School Administrator
Feb 2002 v59 i2 p36(5)
Page 1
John Kotter on leadership, management and change: An interview with
the author of leading change and what leaders really do.(Interview)
by Jim Bencivenga
© COPYRIGHT 2002 American Association of School
Administrators
Good leadership is like gravity. It’s felt everywhere but little
understood. For too many educators, leadership is present
more as a felt absence or visible through a glass darkly. At
its worst, those in charge are not up to the task.
For 32 years, Harvard Business School Professor John
Kotter has been studying the presence and absence of
leadership in business organizations. Much of his thinking
can be applied to school organizations as well. His work is
especially relevant to the needs of schools and school
systems to create succession planning and the role of the
superintendent and principal as both manager and leader.
Kotter has closely examined and detailed what CEOs and
senior executives do, why they do it and how their
decisions affect their own and the behavior of others in
setting and accomplishing strategic thinking with its vision
and direction. He is recognized as one of the foremost
authorities on leadership in the world. Explaining and
helping organizations understand and bridge a leadership
void has been and is his life’s mission.
After a career spanning thousands of interviews with
executives and managers, directly observing hundreds of
them in action and conducting 14 formal case studies at
Harvard Business School, Kotter’s conclusion was
inevitable. He writes in his most recent book, John P.
Kotter on What Leaders Really Do: "I am completely
convinced that most organizations today lack the
leadership they need. And the shortfall is often large. I’m
not talking about a deficit of 10 percent, but of 200 percent,
400 percent or more, in positions up and down the
hierarchy."
day."
The book is full of examples of how a vision for change,
and then the process of change itself, can be brought
about by staff and managers. It examines a nexus of
critical actions that enable skilled leaders to transform
large and small organizations.
Most corporations today are overly managed and
underled, says Kotter. Management and leadership have
two distinct, fundamental purposes. Management is about
coping with complexity. Leadership is about coping with
change. Good CEOs and senior management effectively
do both all the while knowing where their strengths and
weaknesses lie. They take steps that span a career--and
that at times are personally painful--in working to improve
their weaknesses. The key, of course, is to perceive and
admit them.
Kotter is Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at
the Harvard Business School. He is a graduate of MIT and
Harvard and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1972.
The following excerpts are from a wide-ranging interview
Kotter granted The School Administrator recently.
Q: What forces do you see in both business and industry
that will grow even stronger and affect schools? What
forces do you see that have an international dimension
and that will come home to roost?
Kotter: Globalization has been a trend for a century and
will continue for the next century. Technology, the Internet,
is going to be humongous. There will be other
sophisticated forms of technology that we don’t yet know
what it all means, biotech being the most obvious. The
continuing trend toward decentralization and
If you’ve never read Kotter, this slim volume is an excellent democratization, which has been going on for many
place to start. It is refreshing to experience how lucid,
centuries. All of these things hit everybody.
practical and insightful he is. Kotter tells the stories of
people who are responsible for making change happen.
For schools there are two things in particular. The
These stories link his thinking to actual practice, each in its complexity of management-leadership jobs has gone up.
distinct milieu--the lessons, the techniques, what worked
Therefore, as schools have a bigger demand placed on
and didn’t work and how leaders learned lessons from
them, the minimum skills for school leadership have gone
their experiences.
up. And second is just dealing with all the changes this
stuff creates. Helping people recognize that their lives will
In addition, the structure of the book, not unlike Kotter’s
continue to unfold in a new way. They’ve got to continue to
whole approach, respects the time constraints of busy
grow. They’ll be in organizations that will be changing and
executives. He says he wrote it so that "You can pick up
school leaders have got to help people cope with that.
the table of contents, find something and in 15 minutes
walk away with some ideas that you could use that same
Q: What particular challenges should superintendents and
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John Kotter on leadership, management and change: An interview with
the author of leading change and what leaders really do.(Interview)
school leaders be looking to take on to accomplish this?
What structural changes in the system?
reach out enough to different kinds of people who are
strong enough.
Kotter: I don’t want to go out of my area of expertise here.
The goals I can understand are much more sophisticated
output and students who can better deal with a changing
world. If the systems don’t do a perfect job of that now, it
isn’t going to happen because somebody pushes two
degrees to the left or right. It’s going to require some
leaps. Now exactly what those leaps are, I’m not entirely
competent to say.
Q: Superintendents deal with a tenured workforce and
legislative mandates and financing at state, local and
federal levels that are outside their control.
And then there are situations and realities you can never
plan for. No one could prepare for the attack on the World
Trade Center or for anthrax in the mail. In these situations
you find out who the leaders are.
At the very least a leader is calming the troops, being
genuinely visible while gathering some sense of what
needs to be done. The anti-leader is hiding in the
basement with lawyers. For organizations needing a new
CEO, see what people have done in past crises. That will
give you some sense of what they will do in future ones.
Q: Have you ever studied a school district and looked at a
school district?
Kotter: Everything is unique and every sector is unique.
But there are powerful similarities that are a function of
modern technology and human nature. This is where we
get ourselves into trouble. One of the defenses people use
is "No, no we’re different. This school is different. A part of
this school is different. Schools and businesses, you can’t
compare.
The reality is there are fundamental things that run across
all sectors in terms of challenges and solutions. I think
really smart people go out and just look for excellence
anywhere. It doesn’t matter where. And they don’t try to
apply it in some kind of mindless way. The person over
there comes to work at 7:30. That must be the secret. I’ll
come to work at 7:30. That’s not the point. But the point is
to look for excellence and try to use your own brain to say:
"What are they doing there that I can learn from?"
Because when people do that, it always works.
Central to all this is a terrific network of relationships that
you can draw on both within the organization and outside,
and if that network has some neat people who are facing
some of the same challenges you are, and you can draw
on them in an easy way or even in a social way to share
and watch each other and learn, that’s fabulous. One of
the problems that people get themselves into is that their
networks are too parochial, they’re too narrow. They don’t
Kotter: You mentioned tenure. These are not systems that
change easily. They’re pretty sturdy set things. If you fall
back to industry, you can say, "OK, what has happened to
pretty sturdy businesses that got out of touch with reality?
And what got them going?"
There are two elements and they often come together.
One element is just stronger and stronger leadership in
upper-level positions. The other is some form of
competition or alternative to the people they are serving.
What gets organizations in trouble all the time is that
success creates quasi-monopolies. Quasi-monopolies they
lose track of. You hear questions like "How did we ever get
here? What do we need to do to be great?" The managers
get lazy. Again, I’m talking business. They have a heck of
a time.
One that I’ve studied over the years is Xerox. Terrific
company, fabulously successful. They had a huge market
share because they invented that machine. And they didn’t
even understand how much they turned inward, were
paying too much attention to their own bureaucracy and
their own politics, missed what was happening outside of
them and it wasn’t until they got really clobbered by the
Japanese that they began even to wake up and do some
things that were good for everybody.
So alternatives for the people and leadership go together
because very often it’s either the leadership that helps
work with people to nurture some alternatives or it’s the
alternatives that put pressure on the system that allows the
current leadership to push them out and get new
leadership.
Leadership Turnover
Q: A high turnover of leadership in a school district would
be an indicator of some problems? Or some bold leaders
that couldn’t win?
Kotter: It depends on who’s leaving and under what
circumstances. You may have a terrific person come in as
superintendent. Some folks may be wonderful human
beings, but they just got stuck in the past and couldn’t do
the job. If they started turning over and some people who
are more in tune with the future got into those jobs, that
could be good turnover. But if the turnover is some
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John Kotter on leadership, management and change: An interview with
the author of leading change and what leaders really do.(Interview)
dedicated, fabulous people who want to do the right thing
but have just thrown in the towel and say, "I can’t stand it
anymore"-- well, that obviously is a bad thing.
Q: One circumstance is to ensure leadership development
and succession. In Massachusetts the average
superintendency tenure was closing in on three years
because a single-issue school board member could be
elected and if you didn’t fit that issue, the board just buys
your contract out and starts over.
Kotter: That’s not good. And that means part of the
challenge is to figure out how do you create a milieu in
either working with the school board or your own people
that helps them to understand that. That this thing isn’t just
normal, it’s not just inevitable. It’s very, very bad. And that
if we care about educating the children, we just can’t do it.
Jack Welsh, who is retiring from running General Electric,
was asked recently about his tenure. There are a lot of
CEOs out there who come and go in three years and he
said something such as "This is insane! This is insane. It
cannot possibly work." Welsh had 20 years, and he picked
a 44-yearold to replace him, which means he’s thinking
about another 20 years.
Q: How do you factor in the fact that schools are de facto
in the political arena, that their funding comes from outside
their own control at the federal, state and local levels. Your
leader has to bring political skills.
Kotter: That’s correct and more so than we see in
business, although increasingly CEOs would say that they
have to have more political skills than the person who held
the job 20 years ago.
But there’s other stuff that’s important too, not the least of
which is that there’s politics and there’s politics. In a
sense, the great politicians what they’re greatest at is not
just politics. It is almost a subset of the broader genius of
leadership in which they kind of help people to figure
where they have to drive this thing even if it’s going to
require some short-term sacrifices. It gets them out of their
complacency and gets together the leadership teams that
can make things happen and drive it through.
Pushing Oneself
Q: What recommendations would you have for school
leaders to make the "pain of learning" and the "pain of
continuing to push oneself to learn"--to quote from your
writings--more bearable?
meaningful sense of purpose in life, that they translate into
a deeply meaningful sense of purpose for their
organization, the more they’re willing to go through some
painful times to grow and also to fight the bullets and
arrows. It’s the lack of that that wears you down very
quickly.
Q: You’ve written: "Nobody grows old by merely a number
of years. We grow old by deserting our ideas." Would you
on a scale of 0 to 10 (10 being certitude) say that
superintendents are really in the idealism business
because their custodianship on so many levels ultimately
is for our children and the people who work with our
children? Whether it’s leadership versus management,
they have to live their ideals?
Kotter: I think that’s true for everybody. I think some
business people would say it’s easier for the
superintendents for the reason you’re suggesting because
their whole caste has a more idealistic tinge to it, you
know, preparing our children for tomorrow, as opposed to
making ball-bearings. I suspect in that sense they have an
advantage.
Q: You say, "For most people there’s a gap between the
leadership they supply and the leadership that’s possible."
What does a superintendent do to deal with that gap in his
or her own professional life?
Kotter: I suppose step one is always to recognize it and to
admit it. I’ve got both potential and skills that are not being
used right now and it’s smart, right and just, and
everything else to start developing and using those. It’s
easy enough to go into denial on this. "No, no, I’m doing
everything I can." That’s a comfortable stance and I don’t
mean that in a nasty way against anybody. People do that.
So it takes self-insight and a little bit of courage to get
going for yourself and then it’s a matter of helping other
people do the same thing.
Certainly, a lot of the stretching is on the job. It’s not going
off to Harvard for two weeks. Even if you’re lucky enough
to do that, that will happen once every 10 years. It going to
happen every day as you try something and then pay
attention to how it’s working and try a little thing there, and
notice what the guy over there is doing that you’ve never
tried before, and you just grow and grow and grow.
Role of Mentors
Q: I may have missed it, but I didn’t see the word "mentor"
used much in your book.
Kotter: I think the more that people have a deeply
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John Kotter on leadership, management and change: An interview with
the author of leading change and what leaders really do.(Interview)
Kotter: I think most people who are any good have one or
more people early in their careers who play a particularly
important role, either in maneuvering them around or
showing them the way. But I don’t think it takes very long
before people run out of that. I’m too old for mentoring. I’m
a father now. I can’t be looking for more fathers. If
anything, it’s my job now to find those 25-year0olds to help
them along. I think by the time you’re at 35 to 55 it’s less a
mentor out there as it is the capacity to look at and
constantly scan for people like yourself. And try to figure
out who’s doing something that you’re not doing that’s
really effective.
Q: Here’s one of the areas that some superintendents
have asked for more elaboration: Planning for visible
improvements and performance, or wins. How do you
create those wins and visibly recognize and reward people
who made the wins possible and then develop a way to
ensure they continue?
Kotter: Whenever you find some institution or organization
taking significant leaps into the future, you find the kind of
change process or some close variation to what I’ve
identified. We talk about the eight steps (see related story,
page 39). Step one is to get the urgency up among
enough people and put the right group together that can
do it and get divisional strategy straight.
Well, somewhere in there, step six I think, short-term wins
become enormously important in building momentum in
proving to yourself that you’re on the right track in diffusing
the cynics, the pessimists who are anchors on the whole
thing, but play an important role. And what you find in
successful cases is they don’t just say, "Well obviously
we’re on the right track, we’ll get some wins." They say,
"No, we have to very carefully think about how do we
produce a string of those that are visible enough,
unambiguous enough, meaningful enough to the people
we are dealing with." And carefully manage that process
and if they don’t, they can get themselves into trouble.
Even if the vision is right, even if they’re marching along
basically well, because people start to get impatient or
they wear down, everybody that’s grumpy kind of jumps in
and says this is going nowhere, etc. etc. So the short-term
win is huge. It fits into a certain place in the process.
Q: Certification or licensing requirements in most states
means someone like you can’t be a superintendent. Is that
a good thing or a bad thing?
Kotter: It’s nuts. Not for me. I’d probably be a terrible
superintendent. Now we’re back to forces that are kind of
monopoly forces. What you want is the largest pool you
can get of talented people that you can draw on for what
are incredibly important but difficult jobs. No business in
the world would ever say, "No, there is no equivalent.
Unless you have an MBA from Stanford, you can’t be a
CEO." I mean everyone would just laugh at that. But in this
sector, it’s not quite that, but silly things like that happen
again the more protected the sector is.
Ducking for Cover
Q: How high do you put your head above the ramparts?
Kotter: Hiding? It’s not only not good for the school
system, it’s not good for you. There’s no evidence that
people who hide at age 65 say: "Boy, am I proud of that.
Do I feel good about my life. I hid." It doesn’t happen.
I think this is a big deal, because people who want to try to
provide leadership in superintendent and principal jobs
have as important a job as any job in the U.S. today. I
think in a lot of cases they are much more important jobs
than CEOs. Because if we can’t bring everybody up in an
increasingly technologically sophisticated society, you start
getting this growing gap between the technologically
well-educated and the "other." It undermines democracy.
So I think again and this isn’t because I’m an educator. I’m
a different sort of educator. I think much more like the
college president. When they do things right, when they
help their own systems to take a leap into the future, they
make a contribution that is as large as you’ll find
anywhere.
Q: The mission statement starts out at the highest possible
level. But the fact is if you have 21/2 to 3 million teachers.
You’re going to have the average. You’re going to have,
well, mediocrity.
Kotter: I remember talking to a 23- or 24-year-old a couple
of years ago who was teaching. I think it was 4th or 5th
grade. I asked him, "Is the system perfect?" He answers
no. So I say to him, "If you were king and you had ultimate
power, what would you do to change your school or the
district to make it better? You have total power." What I got
is total silence. I couldn’t believe it. I expected this kid, who
was pretty bright, would say "OK, here are the first 10
things." And I thought, "Wow, if this is the 24-year-old,
what is the 44-year-old thinking?" I cannot believe under
the right circumstances, somebody, some principal or
superintendent, couldn’t open him up and start getting
ideas and effort behind those ideas.
Jim Bencivenga is editor of the Ideas section at The
Christian Science Monitor.
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John Kotter on leadership, management and change: An interview with
the author of leading change and what leaders really do.(Interview)
RELATED ARTICLE: Kotter’s Eight-Step Process
This is drawn from John Kotter’s book, Leading Change,
where he uses this eight-step change process to describe
the enormity of the task facing leaders who try to bring
about fundamental, radical change in an organization.
1. Establishing a sense of urgency.
2. Forming a powerful guiding coalition.
3. Creating a vision.
4. Communicating the vision.
5. Empowering others to act on the vision.
6. Planning for and creating short-term wins.
7. Consolidating improvements and producing still more
change.
8. Institutionalizing new approaches.
Resources
Two books by John Kotter have drawn interest among
school leaders:
* John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Do, Harvard
Business Review, 1999, 184 pp., $22.95 hardcover
* Leading Change, Harvard Business School Press, 1996,
187 pp., $24.95 hardcover
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