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Communicating the Rationale: Building Cognitive Investment

A principal stands before her staff, appearing unsure and apologetic, as she asks teachers to fill out a set of new compliance documents and templates from the central office. This latest mandate requires that teachers document every formal and informal intervention interaction they have with individual students during the course of instruction. The principal hears chatter from the back of the room as teachers ponder the purpose of yet another task that seems meaningless.

The principal reluctantly shares that completion of the task is mandatory and failure to do so will have a negative impact on their formal yearly performance evaluations. The principal appears defeated, and now the staff look defeated. The lack of dialogue and intellectual consent makes the staff feel devalued.

The lack of intellectual synergy and communication in the school has led to a culture of hopelessness and pessimism. This environment is not ripe for improvement. A leader who understands the power of communication could greatly improve the culture and productivity of this school.

As we discussed in chapter 1 (page 11), research and experience have shown that attempting to control others with external forces such as punishments and rewards is an exercise in futility. We argue that a crucial factor in motivating people lies within the individuals themselves. To set the stage for motivating those they lead, transformational leaders create the right environment and seek to critically understand the needs of the organization and motivate others to work together to collaboratively meet those needs.

Psychologist Frederick Herzberg (1966) believes that people’s internal capacities, both cognitive and emotional, give rise to feelings, aspirations, perceptions, attitudes, and thoughts that can lead to either motivation or demotivation. Herzberg (1966) states that leaders must recognize human beings as complex and need stimulation on several different levels in order to unleash their followers’ intrinsic commitment. When leaders do this, they create conditions that will more likely satisfy followers’ internal capacity, thus motivating followers to adopt the organization’s goal as their own. Herzberg (1966) calls this type of environment a growth-enhancing environment. Such an environment does not require authoritarian mandates to stimulate change; the members of the organization will drive change because of their intrinsic connection to the growth of the organization. Carol Dweck (2006) calls this a growth mindset. They will also consider the validity of externally developed innovation as long as it is congruent with organizational needs. In essence, they would view the organization’s needs like they would view their own personal needs. In this environment, innovation is not a disruption; it is a necessity.

Transformational leaders also appeal to people’s innate drive to understand the world, to make sense of it, to gain control over their lives, and to become increasingly self-directed. This cognitive perception, which world-renowned psychologist Jean Piaget (1977) advanced, assumes that a need for predictability, sensibleness, and logic motivates people when dealing with a vast and diverse world. In essence, a person’s need to understand the world and make sense of his or her environment would make him or her gravitate toward regularity, and deep understanding of a task and how it relates to his or her personal needs. Piaget (1977) calls this equilibration. If people clearly understand how the tasks that leaders ask them to complete connect to their natural need to solve problems, it will motivate them and make them intensely committed to solving the problem at hand.

Creating a growth-enhancing environment and achieving equilibration both require that leaders answer the question, Why? Asking and answering this question represents one of the most important things a leader can do to create intrinsic commitment to change. In doing so, the leader fulfills followers’ cognitive needs by communicating the rationale for change.

Communicating the Rationale as a Leadership Skill

Why? may seem like a very basic question with an easy answer, but the evidence proves that many leaders fail to address it, and failure to do so leads to apathy, disconnection, and resistance. And, in some cases, it leads to followers abandoning the profession of education.

A 2016 Learning Policy Institute report documents that U.S. K–12 schools lose about 8 percent of their workforce every year, and only about one-third of those workers leave the profession because of retirement (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, & Carver-Thomas, 2016). Nonretirement exits from the teaching profession most prevalently occur due to issues connected to school leadership effectiveness. Teachers who rate their school leadership ineffective are twice as likely to leave the profession as those who rate it effective. The most dominant factor in whether teachers rated school leadership as effective was decision-making input (Sutcher et al., 2016). Teachers want the opportunity to exchange ideas with leaders and colleagues—to communicate—and rationalize changes in their practice.

The Ken Blanchard Companies (2016), led by internationally renowned leadership expert Ken Blanchard, launched an international study to gain insight on the critical skills that make or break a leader. The study concludes that the ability to communicate is the most important characteristic of an effective leader (identified by 43 percent of respondents), and poor communication skills are an ineffective leader’s most significant leadership flaw (identified by 41 percent of respondents; Ken Blanchard Companies, 2016). Those who rated communication as an effective leader’s most important skill share that leaders who are good communicators have the ability to listen, read body language, provide feedback, and generate effective two-way communication. These communication skills allow them to fully and effectively engage in their work. Conversely, those who identify poor communication skills in their leaders share that their leaders did not communicate at all, over-communicated, communicated through outbursts or anger, or communicated very vaguely (Ken Blanchard Companies, 2016). Most important, poor communicators fail to articulate roles, goals, expectations, and the importance of specific behaviors, which undermines productivity and performance.

Communicating involves many facets. This skill includes the ability to articulate thoughts, listen to others, exchange ideas, read body language, have an awareness of tone, and understand timing. We have identified two essential communication abilities for school leaders interested in transforming their cultures and improving student performance: (1) understanding and confronting relevant data and (2) using persuasion. A leader has to create a compelling, fact-based case for change, and then use his or her ability to convince people to make the organizational challenge their personal challenge.

Understanding and Confronting Relevant Data

To help a person understand why he or she should commit to a change, a leader has to provide clear evidence—data—that current practice or policy is not working. Too often, school leaders promote change in practice without providing tangible evidence about why the school needs the change. We have witnessed department and grade-level leaders express that a change is “something the principal wants” when justifying it to their team. Subsequently, the principal says the change came from the central office, the central office identifies state leaders as the source, and state leaders name federal leaders as responsible. A leader who cannot own the change that he or she promotes does not put him- or herself in a good position to expect or demand a staff’s commitment.

Leaders who provide tangible evidence exhibit what Stephen R. Covey (1989) calls principle-centered leadership. A principle-centered leader focuses people’s attention on concrete principles and shared values, and by doing so, the leader empowers everyone who understands those principles to monitor, evaluate, and correct their behavior based on their connection to those principles. Covey (1989) contrasts this with a personality-centered leader, who depends on charisma, personal magnetism, and positional power to inspire change and improvement in others, which, in essence, manipulates people, instead of cultivating a real personal commitment. One of the ways principle-centered leaders build commitment to organizational improvement is their constant focus on emphasizing we instead of me or I when engaging in change focus and strategy. This selflessness focuses subordinates on the goals and not the ego or personality of the leader (Bandsuch, Pate, & Thies, 2008). Commitment in a personality-centered environment is unstable and changes as the leader—or leaders’—personality changes. Principle-centered leaders create intrinsic commitment to core organizational values, which leads to a commitment to improvement that goes beyond the current leader’s tenure. Developing principle-centered commitment requires a clear understanding of facts, what Jim Collins (2001) calls confronting the brutal facts. In studying why some companies make the leap from good to great, Collins (2001) discovers that great companies rise in part because of their willingness to confront the brutal facts (but never lose faith):

All good-to-great companies begin the process of finding a path to greatness by confronting the brutal facts of their current reality. When you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of your situation, the right decisions often become self-evident. It is impossible to make good decisions without infusing the entire process with an honest confrontation of the brutal facts. (p. 88)

Collins (2001) balances his analysis of using brutal facts to stimulate organizational focus and growth with a warning to also never lose faith. He warns that organizations need to use facts in an inspirational context; they can actually use facts counterproductively if the facts lack connections to reasonable goals and a theory of action. Organizations can lose faith if the improvement goals are too high or unreasonable, or if the stark reality is clear, but a plan for improvement is not.

The skill of analyzing data will have great value to a transformational leader who seeks to build a strong commitment to change and a willingness to confront brutal realities. However, keep in mind that exposure to data alone does not always lead to widespread substantive growth. For example, policies like NCLB provided schools with large amounts of data on student academic performance, but the policy did not produce the intended improvement (Guisbond, Neill, & Schaeffer, 2012). An effective leader understands how to use data to create a commitment to goals bigger than the individual and stimulate lasting and powerful intrinsic commitment. Lorna M. Earl and Steven Katz (2006) write about the challenge of using data to motivate change: