Executive Summary
Adopting alternative leadership concepts stands to aid the present case’s institution in realizing the anticipated changes. Several issues serve as the cause of the present problems at the entity. The organization exhibits staff, leadership, and operational issues that require quick fixing. The staff members conflict due to contradictory interests and the leadership’s inability to provide a clear direction. The leadership’s overbearing dependence on the transformational leadership style further leads to noteworthy challenges that can be fixed by adopting the right leadership principles.
Introduction
María Soledad is a transformational education leader facing several issues due to the leadership style’s significant weaknesses. The leader proposes to bring change to a falling academic giant, and almost everyone in her team seems skeptical about her method. The issue of students’ discipline attracts substantial concerns among several teachers who feel that the principal is failing. The school is known for academic excellence but now struggles significantly. The economic situation surrounding the learning institution is wanting due to the financial crisis. Teachers are concerned with the existing condition where students, both performing and non-performing, exhibit high levels of vulgarity. The school requires immediate and effective intervention, which María Soledad believes it can offer. Soledad’s endeavor to have teachers discuss and find solutions to the present challenges seems not to work. The institution’s case provides per excellent of many struggling schools due to leadership and cultural issues. The present work, thus, adopts the case study strategy to analyze the issues facing Soledad’s institution and the possible solutions to the matter.
Problem Statement
Soledad’s school exhibits several issues, comprising of staff, leadership, and operational facets. Members of the school’s staff have conflicting interests, as evidenced by their inability to hear each other. Almost all the meetings called for by Soledad fail because the staff members attending result in talking at each other, as opposed to agreeing on basic issues. Soledad is not new in the school, and her familiarity with the staff members may be the cause of contempt. The team dynamics scheme is crucial in explaining this aspect. Moreover, Soledad’s overbearing dependence on the transformational leadership style is another problem affecting the school and the present condition. Transformational leaders seek to influence change by establishing ‘community’ bonds among their subjects to push for achievements (Tomal, Schilling, & Wilhite, 2014). The model of leadership often makes individual leaders focus more on selling personal interests to followers to cause change. Better still, a major problem with the transformational style of leadership concerns the issue of expecting a ‘big picture’ without a precise way(s) to realize it (Berkovich, 2016). Soledad’s excessive dependence on the leadership model, therefore, exposes her to these two issues.
Soledad badly wants to bring change but lacks the precise way to attain it. The matter makes her staff members, like Pedro, doubt her leadership ability, thus, impacting her effectiveness as a leader. Using the transformational style of leadership makes Soledad commit the mistake of wanting to influence staff members to go a specific way to find solutions. Such a problem is explainable through the transformational leadership theory, which helps in identifying the specific issues caused by over-depending on the style, especially in school settings (Berkovich, 2016). Additionally, Soledad’s schools face noteworthy operational issues that need solutions. The institution’s culture, coupled with the leader’s application of initiatives without linking such to appropriate organizational culture change, are the two indications of operational constraints. Soledad continuously wants to apply a formula that is failing while she remains blind to the idea of the existing organizational culture. The issue makes the teachers demonstrate against the principal’s ideas and initiatives, making the situation as hard as it is currently.
Causes of the Problem: Theory-driven Analysis of the Case
The three fundamental issues causing the problem at Soledad’s institution are explainable using various scientific theories. For example, the challenge of conflicting interests and division among staff members finds its explanation in the team dynamics scheme. The theory posits that all interactions among individuals involved in a team undergo several stages, whose successful completion or failure form or destroy the team member’s ability to work together. The model further provides the storming, forming, norming, performing, and adjournment phases as the basic stages that team members go through while involved in a team. The storming, forming, and norming stages particularly exhibit special effects on a team’s performance. The two initial stages (storming and forming) are full of chaos and mistrust among team members who believe in themselves more than the other members. Teams lacking effective leaders risk remaining fixated at these two initial stages throughout their life.
The wars among staff members in Soledad’s institution depict significant fixation at the storming and forming stages. The principal’s desire to deliver results seems to push her to focus on the team’s performance phase before taking care of the initial critical stages. The outcome of such a blander is the development of many years teams that cannot deliberate on an issue. Transformational leadership theory further explains the leadership and operational issues at Soledad’s organization. The philosophy faults leaders’ aspect of having a ‘big picture,’ which they lack a formula or strategy to implement. Berkovich (2016) also says that many transformational leaders’ trait of trying to please everyone by making things free is a major source of concern, especially in the school setting. That is because the move often grants unnecessary freedom to learners, like in the case of Soledad’s institution, thus, leading to chaos in the long run. The point that the various theories’ arguments exist in the present case implies their applicability and potential to explain the issues at hand.
Decision Criteria/Alternative Solutions
The various issues existing at Soledad’s institution have solutions that the entity can adopt. Attaching a solution to each of the three major issues makes resolving the whole problem easy. For instance, adopting the distributed leadership principle effectively solves the problem of conflicting interests and division among staff members. The (distributed leadership) model is a correction to the transformational leadership style. The distributed leadership style prevents leaders from becoming the center of things and all decisions. Rather, the style of management identifies several parties exhibiting responsibilities in different areas and grants them (the parties) the independence to undertake crucial verdicts in their respective areas (Tomal et al., 2014). Adopting the concepts of distributed leadership style in the present case stands to grant several persons the ability to influence change and, thus, save Soledad from burning out and appearing as controlling.
Blending transformational leadership traits with transactional leadership practices also promises Soledad to manage the issue of students’ discipline better. The transactional leadership model finds its basis in the behavioral education philosophies, which believe that students’ behavior is manageable through the punishment and reward facets (Tomal et al., 2014). Utilizing transactional leadership elements further will help Soledad to differentiate her treatment of students from the way she treats teachers. The leader needs to maintain the transformational administration traits among teachers but applies transactional leadership to students to force change. Lastly, Soledad needs to adopt participative leadership features and a workout strategy to resolve the existing operational challenges at the school. The work-out paradigm specifically promises to utilize the staff members and outside relevant professionals (stakeholders) to come up with effective committees that deliver real results without putting pressure on a single person (Tomal et al., 2014). As such, using various tactics promises to deliver real solutions to the institution that will take it to its original route.
Conclusion
Adopting the distributed, transactional, and participative leadership styles and the workout strategy promises to resolve all the root cause problems in the case described above. Soledad’s mistaken leadership style bears noteworthy blame for the several challenges facing her institution. Her over-dependence on a controversial leadership model, for example, makes her appear weak and inexperienced among her staff members. The issue leaves her team fixated on the storming and forming phases of team dynamics. The leader’s insistence on having the unformed team deliver thus causes much friction, where her staff members directly challenge her. The issue leads to burnout, which forces Soledad to become doubtful and unable to lead the team. Soledad needs to look for additional information concerning the distributed, transactional, and participative leadership styles, together with the workout strategy. The leader can realize this goal by undertaking a short management course lasting for six months. Doing this, thus, promises to resolve the whole issue as the institution suffers due to poor leaders and a lack of information.
References
Berkovich, I. (2016). School leaders and transformational leadership theory: Time to part ways?Journal of Educational Administration, 54(5), 609-622.
Tomal, D. R., Schilling, C. A., & Wilhite, R. K. (2014). The teacher leader: Core competencies and strategies for effective leadership. Rowman & Littlefield.