Researching reciprocal leadership

Introduction

This article offers a possible methodology for researching a school–university partnership that has evolved over the past two years between a primary school headteacher and a university academic. It has been written from the perspective of the university academic but with the full consent of the headteacher who participated in a research pilot to assess the validity of a self-reporting inventory. In this article, I report on how we used our own data as a means of evaluating this inventory and offer it as a starting point for researching our partnership work.

The school context

The headteacher leads a primary school in challenging circumstances and the role of the university academic is to support the work of the teachers engaging in evidence-based teaching (EBT) or teacher inquiry (Poultney, 2017). Contextually, the school intake is from a large disadvantaged area of the East Midlands and has over 70 per cent of children designated as ‘pupil premium’ ¹ and high instances of pupil mobility. The school has a chequered history of inspection outcomes ranging from special measures to ‘ungraded’ and is currently part of a larger group of trust ² schools. The school–university partnership was predicated on the headteacher’s desire to critically evaluate the impact of various initiatives beyond the gathering of simple school data progress indicators. We have been working together for two years and have successfully engaged with EBT which has contributed to a range of positive outcomes for the school, including improved SATs results in 2016 and a publication detailing this work (Poultney, 2017). It is at this juncture that we decided to explore the potential of using the Consciousness Quotient inventory (CQ-i) to evaluate our partnership working.

What did we want to understand?

As the HEI academic reflecting on this journey it was clear to me that both of us as leaders were informants and participants in this research. Therefore, it was important to understand what unit of analysis would be most appropriate to conceptualizing our collective leadership approach and, crucially, to agree a methodology that would support this. Much of the research reported into school–university partnerships is anecdotal, consisting of case studies, narratives or post-reflections on practice, none of which we thought appropriate vehicles to fully describe the headteacher-academic partnership we have both experienced. It was clear that we would not be able to adequately illuminate this work from a joint leadership perspective by adopting any of these approaches. This positive experience of working with a primary headteacher inspired me to find out more about the characteristics and competencies we both needed to have for this partnership to work and, importantly, for the partnership to be sustained over time. If there was a particular blueprint for our leadership work, what did it look like in practice and how might it be evidenced in research data?

This led us to three research questions:

What does our leadership relationship look like; how is it conceptualized by us?

Researching into our own partnership was going to be challenging given that we would be reflecting on our experiences after a period of teacher inquiry work. In addition, we needed to take into account that we were both participants and informants, and that we may be regarded by others as apologists in this post-partnership evaluation exercise, which we did not desire. How could we provide evidence for what had been (and continues to be) a largely democratic and reciprocal partnership when there are few guiding methodologies? What we did understand was that we were working in a relational paradigm in which power was shared and our respective experiences were democratically used to make progress with our collective vision. Starting with that view, we began to think about the nature of our leadership endeavour and how we had both represented our respective domains of school and university. Using key words in an online search for the terms ‘reciprocal leadership’ and ‘authentic leadership’ I came across the term ‘consciousness quotient’ (CQ), a term coined by a Romanian professor of psychology, Ovidiu Brazdau, who talked about conscious leadership. Brazdau had developed a Consciousness Quotient inventory (CQ-i) and had undertaken a pilot study into participative leadership in the university context, part of which chimed strongly with our leadership work. In communication with Brazdau and reviewing his work with Valita Jones (Jones and Brazdau, 2015) it became evident that this inventory might be useful in assessing our leadership competencies given we were leading on a range of issues related to teacher inquiry across school and HE contexts. Although rooted in the field of psychology, Brazdau’s inventory explores aspects of what it is to be human in all its forms, which again chimed strongly with our working relationship. We wondered if this inventory could be used as some form of scale to evaluate our partnership working, to help us understand our respective leadership roles more fully and help our partnership to become more effective in any future projects we undertook together. Examining our individual ‘self-theory’ (Dweck, 2000) would give us each issues to reflect upon and together allow us to see areas of leadership working we needed to think more closely about. The inventory is specifically designed for personal development around improving conscious leadership skills, but we wondered if the inventory could form the basis of a benchmark for our work and as a possible new method for thinking about and researching educational leadership. We decided to pilot the inventory ourselves and our data is presented and evaluated in this article.

Conscious leadership as a way of describing our school–university partnership

Velmans (2009: 3) describes the act of being conscious as ‘all the things that we observe or experience’ and for leaders Jones (2012) describes conscious leaders as those who are at one with themselves (the act of being), are interconnected with the world and motivated to act responsibly. Becoming a conscious leader might be a way in which a leader understands self, others and the wider world, which seemed a good starting point for us to think about our partnership. Conscious leadership is viewed as a humanistic construct and draws on a transformational leadership approach as described by Burns (1978). We were drawn to the fact that transformational leadership is a mutual endeavour based upon our moral values and higher ideals, a means by which we could influence each other to achieve more. Further conscious leadership is predicated on vision sharing and placing trust in each other to achieve agreed goals.

These general assumptions aligned well with our way of working as we were engaging in critical discourse around issues of teacher inquiry, questioning our motives and actions, and reframing classroom methodologies that were unfit for purpose and proposing new ones for teachers to pilot. We were about to challenge long-held assumptions held by teachers in an inner-city primary school that they were unable to change their practice. I drew strength from this body of conscious leadership literature that allows leaders ‘to develop the multiple layers of consciousness they need to be able to have the fluidity, flexibility and openness that is increasingly required of them’ (Carter, 2009: 2). Our individual values of respect and trust for each other aligned with writers, such as Carter (2009), Brazdau (2014) and Chauhan et al. (2013) who collectively focus on consciousness beginning with self and one’s own self-awareness.

What is seen as fundamental to effective leadership is how a leader is able to report upon his/her conscious processes (Barrs, 2003, in Chauhan, Sharma and Satsangee, 2013) and the ability to be able to access a quantity of information (Brazdau, 2011). It is the way in which a leader is able to be mindful of him/herself, of others, and the environment, in order to gain an understanding that choices of action are based upon one’s values, beliefs and feelings (Carter, 2009: 4-5). Carter explains how leaders lead from the ‘inside-out’ which is predicated on:

awareness and being (what it is to be alive, awareness of self, others, organizational settings, the world around us);

Beyond self, there are contextual orientations that a leader must make sense of, working this time from the outside-in. These external orientations have an external reality and are linked with orientations of:

power (awareness and responsibility);

These orientations are situated under five domains of functioning, within which the conscious leader operates which relate to knowledge about personal self, interpersonal relations and internal and external settings. In detail these are:

the self (the awareness of own actions and impact of the leader on others);

Why did this methodology excite us?

Brazdau’s methodology is based upon an online CQ inventory that measures overall leadership conscious awareness and the extent to which we, as leaders can support innovation, creativity and change as part of our leadership role. This I felt was a good start in providing quantifiable and qualitative data as a baseline from which we could further make sense of our partnership within this context. Could the inventory be a suitable method for evaluating our partnership ways of working? Although Jones and Brazdus’ (2015) study was grounded in the HE context for university administrators (leaders), the inventory provided a good ‘fit’ with some characteristics of leadership we were grappling with, namely, that of shared responsibility, trailblazing a new partnership and being aware of our own individual positions in the work and of each other and over a sustained period, in our case two years and on-going. In seeking a suitable methodology to describe our partnership that might be replicated in other contexts, we had seen the inventory as being a means of ‘baselining’ our CQ-i, which would then give us a quantitative and a qualitative measure of how well we might be doing in these terms and the evidence to re-evaluate the partnership. It may also give us the opportunity to use it in with different partnerships, such as teachers working together in school.

Other methods such as the use of a questionnaire, interview or structured narrative were all considered but had limitations: they needed to be administered by a third party and did not provide both quantitative and qualitative data. Their value lay as follow-up methods, especially interviews, which can then examine in more detail the constituents of being a ‘conscious leader’.

Jones and Brazdau (2015) take as given that aspects of conscious leadership such as introspection, collaboration, reflection and decision-making are integral as practice among higher education leaders. They wanted to make leaders in universities aware of their own identities and actions. On completing the inventory the outcomes would then form the basis of a series of interviews to reveal qualitative data around how the university leaders operate in practice. Taken together these data locate leaders as transactional (managerial leaders) or transformational (creative leaders) and identify the potential for them to become interconnected with others. I began to wonder if improving leadership acumen may mean having a framework such as this inventory which provides an opportunity for examination and introspection of one’s own leadership competency and personal dispositions.

The CQ-i inventory as a method

The CQ-i is a measure of access each of us has to a vast amount of information from the vast field of consciousness. It is a measure of ‘being conscious/aware throughout a day, in regular life conditions’ (Brazdau, 2016). It assumes that the participant has a degree of witnessing awareness of themselves and others and is able to make choices when interacting with others and one’s environment. Leaders who register a high CQ have the ability to see a lot of information simultaneously; a lower CQ indicates less ability to access this raft of information. Simply put, someone with a higher CQ normally has a broader perspective, as long as the information is understood. CQ is a measure of ability to access the information and, when linked with IQ, may measure the ability of a person to process this information. Brazdau (2014) has created a psychometric instrument to measure seven domains of consciousness:

physical CQ (being conscious of your own body and environmental awareness;

emotional CQ (conscious of your own feelings, emotions, their development and interactions);

cognitive CQ (conscious of your ideas, thoughts, reflective processes, meaning-making);

social-relational CQ (conscious of human relationships and the way you connect with others);

the self CQ (conscious of self and one’s own ego or identity);

the inner growth CQ (capacity for awareness of personal development, personal growth);

the spiritual CQ (conscious of yourself as part of a wider world and your place/connections in it, ‘I’ as an observer).

The headteacher and I agreed to complete the inventory, which neither of us had used before. This was a two-stage process, the first part to complete the inventory and the second part to meet and discuss our outcomes. We completed the inventory separately but on the same day, keeping a note of how long it took us to respond to all of the 273 statements. The inventory was based on a six-level Likert approach ranging from ‘Almost never’ to ‘Almost always’ for each of the statements. The first section (243 statements) requires the participant to evaluate the frequency with which they have encountered a specific situation (as specified in each statement), in their daily life. There is a range of percentage figures from 90–100 per cent (Almost always/Definitely yes), if the statement regularly applies to one’s daily experience to 0–10 per cent (almost never/Definitely no), if the item does not apply. There is a range of percentage graduations between the upper and lower limits of the scale. Statements in the first section are typically presented as:

59. I notice the automatic habits/patterns of my thinking (for example, positive, negative, optimistic)

123. It is easy for me to notice the various aspects (facets, parts) of my self

The second section has 30 items to be answered with a yes/no response scale. These are typically presented:

252. Do you fantasize about what you want or dream about having?

273. I have carefully designed my own perspective on life on Earth and my role here on Earth

A few days later we met to discuss our individual scores and to see how we compared. The meeting lasted for about one hour. We reflected on our experience of completing the inventory (how easy it was to come to a decision over each score), how long it had taken us to complete the inventory and our overall impression of how each inventory section might relate and or impact on our way of thinking about leadership issues that might impact positively or less so on our future partnership working. We discussed our experience of completing the inventory and agreed that many of the statements did not immediately resonate with issues we would normally associate with the skills, traits and abilities to carry out leadership work. We had not, for example, thought too closely about the domain of spirituality but it did generate a discussion which allowed us to think about why we did not see the immediate relevance of this domain to our partnership work. The inventory allowed us to re-evaluate our own leadership qualities and how we might strengthen our ways of partnership working. This was especially apparent with the domain of ‘Inner growth’ which we felt allowed us to discuss some of the challenges of working in each other’s context, that is, academic working in school and headteacher working in the university. In conclusion, we feel that the inventory has given us both licence to talk about partnership leadership from a personal and professional perspective and through such discussions given us both more confidence in the work of promoting partnership and teacher inquiry.

As a method for researching leadership the inventory was straightforward to complete and the results were generated by the online questionnaire.

Our results are shown in Table 1 and we have decided to compare our statistics and outcomes for the purpose of this pilot.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Headteacher and academic outcomes from the Consciousness Quotient inventory (CQ-i).

CQ Domain	Headteacher Score %	Academic Score %	Range outcome	Range outcome	Summary of outcome statements
Physical	74.77	67.57	Upper-intermediate		Aware of own body and changes in environment. Can describe own physiological changes and acknowledge one’s own needs.
Emotional	76.67	67.2	Upper-intermediate values range		Aware of own emotions and empathetic. Capable of adapting behaviour in response to environment.
Cognitive	81.7	78.7		Upper/ upper- intermediate values range	Many skills available to observe and manage own thoughts. High level of awareness and enhanced abilities in regulating thought processes.
Social-relational	83.33	76.58		Upper/ upper-intermediate values range	Sound awareness of relationship with others. Good interpersonal skills and aware of changes in dynamics of others.
Self	79.01	72.84		Upper/ upper-intermediate values range	Can manage ‘inner life’ and verbalize one’s self. Understands own identity, personality and have good self-awareness.
Inner growth	87.72	71.67		Upper/ upper-intermediate values range	Can adapt and learn from new experiences, open to criticism and welcome difficult situations, helping to contribute to one’s personal development
Spiritual	65.32	66.23	Upper-intermediate values range		Can experience interconnectedness of people, have well-defined ideas about one’s purpose on Earth. Often contemplate the complexity of life.
Overall CQ	78.25	71	No summative value given	No summative value given	No summative statement

Evaluation of our data and reflections about the inventory

The online assessment engine uses standardized scores for exploratory purposes only. For interpretation there are four categories: upper (80–100 per cent), upper-intermediate (60–80 per cent), average (40–60 per cent) and below average (0–40 per cent). For most of our scores we fell into the upper/upper intermediate range across the seven domains and our summative scores were 71 and 78 per cent, respectively (scores above 80 are highlighted in the table). We thought that repeating the inventory after an agreed time period (say after six months) might reveal improvements in our individual scores and be a better measure of validity of the inventory.

The merit of the inventory lies, we feel, in focusing the participant’s awareness of self, promoting reflection of one’s own scores for each domain and in developing an awareness of how well one relates to others over those collective domains, should a comparison of scores/outcomes be agreed between those completing the inventory. As a professional development tool the inventory provides opportunities for individual leaders to reflect on their scores and make the choice to disclose scores/outcomes with others or not. For those interested in their own personal development and in gaining a deeper insight and understanding of themselves, this inventory provides a good introduction. In our context, it gave us the opportunity to have further discussions about our leadership roles in our partnership working and the ways in which we might work together in the future.

Framing joint reflections on our leadership

Recommendations for scaling up this approach to researching leadership

From a wider research perspective, the inventory would seem to have merit as a starting point for researching transformational leadership. As we have worked together in a spirit of cooperation, it seemed appropriate to engage with a psychological-based approach that is grounded in a sociocultural knowledge of reciprocity, essentially a participatory leadership style. Previous research using the CQ-i approach (Jones and Brazdau, 2015; Jones, 2012) has adopted a qualitative approach employing the use of in depth semi-structured follow-up interviews with participants who have completed the inventory. These interviews gave opportunities to follow up on the seven domains of the CQ-i inventory, such as ‘How do you connect with other human beings’, ‘how do you learn’ and ‘what is your specific worldview or perspective on leadership?’ (Jones and Brazdau, 2015: 253). I would suggest that research into effective school–university partnerships could employ a similar methodology or, perhaps, a self-completing questionnaire which provides broadly similar opportunities for participants to reveal more about their leadership values. The use of narratives again aligned with the seven domains of conscious leadership provides an alternative validation of the outcomes of the inventory and the means to accrue a rich data base of transformative leadership evidence.

Scaling up this research about leadership more generally, this method has potential for individual leaders (and those aspiring to leadership positions) to be more self-aware about their own leadership actions. The outcomes of the inventory for a participant bring into sharp relief a score and a written outcome which is useful for self-reflection and personal analysis of how one appears as a leader.

Conclusion

In an era of increased autonomy and system fragmentation, school leaders are charged with forging new alliances across and within their school communities. While on the one hand headteachers are grappling with improving attainment in their schools they are also charged with productively networking and forging close relationships with other institutions and services within their communities. These types of partnerships, if they are to be enduring, need to be built socially, based on trust developed and sustained over time. The partnership described in this article is, at its heart, a social activity from which positive impact has been taken by both parties. Our experience of piloting the CQ-i has opened up a way of exploring our sociocratic way of working (Mongon and Chapman, 2012) and to provide some quantifiable measure of our own personal dispositions. The impact of piloting the inventory has given us licence to reflect on our partnership work to date and how it might help us shape our work for the future. Completing the inventory has given us the space to reflect on how we are thinking about partnership working from a personal and partnership perspective.