The virtues of leadership

The Virtues of Leadership
by Thomas J. Sergiovanni

Teachers and students alike seek frameworks and norm systems that help them sort out how they fit into a school’s culture. Cultural frameworks are sources of sense making and meaning that all of us need.
Schools teach their culture best when they embody purposes, values, norms, and obligations in their everyday activities. Though thisprinciple is widely accepted in word, it is often neglected in deed. The heartbeats of leadership and schools are strengthened when word and deed are one. This happens when leadership and virtue work together. Walton’s (1988, 177–78) words are helpful: The question is not whether virtue can be taught but how it may be taught. Example, not exhortation, and practice, not principle, take priority:carpenters become carpenters by building houses; pianists become pianists by playing the piano; managers become leaders by leading. The same is true of character: people become virtuous by practicing virtue and by living with moral mentors. If, for any reason, an organization becomes sidetracked, only managers of sound character can restore a sense of direction. Disciplined organizations reflectdisciplined leaders whose honed abilities lead them to behave consistently, almost instinctively, in moral ways. These leaders know and focus on what is important, care deeply about their work, learn from their successes and failures, take calculated risks, and are trustworthy people. This article examines four leadership virtues: hope, trust, piety, and civility. When these four are at the core ofleadership practice, the leverage needed for improving even the most challenging schools can be discovered.
112 • The Educational Forum • Volume 69 • Winter 2005

Essays The Virtue of Hope
Perhaps the most important, yet most neglected leadership virtue is hope. Hope often is slighted because management theories tell us to look at the evidence, be tough as nails, be objective, and blindly facereality. But, facing reality rather than relying on hope is to accept reality. Relying on hope rather than facing reality is to change reality— hopefully. Leaders can be both hopeful and realistic as long as the possibilities for change remain open. Being realistic differs from facing reality in important ways. Being realistic is to calculate the odds with an optimistic eye—to be aware of theconsequences of being fateful without being preordained to the inevitability of a situation or circumstance. Why should leaders be hopeful? Because the evidence suggests that hope can change events for the better. It is widely accepted that sick people who are hopeful members of support groups which provide encouragement, prayer, or other forms of targeted social capital get healthier and stay healthiermore often than sick people without the benefit of hopeful social capital. In her review of the literature on hope and health, Roset (1999, 7) found compelling evidence to link the two: “Findings in the health sciences show a positive relationship between biochemical reactions, attributed to hopefulness, and its effect upon illness.” Oncologist Carl Simonton (in Carter 1996, 1) found that whencancer patients respond to their challenges with “feelings of hope and anticipation, the organism translates into biological processes that begin to restore balance and to revitalize the immune system.” Medical researchers (Roset 1999) found that a sense of hopefulness, from an increased sense of control, is connected with biological changes that enhance physical and mental health.

Leadership asmoral action is

a struggle to do the right thing according to a sense of values and what it means to be a human being.

Hope and Wishing
Hope often is confused with wishing. Hope, however, is grounded in reality, not wishful thinking. It is—to use Menninger, Mayman, and Pruyser’s (1963) term—realistic hope. They (1963, 385–86) argued: Realistic hope . . . is based on the attempt to understand...