Ch 4 Principles of Action by Fenwick English

1
Chapter 4(Dr. Fenwick W. English)Individual
Human Agency and Principles of Action

• Lavada Moore Walden
• William Allan Kritsonis, PhD

2

• The inescapable dilemma of every leader is the
  gap between deeply held personal beliefs
  concerning right and wrong, good and evil, and
  the requirements of working in environments in
  which these principles become muddled in a messy
  world.
• Fenwick W. English

3
Overview

• Weberian principle of action
• Gardner Cognitive Model of Leadership
• The moral leader
• The pragmatic leader
• The wounded leader

4

• leaders are fragile instruments. As in
  classical tragedy, their very virtues often
  contain the seeds of failures and disasters and
  self-knowledge is not generally their strongest
  suit.
• Carnes Lord (2003)

5
Weberian Principle of Action

• Humans can become real and knowable by examining
  their actions
• Four types of action

6
Type 1 Zweckrationalitat

• Instrumental leadership traditional educational
  leadership decision making in which an
  administrator anticipates the costs and benefits
  of reaching a desired set of goals

7
Type 2 Wertrationalitat

• Decision is approached and engaged to attain an
  ethical, aesthetic, moral, or religious ideal or
  principle

8
Type 3 Affectual

• based purely on the emotional response to a
  situation

9
Type 4 Traditional

• Ingrained habitation - A decision made from
  following past practices irrespective of whether
  the reason for it is apparent

10
The Moment of Leadership

• The first thing a leader does is situate himself
  in a public discourse, and construct a narrative
  relating what has been done previously to what he
  proposes to do in the moment at hand. The basic
  parameters of the politics of leadership is set
  here. Scott Skowronek

11
The Good Ole Days

• Consulting the Oracle of Dephi

• Leaders must always look forward
• Advice in ancient times
• Oracles or seers
• Oracle of Delphi
• Rely on core of personal values in
• present time

12
The Gardner Cognitive Model of Leadership

• Leaders traffic in stories or narratives
• Followers create leaders
• Followers search for leaders
• Leadership is an artful and purposive construct
  of a voice and a message that resonates with the
  people
• Followers are the doers

13
Gardner continued

• Leaders give voice, make sense of, and interpret
  and rationalize what followers are perceiving and
  feeling
• A common group or subgroup confront, or are
  surrounded by conditions, hardships, or
  deprivations
• Continued interaction with negativity creates a
  shared sense of community

14
Gardner continued

• This creates situation in which leaders rise up
  and give voice to their emotions or privations
• Charisma magnetic personality the greatest
  revolutionary force
• Leaders emerge to meet the needs of the followers
  facing similar circumstances
• Follower opinions create a movement

15
Gardner continued

• Leaders compete for followers by engaging in
  stories or narratives Ex Civil Rights
  Movement
• Born leaders and born followers
• Followers seek social structure, hierarchy, or
  purpose
• Followers seek leaders to help make sense of what
  may often appear overwhelming
• Followers require a sense of identity and mission
• Followers need assurance that their privations
  are not in vain

16
Gardner continued

• Leaders tell identity stories- give answers to
  questions asked when confronting uncertainty and
  ambiguity
• Stories contain symbols, signs, and metaphors
  that the followers already know and understand
• Simple

17
Gardner continued

• Leaders must embody the beliefs they espouse
• When leaders ask their constituents to die for a
  certain cause, the leaders must appear credible.
  Leaders must convincingly embody the stories they
  tell to their audience.

18

• Weber leadership legitimacy of those leaders
  who have attracted followers last only so long as
  the belief in its charismatic inspiration
  remains.
• Charisma is contradictory to requirements of
  organization routinization, which is retained by
  stability rules of office with predictable
  relationships
• Not everyone with authority is a leader

19
Moral Discourse

• Written and spoken communication
• The character of modern leadership reveals itself
  fully only from a vantage point beyond itself
• Some leaders and followers see their values as
  fixed to standards they believe extend through
  time, are universal Plato perspective
• Others swayed by possibilities within immediate
  political or social contexts Sophists

20
Who the Leader Is
And what is important

• Decisions comprised of two levels
• 1. Nature of the decision itself
• 2. Ideas, perceptions, assumptions, and
  values

21

• Leaders should have some idea of the medium in
  which potential actions move in their heads,
  their hearts, and the language and culture that
  defines what they think and how they feel and
  perceive the outside world.
• Potential decisions rest on perceptions and
  judgments value system

22

• Morality does not dissolve all disputes
• Common good focus for leader in deciding
  competing values
• School law relies on constitutional
  interpretation Whose common good?

23
Sophists Perspective

• pursuit of truth must be taken without regard to
  moral values - we cannot know in advance what the
  truth will turn out to be
• common good many temporary arrangements
  worked out between conflicted elements in society
• Protagorian leader Abraham Lincoln

24
Platos Perspective

• common good based on enduring and permanent
  values based on disciplined thinking
• Ideal for the unchanging lies at the core of
  Christian theology
• Ex William Lloyd Garrison - abolitionists

25

• One of the first task of leadership is to
  maintain organizational unity
• Leaders must observe the laws that govern his or
  her office
• Laws often unjust and unfair
• Leaders who are working to change laws must
  ignore or break them in protest
• If a leader belongs to an organization that
  supports unjust laws, s(he) may be forced to
  forfeit membership or have their cause
  compromised

26
The Wounded Leader

• Leadership roles often do not support, confirm,
  or resonate with the psychic needs of the person
  who become a leader
• The gap between the demand of the organizational
  role and the requirements for dramatic
  effectiveness may cause a leader to become lost
  and is put in a position in which her moral
  compass has become confused or points to a false
  position

27

• The healing process for a wounded leader begins
  with permitting herself to tell her own story
• Wounding is not the sign of an inept leader
• - comes with territory of leadership
• - not if, but when
• - what do you do about it

28
The Wounding Process

• Time to engage in critical self-reflection and
  growth
• Opportunity to recast public image
• Time to rethink how you can work day to day
  within the value system in which you believe and
  reset your moral compass
• Know thyself