Understanding Leadership

I love using principalaim to highlight an educational perspective that I share or that I am wrestling with. Today’s “Read This Now!” features a great post about leadership by Liz Ryan CEO and Founder of Human Workplace.

If you have not heard of Liz Ryan, I am happy to introduce her to you because she is doing amazing things to help individuals and organizations understand the meaning of real leadership and its connection with her concept of the “human workplace.” According to Ryan, the human workplace is a concept that 21st century organizations are using to help foster teamwork and collaboration among administrators and the employees they supervise.

Like Ryan, I believe “real leaders use influence rather than power to pursue their goals.” This is an essential piece of Ryan’s human workplace framework. Why? It is important because Ryan believes the best organizations have leaders who can rise above “fear-based, petty bureaucrats” to a level of leadership that is more inclusive and less exclusive.

While Ryan’s posts do not focus on education specifically; her posts do address issues of leadership and organizational health that apply to the work that we do in our schools each day. Ultimately, I believe Ryan’s ideas about leadership just make good sense and can help schools create a new framework in which to design healthier, sustainable institutions of learning. tlb