Well, you’ve made it to the end of the course! Over the past few months, we’ve explored the major areas of programmatic leadership in technology. While we’ve just scratched the surface of many of these areas, there’s one last area to explore - the role of yourself as a leader.

In any role you’ll take after completing your degree, you are a leader. Leadership is much more than supervision of people and programs. If you’re supporting teachers as a coach - you are a leader in your school. If you are an instructional designer - you are a leader who is shaping someone’s vision into reality. In both of these cases, you are guiding the direction of others and their work. You lead by example and lead through support. People who are effective in these roles tend to garner “soft power” within their organizations - while they don’t have a direct leadership or supervisory role in their schools, through relationships and the impact of their work, they tend to influence or have a hand in many decisions made within the organization. As a trusted IT facilitator, you may be able to influence how your school communicates with parents, how your school rolls out major initiatives, or how technology impacts instruction within your building.

I would argue that this type of “soft power” is more important than any actual rank or role that an IT leader has. In many organizations, IT has the reputation of being the “no people” in too many places. In these organizations, a “shadow IT” culture develops where people are going to do innovative and interesting IT things, but without the consent or approval of IT - even if they have the authority to provide said approval. People have to do their jobs and want to do creative things, whether they are “allowed to” or not. The best road to success is to always start with a “yes”, even if it’s “yes, and…”. Most people are open to alternative ways of doing things, even if less convenient, if the reasoning is sound. Developing productive relationships with stakeholders is the thing that can make or break a digital learning program and the thing that can make or break your ability to be effective in your role - even if your technical knowledge is expert-level.

Leadership doesn’t have to be loud or boisterous - Susan Cain’s book Quiet (and her TED talk) talks about leading from a place of reservedness and introversion.

During your career, you may have been asked to take personality and work style assessments, like the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, True Colors, the DISC Assessment, or Strengths Finder. These tests are great at helping you understand yourself a bit better. However, as a leader, the strength of these assessments are to help you understand how you can best work with others. Understanding other personality types is critical to working with them so using these as resources to understand and empathize with others (see this article on working with other MBTI personality types) as well as recognize what motivates them or makes them difficult to work with. They can also help you recognize and address your blind spots.

At a larger scale, it’s important for any leader to be sensitive to the cultural and political implications of our decisions. Every organization has only one CTO - they may be chosen externally and will come into the organization as “an outsider”. Having a different cultural background and not understanding the culture of the district or organization where you work create two blind spots for any leader. This applies to the macro-culture of the place and the history, as well as the micro-culture within the organization. Especially in more rural communities, the school represents a cornerstone of the community - it’s the district and school that they attended, their parents attended, and their grandparents attended. Schools are something deeply personal to communities and that communities hold up as something they’re extremely proud of. A significant number of schools have multiple staff members who attended school there or their parents worked there. Leaders who fail to be sensitive to that pride and ownership will fail. Leaders who don’t manage change well, ignore the cultural contexts of their actions, and don’t design from a place of empathy (refer to Unit 2 on leadership and change management) will fail.

But these culminate in larger political implications for leadership. Leadership is political. Leadership in school districts is especially political. This is both “little p” politics as in the politics of any workplace (micro-political leadership is a standard of evaluation for principals) and also “big P” Politics as in our political climate. Schools are, after all, managed at the local, state, and Federal levels by elected officials. Managing all of these constituencies is a challenge for anyone in a leadership position, especially in education. In the context of digital learning, technology has also been a political football in the education space as well – see this blog post by Audrey Watters and this research paper. If you’re interested in this, even though she’s no longer actively maintaining the blog, Audrey Watters’ Hack Education Blog is a treasure trove of well-researched, interesting to read articles on the topic.