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Date:         Mon, 25 Jan 1993 16:02:53 EST
Reply-To:     VICKERY@sued.syr.edu
From:         Tom Rusk Vickery <VICKERY@SUED.SYR.EDU>
Subject:      Empowerment, leaders & workers, paradox!
Comments: To: 6105KAISERJ@vmsf.csd.mu.edu, ERL-L@vm.tcs.tulane.edu

Jeff Kaiser's statement that

<*>After 20 years of consulting in industrial management and educational
<*>administration, I am convinced that no paradox exists. The most effective
<*>leaders are those using extensive management skills in empowering
<*>subordinates. We can not expect subordinates to exhibit leadership
<*>skills after having spent years under the press of linear Weberian
<*>hierarchies.

sounds like a good sales pitch for a vendor of training, but I think
he has missed my point.  Let me use as an analogy an experience that
many of us have had.  I advertise and offer a graduate course in X; a
student enrolls and proceeds to do Y, perhaps because he/she is more
intersted in Y than X, but for whatever reason, the student is not
doing the work of the course as the professor, in designing the
course, thinks it should be done.  To the extent that the professor
reaches out to the student and negotiates some sort of compromise so
that some portion of the professor's agenda is addressed and some
portion of the student's also, then the course "works," but it isn't
the same course that was originally envisioned.

To the extent that the student is excited about, sees the need for,
and/or is "involved" in the subject matter of the course, the student
should strive mightily to succeed.  Likewise to the extent that the
professor is excited about, sees the need for..., then the professor
should do his/her best to teach the course well.  What happens if
only one of these conditions can be met at a time?  It may be like the
relationship between scientists and ghosts:  If a necessary condition
for the presence of a ghost is the absence of a scientist, not only
will scientists not believe in ghosts but ghosts won't believe in
scientists.

My point is that the research which highlights the importance of
strong, clear, and consistent leadership in innovations is parried by
research on the importance of the workers' making an innovation their
own, at least in those cases when it is important that some degree of
fidelity to the original innovation be maintained.  I have seen
schools in which teachers revised an innovation to make it their own
in ways that subverted its original intent.  For example, in one
district in which one of the objectives was to maximize each
student's responsibility for his/her own behavior, a group of
teachers got very excited about a program of assertive discipline
training, which was clearly inconsistent with the objectives of the
district in that it maximized the teacher's power in controlling the
classroom.  The workers loved it, but the superintendent saw the
conflict and addressed it.

As for empowerment--well, have you ever met anyone who wanted to be
empowered?  Empowerment, like human resource development, is just
another name for getting workers to do what you want them to do while
thinking it is their idea and in their own best interest--maybe not
all the time, but frequently.  But I digress.

                                            T.

                          Tom Rusk Vickery
265 Huntington Hall     School of Education     Syracuse University
                      Syracuse, NY 13244-2340
VICKERY@SUED.SYR.EDU  telephone:  315-443-3343   fax:  315-443-5732
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU