Chapter 1 --  The Jossey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership
The Nature of Leadership

Leadership is the process of persuasion or example by which an individual (or leadership team) induces a group to pursue objectives held by the leader or shared by the leader and the followers of that leader.

Communication and influence flow in both directions.

In the process leaders shape AND are shaped.

Distinctions:

• Don't confuse leadership with status
• Don't confuse leadership with power
• Don't confuse leadership with official authority
• Leadership requires major expenditures of effort and energy
• The marks of an open society are that elite status is earned

Leaders and Managers

• Manager indicates one who holds a position in an organization and presides over the processes by which the organization functions.
• Leader/managers distinguish themselves from the general manager in ways including the following six:

1. They think longer term.
2. They grasp the relationship to larger realities.
3. Their influence reach beyond their jurisdictions.
4. They put emphasis on the intangibles of vision, values, and motivation.
5. They have the skill to cope with multiple constituents.
6. They think in terms of renewal

• The manager is more tightly linked to an organization

The Many Kinds of Leaders

• Leaders come in many forms, styles, and qualities

Leaders and History

• "Does the leader make history or does the historical moment make the leader?"
• Historical forces create the circumstances in which the leader emerges but the characteristics of the leader have their impact on history.
• Churchill tried out for leadership many times before history was ready for him.

Settings

• The makeup of the group to be lead is crucial.
• The leadership approach that will be effective depends on those to be lead (age level, educational background and competence, size and cohesiveness of the group, motivation and morale, and rate of turnover).

Judgments of Leaders

• Outcomes are the result of a complex set of interactions among group members and environmental and historical forces.
• People attribute outcomes to an identifiable leader in order to feel more in control
• Consequences are not a reliable measure of effective leadership
• Many of the changes sought by leaders have taken time.
• Judgments made of a leader must be multidimensional

Developing Initiative and Responsibility

• Dispersed leadership is a reality.
• We still make it too difficult for potentials leaders at lower levels to exercise initiative.
• High-level leaders will be more effective in every way if the systems over which they preside are made vital by dispersed leadership.

Institutionalizing Leadership

• The issues are too technical with too swift a pace of change to expect a leader to personally solve the problems facing the system over which he or she presides. 
• Therefore, an institutional system must be designed for those who will survive the leader (s).

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Jossey-Bass Publishers.  The Jossey-Bass Reader on Education Leadership.