Uplifting Leadership: Transforming Leadership Practice in Business, Sport, and Education

• In Event: 33.057 - Leadership for Social Justice and Educational Improvement

Abstract

This paper draws on an extensive seven-year research program of unusually high performance in three sectors, in eight countries, on four continents, to pinpoint six factors that define the uplifting journey to dramatically improved results through how people uplift their teams, their communities and themselves. The process of uplift, the presenter shows, raises people’s spirits, improves people’s opportunities and quality of life, including equity (as in the original African American idea of uplift), and transforms their performance. Each of the six factors brings together opposites that weaker performers and their leaders keep apart in ways that enhance quality of life and equity of opportunity and outcomes – inspiration and perspiration, innovation and discipline, competition and collaboration, good data combined with good judgment, short-term success and long-term sustainability, and pulling people forwards as well as pushing them into and through something new. This paper on the intellectually original idea of uplifting leadership presents compelling evidence that many of the secrets of high performance in education, business and sport are the same and go far beyond bottom lines in business, test scores in education, and on-field victories in sport.

The research underpinning this paper draws on interconnected projects that have extended over seven years and led to detailed case studies of high-performing organizations in the fields of business, education and sports: including urban local authorities (school districts) in England, the California Teachers Association’s commitment to turning around hundreds of lower performing scools in the US, and the systemic improvement strategies of Singapore, Finland and Ontario in Canada.

Over 300 in-depth interviews were conducted with leaders and a cross section of respondents at all sites on multi-day site visits with multi-member teams. Documentary, contextual and multi-media evidence supplemented the semi-structured interviews. All interviews were transcribed and coded according to a rubric we derived originally from the literature and the interview schedule. The project team deployed within-case and cross-case analysis to elicit themes that were synthesized, revised and repeatedly tested against the evidence.

An initial analytical framework of 15 factors, supported by multiple cases, was developed. As we combined the key elements of the interconnected research projects, we undertook further contrast and comparison and condensed our analytical framework from the initial 15 factors to the eventual six factors that comprise uplifting leadership. These factors, the presentation shows, are the antithesis of many of the principles driving system-wide reforms in the US and elsewhere.

Author

• Andy Hargreaves, Boston College