Welcome to

Sustainable
Leadership

Andy Hargreaves

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Sustainable development

Sustainable development, democracy and

peace are indivisible as an idea whose time
has come.

Wangari Maathai

2
Development of the term “sustainability”
1980 Term first coined by Lester Brown, founder of the World
Watch Institute

1987 Sustainable development defined by Brundtland Report of

the World Commission on Environment and Development

1992 Agenda 21, United Nations Conference on Environment

and Development, Rio De Janeiro systematically
addressed sustainable development

2002 United Nations Johannesburg Summit – developed

practical goals for sustainable development

2005 Beginning of UN Decade of Education for Sustainable

Development

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United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development
2005-2015

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Sustainability
Sustainability does not simply mean whether
something can last. It addresses how
particular initiatives can be developed
without compromising the development of
others in the surrounding environment, now
and in the future.

Hargreaves & Fink 2000

5
Sustainable leadership
Sustainable leadership matters, spreads and
lasts. It is a shared responsibility that does
not unduly deplete human or financial
resources, and that cares for and avoids
exerting damage on the surrounding
educational and community environment.

Hargreaves & Fink 2003

6
Sustainability
Sustainability is the capacity of a
system to engage in the complexities of
continuous improvement consistent
with deep values of human purpose.

Fullan 2004

7
Educational Lessons of Environmental
Sustainability
• Rich diversity, not soulless standardization
• Taking the long view
• Act urgently for change, wait patiently for results
• Prudence about conserving and renewing human
and financial resources
• Examine the impact of our improvement efforts on
others
• All of us can be activists and make a difference

Hargreaves & Fink 2006

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Built to Last Companies
• Put purpose before profit
• Preserve long-standing purposes amid the pursuit of
change
• Start slowly, advance persistently
• Do not depend on a single, visionary leader
• Grow their own leadership, instead of importing
others
• Learn from diverse experimentation

Collins & Porras 1994

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Seven principles of sustainable
leadership
1 Depth It matters

2 Endurance It lasts

3 Breadth It spreads

4 Justice It does not harm the

surrounding
environment

Continued…
10
Seven principles of sustainable
leadership
5 Diversity It promotes diversity
& cohesion
It conserves
6 Resourcefulness expenditure

It honours the past

7 Conservation in creating the
future

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Unsustainability
Repetitive change syndrome is

Initiative overload
+
Change-related chaos

Abrahamson 2004

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Initiative Overload

The tendency of organizations to launch

more change initiatives than anyone
could ever reasonably handle

Abrahamson 2004

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Change-related Chaos
The continuous state of upheaval that
results when so many waves of
initiatives have worked through at the
organization that hardly anyone knows
which change they’re implementing or
why

Abrahamson 2004

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Unsustainability
Imposed, short-term targets (or
adequate yearly progress) transgress
every principle of sustainable
leadership and learning

Hargreaves & Fink 2006

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Principle 1: Depth
Sustainable leadership
matters. It
preserves, protects,
and promotes deep
and broad learning
for all in
relationships of care
for others.

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Nelson Mandela
The human body has an
enormous capacity for
adjusting to trying
circumstances. I have found
that one can bear the
unbearable if one can keep
one’s spirits strong even
when one’s body is being
tested. Strong convictions
are the secret of surviving
deprivation: your spirit can
be full even when your
stomach is empty.

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1. Depth
The Two Hungers
In Africa, they say there are two hungers, the lesser
hunger and the greater hunger.

• The lesser hunger is for the things that sustain life,

the goods, and services, and the money to pay for
them, which we all need.

• The greater hunger is for the answer to the question

‘why’, for some understanding of what life is for.

Handy 1997

1. Depth 18
Product Integrity
Clif Bar’s Philosophy of Sustainability

Sustaining…
• our brands
• our company
• our people
• our community
• our planet

1. Depth 19
Standards and Sustainability
Learning  Achievement  Testing

NOT

Testing  Achievement  Learning

Hargreaves & Fink, 2006

1. Depth 20
The four pillars of learning
1. Learning to know
2. Learning to do
3. Learning to be
4. Learning to live together
UNESCO 1996

1. Depth 21
The four pillars of learning
1. Learning to know
2. Learning to do
3. Learning to be
4. Learning to live together
UNESCO 1996
5. Learning to live sustainably
Hargreaves & Fink, 2006

1. Depth 22
Basics
Old basics New basics
• Literacy • Multiliteracy
• Numeracy • Creativity
• Obedience • Communication
• Punctuality • IT
• Teamwork
• Lifelong Learning
• Adaptation & Change
• Environmental
Responsibility

1. Depth 23
Slow Knowing
The unconscious realms of the human mind will
successfully accomplish a number of important tasks
if they are given the time. They will learn patterns of
a degree of subtlety which normal consciousness
cannot even see; make sense out of situations that are
too complex to analyze; and get to the bottom of
certain difficult issues much more successfully than
the questing intellect.

Claxton 1997

1. Depth 24
What does the doctor reply?

1. Depth 25
Activity

1. Depth 26
Slow forms of knowing
• are tolerant of the faint, fleeting, marginal and ambiguous
• like to dwell on details that do not fit or immediately make
sense
• are relaxed, leisurely and playful
• are willing to explore without knowing what they are looking
for
• see ignorance and confusion as the ground from which
understanding may spring
• are receptive rather than proactive
• are happy to relinquish the sense of control over the directions
the mind spontaneously takes
• treat seriously ideas that come ‘out of the blue’

Claxton, 1997

1. Depth 27
Slow schooling
• starts formal learning later
• reduces testing
• increases curriculum flexibility
• emphasizes enjoyment
• doesn’t hurry the child
• rehabilitates play alongside purpose

Honore, 2004

1. Depth 28
Leaders of Sustaining Learning
• Passionately advocate and defend deep learning for all students
• Combine and commit to old and new basics
• Put learning, before achievement, before testing
• Make learning the paramount priority
• Become more knowledgeable about learning
• Make learning transparent
• Be omnipresent witnesses to learning
• Practise evidence-informed, inquiry-based leadership
• Promote assessment for learning
• Engage students in decisions about their learning
• Involve parents in their children’s learning
• Model effective adult learning
• Create the emotional conditions for learning

Hargreaves & Fink, 2006

1. Depth 29
Principle 2: Endurance
Sustainable
leadership lasts. It
preserves and
advances the most
valuable aspects of
learning and life
over time, year
upon year, from one
leader to the next.

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Endurance
• It is a common defect in men not to consider
in good weather the possibility of a tempest
Machiavelli, 1532
• All leaders, no matter how charismatic or
visionary, eventually die
Collins & Porras, 1994
• Few things succeed less than leadership
succession
Hargreaves & Fink, 2006

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2. Endurance
Approaches to succession
The public sector… The private sector…

• Passively lets • Actively recruits

candidates emerge and encourages
• Focuses on the short potential leaders
term • Takes the long view
• Handles succession • Manages succession
informally more formally

Continued…
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2. Endurance
Approaches to succession
The public sector… The private sector…

• Seeks replacement for • Defines future

existing roles leadership skills and
aptitudes
• Selects in relation to • Emphasises flexibility
current competencies and lifelong learning in
the face of changing
needs
• Views succession
planning as a cost • Views succession
planning as an asset

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2. Endurance
Four Issues in Succession

1. Succession Planning
2. Succession Management
3. Succession Duration & Frequency
4. Succession and the Self

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2. Endurance
Succession Planning Patterns
Continuity Discontinuity

Planned Planned Planned

(purposeful) Continuity Discontinuity

Unplanned Unplanned Unplanned

(accidental/ Continuity Discontinuity
unintentional)

Hargreaves & Fink

2006

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2. Endurance
Good succession plans
• Are prepared long before the leader’s anticipated departure or
even from the outset of their appointment
• Give other people proper time to prepare
• Are incorporated in all school improvement plans
• Are the responsibility of many, rather than the prerogative of
lone leaders who tend to want to clone themselves
• Are based on a clear diagnosis of the school’s existing stage of
development and future needs for improvement
• Are transparently linked to clearly defined leadership
standards and competencies that are needed for the next phase
of improvement

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2. Endurance
Successful Succession Management
• Distributes leadership effectively
• Builds strong professional communities
• Deepens and broadens the pools of leadership talent
• Establishes leadership development schools
• Stresses future leadership competencies
• Supports and sponsors aspiring school leaders
• Replaces charismatic leadership with inspirational
leadership
• Plans early for the incumbent leader’s exit
• Moderates and monitors leadership succession
frequency

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2. Endurance
Three Cultures of Teaching
• Veteran dominated
– serves experienced teacher interests
– feels exclusionary
– offers few leadership opportunities

• Novice orientated
– surrounded by fellow novices
– feels inclusive
– driven by enthusiasm rather than expertise

• Blended
– provides mentoring
– offers leadership
– reciprocal learning
Johnson et al, 2004

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2. Endurance
Sound succession, strong selves, through
• Availability of counselling and coaching for exiting leaders
• Quick, clear and open communication of reasons for departure
• Acceptance of emotional confusion and vulnerability
• Celebration of the leader’s contributions
• Recognition that succession is subject to the four stages of grief
– denial, awakening, reflection and execution
• Confrontation of the Messiah and Rebecca myths
• Prepares oneself and others early for the possibility of
succession

Hargreaves & Fink, 2006

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2. Endurance
Principle 3: Breadth
Sustainable
leadership spreads.
It sustains as well as
depends on the
leadership of others

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 Culture and Contract Regimes

-
CONTRACT +
Permissive Corrosive
-
Individualism Individualism
CULTURE

=
Collaborative Professional
Cultures Learning
Communities
Contrived Performance
+
Collegiality Training Sects

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3. Breadth
Professional learning community
Learning &
Collaboration teaching focus

Achievement and
Engagement

Learning, Use of
reflection & evidence
review

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3. Breadth
 43
3. Breadth
Professional learning communities
aren’t…
X Merely convivial and congenial – they are
demanding and critical
X Just a collection of stilted teams looking at data
together
X Obsessed with scores and results, instead of
depth of learning
X Forced and imposed, they are facilitated and
supported
X Ways to hijack teachers to carry out
administrative agendas

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3. Breadth
Communities and Sects
Professional learning Performance training
communities sects
• Transform • Transfer knowledge
knowledge • Imposed
• Shared enquiry requirements
• Evidence informed • Results driven
• Situated certainty • False certainty

Continued…
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3. Breadth
Communities and Sects
Professional learning Performance training
communities sects
• Local solutions • Standardised scripts
• Deference to
• Joint responsibility authority
• Intensive training
• Continuous learning
• Communities of • Sects of
practice performance

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3. Breadth
Relationships
It’s hard to eat something you’ve had a
relationship with

Hargreaves & Fullan, 1998

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3. Breadth
Distributed leadership
sees leadership practice as a product of the
interaction of school leaders, followers and their
situation.
• Leadership practice involves multiple individuals
within and outside formal leadership positions
• Leadership practice is not done to followers.
Followers are themselves part of leadership practice.
• It is not the actions of individuals, but the
interactions among them that matter most in
leadership practice.

Spillane, 2005

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3. Breadth
Raising the temperature of distributed
leadership
Too hot Anarchy

Assertive distribution

Emergent distribution

Guided distribution

Progressive delegation

Traditional delegation

Too cold Autocracy

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3. Breadth
Principle 4: Justice

Sustainable leadership
does no harm to and
actively improves the
surrounding
environment by finding
ways to share
knowledge and
resources with
neighboring schools
and the local
communities.

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Sustainability and Social Justice
 do not steal your neighbour’s capacity
 use multiple indicators of accountability
 emphasize collective accountability
 coach a less successful partner school
 make a definable contribution to the
community your school is in
 pair with a school in a different social or
natural environment
 collaborate with your competitors

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4. Justice
Responsible leadership
Mutual relationships among the domains
of ethical responsibility

Starratt, 2005

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4. Justice
Principle 5: Diversity
Sustainable leadership
promotes cohesive diversity
and avoids aligned
standardization of policy,
curriculum, assessment, and
staff development and
training in teaching and
learning. It fosters and
learns from diversity and
creates cohesion and
networking among its richly
varying components.

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Differences

You learn more

from people who are
different from you,
than ones who are
the same

Hargreaves & Fullan, 1998

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5. Diversity
Effective organizations are
characterized by:
• A framework of common and enduring values, goals and
purposes
• Possession and development of variability or diversity in skills,
talents and identities
• Processes that promote interaction and cross-pollination of
ideas and influences across this variability
• Permeability to outside influences
• Emergence of new ideas, structures, and processes as diverse
elements interconnect and new ones intrude from the outside
• Flexibility and adaptability in response to environmental
change
• Resilience in the face of and in response to threats and
adversity

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5. Diversity
Networked learning communities
• Enable and encourage schools to share and
transfer the considerable knowledge already
in existence that can help children learn
better. Individual schools have limited
knowledge, but collectively they have almost
as much as they need.
• Stimulate the professional fulfilment and
motivation that comes from learning and
interacting with colleagues in ways that help
teachers be more effective with their own
students.

Continued…
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5. Diversity
Networked learning communities
• Capitalize on positive diversity across teachers and
schools who serve different kinds of students, or who
vary in how they respond to them, rather than
maintaining the negative diversity of cut-throat
competition that prevents mutual learning and
assistance, or than denying diversity altogether
through imposition of standardized solutions.
• Provide teachers and others with opportunities for
lateral leadership of people, programs and problem-
solving beyond one’s own school setting.

Continued…
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5. Diversity
Other advantages
• they provide opportunities to draw on and
develop evidence-informed, research-derived
practice
• they promote innovation and its dissemination
across large groups of interested schools
• they give teachers more of a voice in
professional and school-based decision-
making

Continued…
58
5. Diversity
Other advantages
• they help personalize every school as a learning
community, enabling them to adopt emergent
solutions to their own needs, that are diffused and
made available throughout the network, instead of
being subjected to overly prescribed programmes.
• they are flexible and resilient in the face of crises or
misdirected system initiatives that turn out to be
unsuccessful – allowing new learning and fresh
solutions to emerge and fill the gap that the false
starts and failures have left behind.

Jackson, 2006

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5. Diversity
Network risks
• Restricted to enthusiasts
• Shared delusions
• Self-indulgent
• Limited scale
• Unaccountable
• Over-regulation
• Over-participation

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5. Diversity
Strong networks have…
• Strong branding, definite products
• Clear moral purpose
• Clarity, focus, discipline
• Evidence informed substance
• Accessibility in real and chosen time
• Hacker ethic
• Embedded in altered structures
• Support from lateral leadership
• PLCs as nodes

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5. Diversity
Networking and interaction
• Paired schools
• University-school
partnerships
• Internet communities
• Families of schools
• Collaborative
accountability
• Professional networks

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5. Diversity
Principle 6: Resourcefulness
Sustainable leadership
develops and does not
deplete material and
human resources. It
renews people’s energy.
Sustainable leadership
is prudent and
resourceful leadership
that wastes neither its
money nor its people.

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Two theories of energy
Energy Energy

Entropy Exchange

Restraint Renewal

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6. Resourcefulness
Four Forms of Energy Renewal
1. Physical Renewal
2. Emotional Renewal
3. Intellectual Renewal
4. Spiritual Renewal

Loehr & Schwartz

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6. Resourcefulness
Energy restraint
• No achievement without investment
• Shared targets, not imposed ones
• Slow leading, slow learning
• Time
• Political continuity and stability

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6. Resourcefulness
Three Sources of Renewal
Trust

Confidence Positive emotion

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6. Resourcefulness
Three forms of trust & betrayal
Communication

Contract Competence

Hargreaves, 2002

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6. Resourcefulness
Trust involves
• reliability and predictability
• reaching shared understanding
• assumptions of good faith
• trusting yourself as well as others
• trusting processes as well as people

69
6. Resourcefulness
Betrayal involves
• loss of trust or absence of trust
• spectacular breakdowns of trust
• small, accumulated breaches of trust

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6. Resourcefulness
 Page 76

Contractual trust
 meeting obligations
 completing contracts
 keeping promises

71
6. Resourcefulness
…and Betrayal
X not pulling one’s weight
X poor work-rate or effort
X teaching the same thing
X clockwatching
X complaining without commitment
X self-servingness

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6. Resourcefulness
Competence Trust
 trust own & others’ capability
 effective delegation
 providing professional growth &
development

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6. Resourcefulness
…and Betrayal
X constant criticism/dissatisfaction
with others
X martyrdom/inability to delegate
X abandon people when faults first
appear
X recruitment and retention
problems
X micromanagement, scripting,
standardization

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6. Resourcefulness
Communication Trust
 clear, high-quality, open and
frequent communication
 sharing information, admitting
mistakes
 telling the truth, keeping
confidences

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6. Resourcefulness
…and Betrayal
X malicious / mischievous gossiping
X public shaming / humiliation in front of:
colleagues
superiors
students
X miscommunication/misunderstanding
X self-servingness

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6. Resourcefulness
Conclusion
Many problems that we treat as being a result
of other people’s contract or competence
betrayal, are actually a result of their or our
communication
problems.
In other words…
Competence failures or contractual failures
are often really communication failures.

77
6. Resourcefulness
 Page 83

Principle 7: Conservation

Sustainable
leadership respects
and builds on the
past in its quest to
create a better
future.

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Modes of organisational forgetting

Established
New Knowledge
Knowledge

Failure to Failure to
Accidental consolidate maintain
DISSIPATION DEGRADATIO
N

Abandoned Managed
Purposeful innovation unlearning
SUSPENSION PURGING

DeHolan & Phillips, 2004

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7. Conservation
The Past, Present & Future of Change
 Acknowledge the past. Preserve the best.
Learn from the rest.
 Wildness, diversity and disorder have
value.
 The past is not pure. Do not romanticize it.
 The past has no Golden Age to which
we should return.
 We view the past differently. We
must therefore interpret it together.
 When we dismiss or demean the past,
we fuel defensive nostalgia among its
bearers.

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7. Conservation
Creative Recombination for Renewal
From: To:
Firing and rehiring Redeploying the talent
companies already have
Developing new
Plugging into & reinventing
communications
existing social networks

Inventing new values Reviving and renewing

existing values
Re-engineering new Salvaging existing good
processes Processes
Reworking and rebuilding
Complete restructuring
existing structures
Abrahamson, 2004

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7. Conservation
Stop, Start, Continue…
STOP START
What is less What is more
valuable valuable

CONTINUE SUBVERT
What remains What is formally required
highly valuable but threatens what is
valuable

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7. Conservation
Conserving the past through…
• Retreats that renew the vision
• Audits of the organization’s memories of analogous change
• Asset inventories of existing experience and knowledge
• Organizational abandonment meetings
• Appointments made mid-term to cultivate learning of the
culture
• Storytelling to pass on wisdom
• Mentoring that runs in both directions
• Good written records
• Creation of blended professional cultures
• Creative recombination, not repetitive change

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7. Conservation
Short-term strategies
• Exam strategies
• Revision sessions
• Tutoring
• Recognition of achievements
• Pupil-teacher conferences
• Bananas and water

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5. Diversity
Medium-term strategies
• Teacher mentor programs
• SAM technology
• Data-driven assessment for targeted
instruction
• Training days

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5. Diversity
Long-term strategies
• Restructuring
• Student voice
• Continuous improvement
• Teaching and learning

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5. Diversity
Thank you

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