The return of sustainable leadership

Author: Professor Andy Hargreaves, Visiting Professor, University of Ottawa, Canada and Research Professor, Boston College, US.

It’s November 2024: time for the COP 29 Summit: another summit on climate change hosted by yet another petrostate. It's not just the climate that’s unsustainable, though. The costs of the economic stimulus have plunged public institutions into financial austerity. And politics has become unsustainable too, as the volatility of recent elections illustrates. 

In the face of all this, what can educators do? They cannot halt climate change, end wars, or cure disease, of course. But this does not make them helpless. Twenty years ago, Dean Fink and I published Sustainable Leadership. It argued that sustainable leadership and change “preserves and develops deep learning for all that spreads and lasts, in ways that do no harm to and indeed create positive benefits for others now and in the future.”

Uniquely, our book connected sustainable organisational leadership in schools and elsewhere, to the scientific literature on biodiversity and energy transformation. The result was seven principles of sustainability. How do these principles apply to leaders’ work today?

1. Depth

Sustainable leadership matters. It preserves and promotes deep and broad learning for all in relationships of care for others. When tests and targets distract us, pandemics and climate events disrupt us, AI opportunities entice us, and market branding deludes us, it is essential to take out our moral compass and ensure we are staying true to our North Star or Southern Cross. 

2. Length

Sustainable leadership preserves and advances the most valuable aspects of learning and life over time. It should outlast individuals, policies, trends, and project funds, and carry forward the school’s vision and values. Sustainable leadership involves planning for leadership succession, working across different generations, avoiding both excessive staff turnover as well as unhealthy stagnation, and actively renewing a school’s culture. Whenever sustainable leaders innovate, they consider one thing they can do that will make it last forever.

3. Breadth

Sustainable leadership spreads: it sustains the leadership of others. More leadership needs to start from the middle. The closer we get to the practice and each other, the better we will lead. According to the OECD, over 80% of policies never get implemented properly. So, they say, we must create policy together. Inclusion and innovation are too complex to be driven from the top. Sustainable leadership is not only more collaborative, but its leadership teams are more diverse in identity, representation, and style. They bring more insight to the table.

4. Environmental Impact

Sustainable leadership is about social justice and ethical integrity, not just in leaders’ own schools, but in the schools around them who are affected by their choices. Sustainable leaders share recreational and after school resources with less well-resourced neighbours, they pool professional learning resources with them, and they do not steal all the highest achieving students or star teachers from the schools nearby. Sustainable leaders constantly consider the environmental impact of their decisions on others in the educational community around them.

5. Diversity

Sustainable leadership fosters and learns from diversity and creates cohesion among its richly varying components. Strong natural systems are bio-diverse rather than standardised. So are strong organisations. They each promote cross pollination of learning that enables a system’s diverse resources to recover quickly in the face of adversity. Sustainable leaders avoid imposing singular ways of teaching and learning – the three-part lesson, scripted teaching etc. They allow and encourage pedagogical diversity, then monitor it for its effectiveness. They stay clear of standardised, Anglo-American ways of running teams too. They can decolonise professional learning to accommodate and learn from practices such as the talking circles of indigenous cultures, the conversational lived experience and storytelling of Hispanic cultures, the hierarchical respect that team members display in many Asian cultures, and so on.  

6. Resourcefulness

Sustainable leadership develops and does not deplete material and human resources. It renews peoples’ energy rather than simply saving it from being used up. Sustainable human resources shouldn’t just be about creating less workload. That just saves energy by eliminating bad and wasteful work. Rather, sustainable human resources create better work that is more inspiring and innovative for teachers and students alike. Sustainable leadership renews people’s will to come into school, every day. 

7. Conservation

Sustainable leadership respects and builds on the best of the past while innovating for the future. Sustainable leadership values the traditions and achievements that have shaped an institution while remaining open to and interested in new ideas. Sustainable leaders include resistors and sceptics in the early stages of change. They avoid equating all old pedagogies with bad practice (and all new ones with good practice too). They embrace change, but not of everything, all at once. If they are a new leader, they take time to understand the culture of a school before trying to change it.

Conclusion

Sustainable leadership commits to deep, just, and resourceful practices, that benefit present and future generations and that thrive long after key leaders are gone. Policy makers can support sustainable leadership by putting aside the unsustainable priorities of testing, branding and top-down compliance in favour of a more collaborative and sustainable culture of leadership and innovation that is driven by people from the middle, where the heart, soul and guts of the system are ultimately to be found.