Bicycles and Leadership

07/16/2009

Being brave means knowing that when you fail, you don’t fail forever.
Lana del Ray, singer

Gordon Donaldson observes that teachers grow into leadership much like one learns how to ride a bike. In "The Lessons Are in the Leading," in Educational Leadership (February 2009) Donaldson observes...

"Teaching and leading are performance professions. Like riding a bicycle, they involve coordinating mind, body, and heart in sometimes intricate ways to create a successful lesson, meeting, or ride.

"Prospective leaders can study helpful models and descriptions of effective leadership, just as 7-year-olds can learn that they must hold the handlebars, sit on the seat, pedal, and steer. But the performance of leadership involves much more, just as actually trying to ride a bike involves much more. Balancing. Calming fears of crashing. Making sense of one parent's encouraging 'You can do it' and another's 'Watch out for the curb!' Summoning up the courage to finally push off.

"Leading includes a lot of preparation — reading and discussing others' advice and models, planning specific strategies, and anticipating what will happen once you begin. But as with bike riding, you never really know what's going to happen until it happens. You never know whether you can ride a bike until you've wobbled 15 feet in the general direction you'd hoped to wobble.

"Learning to lead is also distinctly different from learning to ride a bike. Eager 7-year-olds must eventually integrate the several parts of their performance task — balance, steering, pedaling, emotion — into a moving system that makes their bikes go. Leaders face the same task, but with one huge difference: The parts they are trying to integrate are already moving, and often with a will of their own. The members of the school faculty, the superintendent, the angry parent, and the upset teacher are not evenly spaced gears on a sprocket driving the wheels. Leading them requires an amazing amount of insight into what people want, mean, think and feel.

"So learning to lead takes a lot of interpersonal learning — coming to understand how your own words, behaviors, and moods shape and are shaped by those people you seek to lead."

Art of Leadership Now on CD

In a recent Exchange focus group of early childhood educators, one common concern expressed was the high cost of textbooks. To counter this, Exchange asked, "What if we put our most popular classroom resources on CD at a considerably reduced cost from the print version" ... and the response was a unanimous: "Go for it." So today we are announcing our first textbook on CD — The Art of Leadership: Managing Early Childhood Organizations. Now individuals or training institutions have a choice — they can buy the print version of Art of Leadership for $63 or the CD version for $38.

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For more information about Exchange's magazine, books, and other products pertaining to ECE, go to www.ccie.com.