Leadership through communities of practice

CEDAM's approach to leadership development through communities of practice focuses on supporting academic and general staff to perform effectively within the context of the university and in collaboration with their peers. It is a relational model of leadership, that fosters agency, self awareness and the social and professional meaning making that occurs in groups.

Leadership manifests through the actions and behaviors of participants in communities of practice, rather than through organizational role or position. In this vein leadership is a shared or distributed activity. In the context of a university culture in which collegial practices have been seen a the norm, distributed leadership is a logical further development.

In Gronn’s view (2002) distributed leadership has several distinct attributes which include that it:

• is an emergent property of a community or group of interacting individuals.
• involves concertive action through the conjoint activity of people pooling their initiative and expertise;
• widens the conventional net of leaders as its leadership boundaries are open—so it fosters both individuals and the group contributing to leadership; and
• uses and values the diversity of expertise distributed across the community.

Through the Australian Learning and Teaching Council  (ALTC) project work CEDAM has undertaken it has found that communities of practice do not fit the human capital leadership capacity approach. Rather the community of practice model favours ‘leadership  development’ a distinction based on the idea of social capital. The social capital model emphasizes building networked relationships amongst individuals that enhance cooperation and resource exchange to create organizational value, (Day, 2001: 584-585). In this view leadership is not a 'thing'  added to existing systems, rather leadership is an emergent property of social systems. Leadership  emerges with the process of creating shared meanings. 

Distributed leadership capability

CEDAM's approach to capability development focuses on supporting and developing the individual and the community through a range of measures that assist them to achieve their current goals, meet future challenges and build capacity for change.

Capability focuses on people performing at effective levels in a changing working environment. It encompasses the qualities, talents and abilities that the community has the potential to use or develop in the higher education sector. It also acknowledges the continuously evolving nature of knowledge and practice, and of the contexts in which we use them.

Capability development for leadership through communities of practice is conceptualized as a joint enterprise. It involves members, through collaborative learning and endeavour, building and extending a range of capacities.

What capacities?

Drath and Palus (1994: 23) see the relational leadership skills for distributed leadership as arising from community-oriented meaning-making capacities, including the capacity to:

• 'understand yourself as both an individual and as a socially embedded being;
• understand systems in general as mutually related, interacting, and dynamic;
• take the perspective of another; and
• engage in dialogue’.

Capacity to understand yourself

A critical factor in manifesting leadership capability is the developing awareness of ‘self as leader’. The significance of changes in self-perception, combined with increased confidence, contribute to a preparedness:

• to act in a leadership capacity, and
• to name what people do as ‘taking the lead’.

Leadership also involves a shift in valuing what we bring to our work and what we can offer staff and university as a living system. This shift in a community of practice is concomitant on making sense of ourselves as socially embedded beings in the workplace. Members actively assist each other to develop this awareness.

Over time a shift in intention occurs—away from what can I achieve, to what can we achieve together. This awareness of the source of our personal intention…away from an imposition of will to allowing for other possibilities…is accompanied by a parallel realization that we are not separate from others, or from the things we are trying to change.

Understanding systems, sense-making, context building

People in CEDAM’s communities of practice, work across disciplines or across institutions in the higher education sector to evolve broader, richer understandings of inter-institutional and inter-disciplinary issues and contexts. Through sharing and synthesizing perspectives members begin to see that local issues connect up and repeat, creating recognizable patterns across the institution, or the sector.

In communities members develop the capacity to co-construct their experiences and create and sustain more holistic explanations of organizations and systems and the intricate inter-relationships that arise between them. As such the community offers an integrating context for evolution of practice in higher education.    

Capacity to take the perspective of another

Taking the perspective of another is a way of considering the mental models and habits of thinking that inform our interactions and decisions. CoP participants are exposed to a range of different perspectives and encouraged to practice listening to each other, to suspend judgement and consider through observation and inquiry how other people do things.

The development of this capacity in CoP participants engenders a feeling a growing responsibility towards the members of the group (for example, feeling the need to support fellow members in areas outside the domain of teaching and learning).

In allowing others to make claims on them—communities of practice embed people in commitments.  [This] Implies some sort of opening up of individual boundaries, of allowing the concerns, hopes, beliefs, convictions, fears, destinies of others to become part of our own individuality. (Drath & Palus 1994:13)

Capacity to engage in dialogue

Communities of practice promote a participatory interaction based around dialogue. Dialogue, Bohm says, involves joining thinking and feeling to form a shared pool of flowing and evolving meaning that creates deeper levels of understanding  (1996: 6). It involves three qualities—suspension, inquiry and generative listening. 

Suspension requires that members let go of attachment to or investment in an idea, feeling, or belief. Instead they allow the community as a whole to consider it and together reflect  on what is there from many different perspectives.

Inquiry depends on the community engaging in an open form of questioning. It is a powerful intervention to reconsider the data that led to certain ways of thinking or to the formation of mental models. In inquiry mode the community is tracing how ideas and positions have evolved, and  what underpins them.  

Finally generative listening is learning to listen for understanding rather than listening for difference, or for argument. This form of listening requires an opening, rather than closing down of being. 

Supporting distributed leadership

In the university sector generally, and inherently within a research-intensive university the reward and recognition model is individualistic and competitive. The project work CEDAM has undertaken for ALTC has shifted the focus from individual skill development and personal recognition to a focus on community skill development and the gestalt of concertive endeavour. Through its ongoing support for communities of practice as incubators for distributed leadership CEDAM hopes to strengthen academic practice and the sense of personal and group agency and engagement among staff. 

As Kemmis observed (2005: 418) communities of practice do influence the timbre of debate, the engagement with ideas and situational understandings and can generate alternative ways of doing things. Staff in ANU's communities of practice are manifesting leadership through applying, integrating and conveying their knowledge within the university context, and  also in generating sophisticated approaches to engaging the university in organizational change.

References

Bohm, D. On Dialogue, Routledge, London, 1996 

Day, D. V. ‘Leadership Development: A Review in Context’ Leadership Quarterly, 2001, 11 (4), 581-613  

Drath, W. H., & Palus, C. J., Making Common Sense: Leadership as Mean-Making in a Community of  Practice, Greensborough, NC: Centre for Creative Leadership, 1994 

Gronn, P. Distributed Leadership. In Leithwood, K. Hallinger, P. et al (eds), Second International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002

Kemmis, S. ‘Knowing Practice: searching for saliences’, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, Volume 13,  Number 3, 2005