What Makes School Leaders Inspirational and How Does This Relate to Mentoring?

Peter Hudson

doi:10.4236/ojl.2013.24014

Abstract

Leadership comes in many forms (such as transactional, transformational,anddistributed) and its effectiveness can inspire others to achieve organisational goals and visions.Inspiration as an emotional event requires receptiveness and an awareness of social interdependence. When mentees are inspired by mentor role models they can extend personal attributes and practices.Similar to other leaders, inspiring mentors can motivate mentees to develop a strength of character and achieve goals in the workplace.What makes school leaders inspirational and how does this relate to mentoring? This qualitative study collects data from 25 experienced teachers, which involved a written questionnaire, work samples, and audio-recorded focus group discussions. These participants indicated that inspirational school leaders were those who had: 1) organisational goals (e.g., visionary, goal driven, innovative, & motivational); 2) professional skills such as being knowledgeable, communicative, and acknowledging others’ achievements; and 3) personal attributes (e.g., integrity, active listening, respectful, enthusiastic, & approachable). This research shows how mentors and school leaders can consider the inspirational attributes and practices outlined by participants in this study to inspire teaching staff. For example, an awareness of attentive listening, motivational and visionary practices, and acknowledging individual achievements can guide school leaders and mentors to inspire others for achieving organsational goals and visions.

Highlights

Leadership comes in many forms with past research identifying leadership in terms of traits, behaviours, and characteristics (Burns, 1978)
Mentors involved in the Mentoring for Effective Teaching (MET) program were asked about their leadership potential with 6 outlining existing leadership roles and 17 claiming they wanted to be in leadership roles
Positive personal attributes and school community relationships as indicators of leadership potential was noted by nine participants (4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 14, 18, 21, & 22) with opening remarks such as “I am able to listen and understand people’s concerns” (Participant 5), “I have a strong connection with people in my school community” (Participant 4), “daily interactions with all types of personalities” (Participant 12) and “I am a personal and relational leader

Summary

Introduction

Leadership comes in many forms with past research identifying leadership in terms of traits, behaviours, and characteristics (Burns, 1978). As a subset of transformational leadership, distributed leadership can inspire others in roles to assist in achieving organisational goals (Harris, 2004), where workers share responsibility within an organisation to advance workplace practices through an ethical and democratic investigative culture (Dean, 2007; Gronn, 2002; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2001). Distributed leadership transcends a single leader approach towards collaborative decision-making and may be noted as democratic leadership with an emphasis on empowering others within an organisation (Harris & Chapman, 2002), sharing responsibility and building capacity (Dean, 2007; Harris, 2004) In this respect, a successful mentor-mentee relationship would see the mentor distributing leadership to the mentee and building the mentee’s capacity towards eventual autonomy in a classroom, depending on circumstances (e.g., preservice teacher’s university year level). Collaboration and sharing of common goals has strong association with the distributed model of leadership (Karkkainen, 2000) and strong associations within effective mentor-mentee partnerships (e.g., see journal Mentoring & Tutoring)

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Conclusion