0.5 Why is school leadership preparation so complex  (Page 3/11)

• To plan means to study the future and arrange the plan for operations.
• To organizemeans to build up the material and human organization of the business, organizing both men andmaterials.
• To command means to make the staff do their work.
• To coordinate means to unite and correlate all activities (Gross 1964, p.39).

Although the appearance of these“Elements”is top down and controlling by management Fayol did make room for somedegree of shared leadership. Gross (1964) found that Fayol believed:

Administration was not the exclusive privilege or responsibility of a few people, but was spread out throughoutthe organization. Everyone should participate to some extent in the administration, but the degree of responsibility and participationincreases as one moves up in the hierarchy. (p. 40)

Thus, Fayol promoted a science of administrative leadership and believed that it should be taught asa discipline in public schools and universities in order to produce leaders in the industry and other organizations. It is notsurprising that during this time of“organizational efficiency”in business, public school administrators came under attack forrunning inefficient schools. In 1913, John Franklin Bobbitt applied Taylor’s scientific management to educational management and leadership. He believed that schools must be more efficient bycreating a centralized authority with top down control of all operations and proposed that children in schools were the rawmaterial for the organization, the curriculum clearly identified and uniformly taught and authoritarian leadership by schooladministrators was an absolute necessity to assure that schools were to be business like and efficient (Callahan&Button, 1964). This definition of school leadership remained ingrained inthe behaviors and the literature of educational administration until the late 1950’s when the human relations era emerged under the influence of Mary Parker Follett and to studies conducted byElton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger, and Chester Barnard. These giants of the human relation movement provided insights into therelationships among formal and informal groups and the importance of linking the roles and duties of the jobs and the personalities,and needs of the people doing the jobs. Follett was a clear leader and pioneer in the human relations movement and within the past tenyears has been given the credit she deserved for her influence in being the human side to organizations. She wrote that there must bea“harmonious”relationship between the job to be done and those doing the job and that conflict was a natural phenomenon inorganizations. Follett (1924) conceived three ways to handle conflict and use it for the good: (1) dominion determines a win forone side or the other; (2) compromise directs each side and gives us something to bring some peace to the situation; and (3)integration guides each side toward blending conflicting views so that each side gains in the process (p. 300). The human relationsera was a time to attempt some balance between the demands of the organization and its primacy for production with the needs anddispositions of the workers. Before the strong labor movement led by John L. Lewis, laborers had no protection from the captains ofindustry. In 1935 Lewis and his staff struggled to organize all workers into a single union and in spite the controversysurrounding his leadership strategies, the standard of living of most laborers improved. In spite of the labor movement, laborrelations departments and hundreds of articles and books on organizational relations, the search continues for a proper balancebetween the drive for higher performance and needs and welfare of the employees in most organizations. Unions and labor relationsorganizations today have specialists trained to deal with labor issues including mediation, arbitrations, and legalservices.