Imaginative Leadership: Facilitative Leadership

414 Words1 Page

Facilitative leadership is defined as developing shared governance structures, demonstrating trust in teachers, and encouraging teacher input, autonomy and innovation, giving rewards, and providing support; enabling others to act is defined as supporting other people's decisions, allowing people to choose how to do their work, developing cooperative relationships, listening to diverse points of view, ensuring that people grow in their jobs, and treating people with dignity and respect (Blase & Blase, 1996; Kouzes & Posner, 1995). Rational frame. The school head focuses on organization structure and provides insight into how leaders within organizations can better organize and structure organizations, groups, and teams to get results (Bolman …show more content…

The leader focuses on the political dynamics in organizations and examines how leaders in organizations can understand power and conflict, build coalitions, hone political skills, and deal with internal and external politics (Bolman & Deal, 1984). Hence, few leaders use more than two of these frames; yet in a facilitative environment, all are important. For example, a principal who is facilitating greater faculty involvement in teacher evaluation is more likely to succeed if he or she can recognize the anxiety that evaluation causes, human resource frame; anticipate teacher concerns about judging peers, political frame; create support by casting the issue in terms of shared expertise, symbolic frame; and judge whether the new procedures are fulfilling their intended purpose, rational frame Bolman and Deal (1991). Thus, the radically different assumptions of facilitative leadership are likely to create ambiguity and discomfort. Conley and Goldman characterize facilitation as "the management of tensions." Without question, the most serious issue is the blurring of accountability. Facilitative leadership creates a landscape of constantly shifting responsibilities and relationships, yet the formal system continues to turn to one person for results. Principals may wonder about the wisdom of entrusting so much to those who will not share the accountability; teachers may be nervous about being enveloped in schoolwide controversies from which they are normally buffered (Conley and Goldman; Mark Smylie and Jean Brownlee-Conyers,

Open Document