Effective School Management

9
Organizations

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EFFECTIVE SCHOOL MANAGEMENT
conceive it as one of their most important tasks to keep their schools
moving.  ‘My recurring nightmare is stagnation and not moving forward’,
said one.
Interestingly, this same idea of inducing movement was picked up as a key
activity of executives of successful companies by Peters and Waterman in In
Search of Excellence (1995, p. 119). For instance, they quote a Cadbury’s
executive as saying ‘Ready. Fire. Aim’. And (p. 107):
organizations are to be sailed rather than driven … the effectiveness of
leadership often depends on being able to time interventions so that the
force of natural organizational processes amplifies the interventions
rather than dampens them … organizational design is more like
building a snow fence to deflect drifting snow than like building a
snowman.
Similarly, John Harvey-Jones, a former chairman of ICI, said in a nautical
metaphor: ‘I know this sounds terrible, but I’m more interested in speed than
direction. Once you get moving, you can sort of veer and tack. But the
important thing is, you’re moving’ (Huxley, 1984).
So the message to organization managers is: get moving! Don’t drive it;
steer it. Use the force of the wind and snowstorm, not just letting them buffet
you around like a cork, but to help you aim in roughly the right direction.
Once you have got it on the right course and everyone knows in what
direction you are trying to head, you can start to close down the broad
objectives and set more specific markers of progress, such as targets. For
example, if you want to stimulate new thinking on curriculum development,
you could assemble a small informal group of, perhaps, staff, pupils and
parents who are constructively dissatisfied with the present curriculum, and
give them the general aim of helping you to decide what most needs change.
You may not agree with all they say, but you will probably like at least one
suggestion which you might give to, say, the English department to shape
into a concrete proposal by the end of the Easter term. After discussion, you
might agree a target date for incorporating the change into next year’s
curriculum.
The same approach is needed for the constituent parts of the organization