a situation.
Teachers are presumably supposed to follow these if they want to be considered quiet leaders right? And it is, assumed, that teachers should be quiet leaders if loud leadership approaches are not working. Now, take two teachers who have differing ideas about what it means to be "careful", what it means to be "hazardous situation". How are these to be determined when one says a hazardous situation, say, affects 1 kid and another says 9 kids, etc. I was just wondering. That's why I brought up politics as an example, not to be the main focus of the conversation but as a similar situation. People in this country, just as teachers do too, have differing opinions about how and when to do things within the system. I just thought something like voting or electing a decision maker would be crucial because upon implementation of quiet leadership classroom, school, or district-wide, there are bound to be dissenting opinions about how and when to do things.
I agree that there will be dissent, and voting doesn't solve that. I actually teach a unit on alternative voting methods and according to Arrow's theorem there is no fair voting method either.
ReplyDeleteAt my school there are lots of leaders and many of us lead in different ways toward non-competing ends. My administration cannot deal with all the issues, and "loud" leadership isn't always the best path because there are some people that automatically get defensive when that kind of leadership is used. I posted this article to remind people that there is another tool they can use and there is research out there to help them use it. There is no one tool that should be used.
Anyway, if we had one person in our building with absolute power there are those of us hard-headed enough that we would still try to influence policy and practices.
The root message I took is to listen well, wait to respond, THINK THINK THINK, remember that politics is always in play when dealing with leadership... use that capital carefully and finally act as necessary when necessary.
ReplyDeleteA follow-up article may be around leading by example.
Great thread.
:)