Soft Lessons of Leadership - 4

So far, in this series of blogs, we've looked at the soft (not really, but descriptive) leadership qualities such as passion, loyalty, courage, trust, relationships, and integrity. In this fourth (and final) posting in this particular thread, I'd like to focus on two other "soft" qualities: persistence and resilience. Like the other six, these help to form the heart of a leader as well as help to shape his/her responses to the trials of leading an organization, particularly a school or school distict.

Persistence is not to be confused with stubbornness or inflexibility. Those more negative qualities connote a lack of willingness to see emerging realities and make adjustments to accommodate them. In terms of a leadership quality, persistence means taking the long view and not assuming that the here and now is necessarily the only possible reality. The persistent leader keeps vision and goals in front of everyone's eyes, so that they can keep, as constant, the result they are working towards. In a perfect world, there would be no setbacks, no interruptions of progress, no losses of confidence, resources, or commitment, and certainly no loss of internal and external support. However, educational leadership does not exist in a perfect world, and stuff just happens. The persistent leader would hold vision and goals as pretty constant, but would seek strategies and tactics to help keep the organization moving forward, even if those strategies and tactics were different from before. Persistence feeds well into a results-oriented school organization where desired outcomes are typically held constant and the work to accomplish the results is typically more variable.

Resilience is closely related to persistence, but it is different. Resiliency is the leader's ability to absorb a setback, bounce back from the setback and re-focus both energy and effort. This is not to be confused with heroics. The leader is not bigger than the organization he/she leads. Effective leaders recognize that no path to successful change is smooth and without difficulties. Some difficulties are bigger than others, and many are not deserved. Our current economic meltdown of 2008 is a prime example. Big or small, deserved or not doesn’t matter nearly as much as what the leader does about it. We tend to respect those who refuse to cave under pressure, and we reserve unflattering epithets for those who do capitulate under pressure. The resilient leader convinces us that we, collectively, can weather the storm, has plans and structures in place to enable everyone to bounce back, and then acknowleges, publicly and privately, the examples of resiliency in others.

I hope these 8 soft lessons of leadership have been helpful in shaping a broader and deeper perspective on leadership beyond the more popular theories and models, however good they might be. I appreciate your comments, thoughts, and even critiques. The next thread or theme will again be a series of reflections, but on a perspective for leading organizational change.