Developing adaptability and agility in leadership amidst the COVID-19 crisis: experiences of early-career school principals

Abstract

Purpose

During the COVID-19 crisis in Victoria, Australia the complexity of school leadership increased greatly for school principals. This study focused on the lived experiences of early career principals in the independent school sector from March to November 2020 in Victoria, Australia. It investigates transformative work that was undertaken by these leaders in leading their schools over a protracted crisis.

Design/methodology/approach

The study builds on constructs of crisis leadership, adaptive leadership, agile leadership and emotional intelligence, exploring the leadership approaches undertaken by twenty-two early career principals in Victoria, Australia. Using a narrative inquiry approach, across three temporal points in 2020, storied productions drawn from the findings present four emergent types of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches undertaken by these principals. These leadership approaches are presented as the commander-leader, the conductor-leader, the gardener-leader and the engineer-leader with each approach demonstrating both organisational leadership approaches as well as individual leadership styles used by these principals as they led their schools.

Findings

The findings have direct implications for professional development programs focusing on aspiring principals and early career principals with emphasis on the importance of developing emotionally intelligent skillsets in principals for use during periods of rapid change or high crisis in schools. The findings present insight into the support useful for early career principals in the first five years of principalship.

Originality/value

This study uses a unique emotional intelligence approach to understand school leadership during and after a crisis.

Citation

Fernandes, V., Wong, W. and Noonan, M. (2023), "Developing adaptability and agility in leadership amidst the COVID-19 crisis: experiences of early-career school principals", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 483-506. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-02-2022-0076

Background of this study

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruption across the world. Within the education sector, it impacted students, teachers, parents and their school communities. Internationally, more than 1.5 billion enrolled students of all ages were affected in 2020, with four million of those students residing in Australia (ABS, 2019; UNESCO, 2020a; 2020b; UNICEF, 2020; cited by Bozkurt et al., 2020, p. 2).

In Victoria, Australia schools experienced significant learning interruptions over 2020–21 and moved into and out of six lockdowns totalling 262 lockdown days (Vally and Bennett, 2021) equating to almost one year of remote learning. This study focuses on the period of March to November 2020. During the first six-week lockdown (March to May 2020), Victorian schools were directed to move to remote learning and in less than a week, were expected to convert their on-site educational delivery into an online delivery of remote learning (Oplatka and Crawford, 2021). A first-of-its-kind, rapid upskilling of staff across Victorian schools was conducted to ensure that schools were able to deliver this new mode of educational delivery. Parents and students were provided basic instructions and training through their schools to help them partner with schools in this process. Schools reopened in May 2020, but, due to sharply increasing numbers of COVID-19 in Victoria, closed again and went online into remote learning (Duckett et al., 2020) for ten weeks (July to October 2020). From October 2020, using a staggered approach schools transitioned back to onsite learning.

These novel challenges faced by school principals were out of their normal lived professional experiences (Thomson et al., 2021) and has transformed the role of school leadership across Victoria (Arnold et al., 2021). Within Victoria, school leadership was influenced by instructions from governments, unions and medical experts. Principals felt that mounting contextual pressures from these stakeholders left them bombarded on many fronts as they led their schools (Arnold et al., 2021). Increased importance was accrued to the provision of school education as it was considered a social stabilising factor in a period of uncertainty and instability (Thomson et al., 2021). Crises are usually urgent situations within which principals have to take fast and decisive action (Smith and Riley, 2010, 2012). Over this protracted crisis period, principals reported how their leadership approaches moved from being crisis-oriented to human-oriented with elements of adaptive and agile leadership developing as the pandemic progressed. The pandemic provided a unique opportunity to study first-hand not only a protracted crisis stage but also a post-crisis period and identify emergent approaches of school leadership, as schools continued to deliver education as well as adopt versatility in their leadership approaches.

Using a narrative inquiry approach, this study identifies four emergent storied productions of the kinds of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches undertaken by twenty-two early-career independent school principals from March to November 2020. The pandemic reinforced the importance of emotion training in all teacher and principal preparation programs due to its significance in human behaviour and actions (Lakomski and Evers, 2017). The findings from this study provide insights into the kinds of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches used by early-career school principals with implications for making use of these findings in developing elements of emotion training in teacher and principal preparation and professional development programs.

The main research question of this study is, “What kinds of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches were identified in early-career school principals during the Covid-19 global pandemic?”

Literature review

Crisis leadership

Crises are unexpected, unplanned, unpredictable, highly salient and disruptive events (Wu et al., 2021) that have long- and short-term impacts on an organisation. In most cases, they directly impact the organisation's performance and may result in adverse outcomes (Coombs, 2007). In schools, crises are unexpected situations associated strongly with urgency, requiring principals to take a series of quick, decisive actions. When school communities face a crisis, some members of the school community endure confronting, intrusive and painful experiences (Smith and Riley, 2010, 2012). During a crisis, principals deal with continuing complexity due to the immediacy of the crisis event and work within an uncertain environment of fluctuating conditions as they salvage (Grice, 2021) and lead their organisation from a level of crisis response to crisis recovery and beyond (Mutch, 2020).

The crisis leadership of principals over the pandemic had a strong performative aspect with ongoing complexities faced over extended lockdowns in the state of Victoria, Australia. As strategic organisational leaders (Schaedler et al., 2022), principals had to undertake actions that would help them directly address complex problems occurring in an ever-changing educational context, severely impacted by changing federal and state political and health directives, as the pandemic lockdowns progressed over 2020–21. Over this period, schools and what happened within them held a pivotal role across society, and principals became the school's public face to their community. In such situations, principals needed to respond swiftly by carefully considering their mandated and non-mandated options, the full-scale impacts and subsequent consequences of decisions taken and the effects of the organisational actions undertaken by their school (Netolicky, 2020).

Within any school crisis, positive or negative outcomes are directly affected by how organisational behaviours have occurred during that crisis. These behaviours affect the technical dynamics of the organisational response to the situation and the trust factor on which the cultural dynamics of the school community is dependent. Organisational leadership during a crisis influences “the nature of communication, the centrality or distribution of power and decision making, and the conservation and use of resources” (Sutherland, 2017, p. 4). The complexity of school leadership exists throughout the phases of response, recovery and reflection in a prolonged crisis. This suggests that principals who are successful crisis leaders draw on their dispositional qualities and prior experiences; their relational skills in building school community; and their managing of the ongoing crisis by assessing and responding to the situational demands that arise (Mutch, 2015). Crisis leadership, when considered a relational social construction (Eacott, 2018), is exercised during a crisis by principals and other stakeholders within the school community as they move into, through and out of the crisis. It requires that principals actively engage in “careful examination[s] of intentionality, or the ethics, values and spirituality, which guide the ‘how,’ ‘why,’ and ‘what’ of [their] leadership in schools” (Mutch, 2015, p. 8).

In their recent work Wu et al. (2021) have identified the importance of considering a process view of crisis leadership especially due to the fragmented and subjective approach taken in most reviews on crisis leadership. Bundy et al. (2017) have presented a framework that specifies crisis management as consisting of three primary stages, which include pre-crisis, in-crisis and post-crisis stages. The current study adopted a processual approach to studying school leadership over three points in time in 2020 with emphasis given mostly to the pre-crisis and in-crisis stages of the pandemic over that period and has attempted at presenting this through the lens of emotional intelligence in school leadership. Using this lens within this study was particularly useful due to the heavy emotional labour exercised by both school leaders and other stakeholders when confronted with the protracted nature of this crisis. As Wu et al. (2021) suggest research into leader emotion management during crises is important as it provides leaders with the knowledge on how best they may effectively and strategically manage negative emotions arising during crises.

Adaptive leadership

In an ever-changing and complex external environment, the importance for principals to be able to adapt and change while addressing challenges becomes critical. When, these challenges arise as adaptive problems or challenges (Uhl-Bien, 2021a) requiring leaders and their followers (Uhl-Bien, 2021b) to use alternative approaches to problem-solving instead of known solutions to technical problems. Adaptive problems are not easily identifiable or clearly defined (Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2017). They require multiple stakeholders to work on the challenge within a productive zone of disequilibrium (Heifetz and Laurie, 1998; Uhl-Bien, 2021b). In this zone, there is sufficient tension caused by the change, to get stakeholders involved in organisational adaptability (Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2018) through their adaptive work done together. This allows for the system to not fall apart as a result of the disequilibrium created through conflicting views, high heterogeneity and interdependence (Uhl-Bien, 2021a).

Engaging in complex adaptive problem-solving requires principals to use complex adaptive systems thinking in these processes (Lichtenstein et al., 2006). Complex adaptive systems have multiple independent change agents who interact and adapt each other by constantly modifying and rearranging their building blocks in light of prediction, experience and learning (Lichtenstein et al., 2006; Waldrop, 1993). Principals enable the complex adaptive processes (Morrison, 2002) taking place in their schools. Research indicates that the actions of principals during periods of adaptive work can either facilitate or restrain the exploration of new paths undertaken by their school community (Khanal et al., 2021). Solving adaptive challenges in schools requires a period of adaptive work led by the principal and undertaken by school stakeholders. Principals through their leadership actions (Grice, 2021) lay the groundwork for teamwork, carrying on the invisible emotional labour of deepening relationships within the school and community through the strengthening of social cohesion (Wilkinson et al., 2018). They provide opportunities for collective ownership and innovation created through collaborative problem-solving processes integrated into regular school processes (Raelin, 2016).

Complex adaptive school leadership mobilises people within schools to work together on difficult problems and engage in the adaptive work required to progress ahead (Heifetz et al., 2004). Subsequently, complex adaptive school leadership, is an iterative process, which involves the principal and their teams observing complex patterns and events caused due to a problem, interpreting their observations and designing their complex adaptive interventions based on their interpretations of the educational change process taking place (Lichtenstein et al., 2006). Being iterative, these activities keep building on the ones before them and are refined within a continuous process of observation, interpretation and intervention (Heifetz et al., 2009). Developing complex adaptive organisational leadership approaches (Lichtenstein et al., 2006) during a protracted crisis provides principals with opportunities to grow the whole school as one community with different teams working towards common organisational goals. The pandemic has in effect enabled the process of complex adaptive school leadership by opening up adaptive spaces in schools through its destabilising disruptions (Uhl-Bien, 2021b) and helping leaders and followers to engage more fully in building cohesive learning environments.

Agile leadership

The protracted nature of the COVID-19 pandemic over 2020–21 created a situation where principals had to rapidly engage in strengthening the internal integration of their schools (Schein and Schein, 2016) while sustaining continuous strategic transformation facilitated by enhanced organisational agility (Appelbaum et al., 2017a). Organisational agility is complex, multidimensional and context-specific (Yang and Liu, 2012) where an organisation such as a school senses the environmental change such as the pandemic and responds skilfully and quickly to that change (Plummer and McCoy, 2006). This quick, skilful change is done through the flexible assemblage of its resources, processes, knowledge and capabilities (Yang and Liu, 2012) to innovate and envision new practices and processes that it will engage in. However, the transformation into becoming and remaining an agile organisation is not easy (Appelbaum et al., 2017b) and becomes an ongoing organisational process. Agile organisations need to be adaptive organisations first before they can transform themselves into agile organisations and sustain this transformation (Appelbaum et al., 2017a, 2017b). The important prework of complex adaptive change (Lichtenstein et al., 2006) results in organisations further developing their enterprise agility which in turn improves their organisational capabilities as well as their chances of survival (Yang and Liu, 2012) during a protracted pandemic period. Koning (2019) suggests that agile leaders have the ability to co-create with their teams a new vision and direction that their organisation will be going on. These leaders develop team ownership brought about by providing a safe environment where their teams can be creative, experiment and innovate new ideas and spaces for the organisation to grow itself as an effective and viable organisation. These agile leaders focus on developing healthy cultures for agile work to take place. Breakspear et al. (2017, p. vii) recognise that agile principals are able “… to shape changing conditions into a positive impact on students … are responsive, quick to spot emerging problems or opportunities, and able to work in short-iterative cycles of adaptation, learning, and improvement.”

Research indicates that these leaders have specific characteristics, and competencies demonstrated through their leadership practices within complex educational environments (Joiner and Josephs, 2007). Agile characteristics are organisational leadership characteristics that leaders and followers engage in together and include collaboration, self-awareness, proficiency, flexibility, an ability to change and quick thinking and action (Akkaya and Yazici, 2020). These protean characteristics represent the cognitive agility of leaders demonstrated through their ability to remain versatile, flexible and adaptable (Johnson and Kruse, 2019). The agility of these organisational leaders is shown through their higher levels of sensemaking and responsive capability as they engage with others in complex adaptive work taking place in their schools (Lichtenstein et al., 2006) while also envisioning and building up new spaces for creativity and innovation. They can sense deeply nuanced changes happening internally and externally within their school environments, intelligently and rapidly respond to them and identify future viable options by exploring and testing several paths if needed (Breakspear et al., 2017). Sensemaking in such environments involves school leaders and followers as agile thinkers, capable of adapting their thinking within the variability of events being experienced. In fact, these agile school leaders develop the collective capabilities of their school personnel using disciplined collaborative inquiry approaches (Breakspear et al., 2017) that allow them in agile teams to co-create goals, facilitate ownership, learn faster together and design a healthier organisational culture in their school (Koning, 2019).

Emotional intelligence in school leadership

Emotional intelligence allows one to understand, recognise and evaluate the meaning of emotions in order to reason and solve problems (Mayer et al., 1999). Emotional Intelligence requires that both thinking and feeling abilities must work together (Kerr et al., 2006). Goleman's (Goleman, 1998) model of emotional intelligence incorporates five emotional and social competencies in the workplace: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. Self-aware leaders are self-knowledgeable, recognising their strengths and weaknesses and considering their failures as opportunities to learn (Blaik Hourani et al., 2021). These leaders are comfortable with accepting their own personal strengths and weaknesses (Bower et al., 2018). Self-regulated leaders analyse their responses and behaviours, identifying effective ways for achieving their intentions and purposes within certain situations (Blaik Hourani et al., 2021). They are self-controlled, trustworthy, conscientious, adaptable and innovative (Serrat, 2017). Motivated leaders set challenging goals for themselves and others; seeking ways to improve their performance and that of others in their institution through collective effort; while working together to meet the goals of their organisation (Lunenburg, 2011). Leaders demonstrating empathy are able to identify, understand and experience the emotions of others (Berkovich and Eyal, 2015). Leaders possessing higher levels of social skills work at inspiring others by developing their capabilities, influencing their feelings and beliefs, building strong relational bonds, supporting teamwork, leading by example, managing change processes and resolving conflicts that arise (Lunenburg, 2011) while moving teams through various stages of the crisis.

Brinia et al. (2014) found in their study of school principals that, emotionally intelligent principals are “able to inspire and facilitate a group-conscious organisational culture by adopting the values of understanding, trust, prospect, achievement and effectiveness and combining emotions, beliefs, vision and values in a flexible manner” (p. 28).

Emotionally intelligent leaders recognise, understand and respect the needs, values and aspirations of their staff (Nelson and Low, 2011) and build stronger and healthier self-managed teams within their institutions (Brinia et al., 2014). Principals with high levels of emotional intelligence create strong cooperative relationships and are effective in developing transformational change within their respective schools (Cai, 2011). Emotionally intelligent leaders understand their own emotions and that of others, enhancing their thinking processes and the effectiveness of their leadership practices (Sadri, 2012).

Goleman's studies (Goleman, 2000, 2019; Goleman et al., 2004) on emotional intelligence involved identifying six distinct individual leadership styles: commanding, pace-setting, democratic, affiliative, coaching and visionary. Commanding leadership demands immediate compliance and is best used in the initial stages of a crisis or at the start of a turnaround (Goleman et al., 2013). Pace-setting leaders set high standards for performance and get quick results from highly motivated and competent teams while working within the initial stages to medium stages of the crisis (Goleman et al., 2004). Democratic leadership forges consensus through participation and builds this consensus through communication and collaboration. These democratic leaders are important in the midst of a crisis as their organisational change leadership actions are leaderful practices that are both dialogical and deliberate (Raelin, 2012). These leadership actions help build and maintain strong bonds of organisational trust (Cranston, 2011) amongst principals and their adaptive teams working to bring about new forms of innovative equilibrium within the organisation. Affiliative leaders work to create harmony and build emotional bonds by healing rifts in a team or by motivating people during stressful circumstances. These leaders exercise real power and energy in their organisations through relationships that are developed, healed and maintained especially during protracted crisis periods. The patterns of relationship-building and having the capacity to form these relationships take precedence over the managing of operational tasks, organisational functions, leadership roles and hierarchical positions (Madsen, 2008). Coaching leaders are empathic and self-aware and focus on building people for future goals and roles within the organisation especially as it starts to reconfigure itself. They develop team members by helping them improve performance or by helping them develop their long-term strengths (Goleman et al., 2004). These leadership actions are necessary when schools are moving out of a crisis and into a post-crisis mode because they help in re-establishing the cultural milieu of the school. Visionary leadership is used when adaptive changes now require new vision-building or new directions. Visionary leaders mobilise their teams toward this new vision and direction (Goleman, 2019). While it can be authoritative, it helps the school to move into new educational spaces through innovation and creativity. In this case, the leader uses strategic as well as relational leadership approaches to help their teams feel confident in venturing into new spaces and directions.

Research acknowledges the emotional labour of a principal in managing their own emotions and those of others (Chen et al., 2021; Lakomski and Evers, 2017). The pandemic and the role of principals over this crisis have heightened the importance of developing aspiring principals' skills in crisis, adaptive and agile leadership approaches where emotional intelligence has been integral in how principals have led their school communities.

Conceptual framework for this study

Principals influence the motivation, knowledge and practices of their staff as they facilitate teaching and learning processes being conducted at their school (Spillane and Diamond, 2007). Figure 1 indicates how leadership actions during this protracted crisis can best be demonstrated through nested leadership systems where schools move from a crisis leadership system to an adaptive leadership system and finally into an agile leadership system. Each leadership system is nested within the other because of the contextual realities that a school faces in such situations where certain elements of a crisis might still be dealt with even though the school might be working in an adaptive or agile zone.

In general, research indicates as shown in Figure 2, principals move through a protracted crisis by first using high to low crisis leadership approaches where individual leadership styles such as commanding leadership and pace-setting leadership helps principals to work through the initial stages of the crisis with their staff, understand the problem and develop new processes to maintain and operationalise redefined school processes. These individual leadership styles help principals to support organisational adjustments being made as their schools move into low and then high adaptive leadership work during a protracted crisis. In the adaptive zone, democratic and affiliative leadership styles are exercised by principals while their teams work together in an organisationally adaptive zone of disequilibrium and build stronger relational bonds together. For many schools, this adaptive work goes on even after reaching the mid-crisis point and while coming out of the crisis since these schools remain in this adaptive zone using relational leadership actions to maintain and sustain leaderful practices (Raelin, 2011) being attempted within their schools so that communication, collaboration and trust become central in their delivery. However, for some schools, they move beyond adaptive leadership approaches towards demonstrating organisational agility. Agile principals are found to not only allow their schools to engage in complex adaptive work but also look beyond the pandemic at their new normal and work at developing viable innovations to improve their educational service within their schools. As indicated in Figures 1 and 2, this changing complex leadership process while mostly linear may have embedded approaches from the previous approach such as crisis leadership or adaptive leadership still taking place while new ground is established in the adaptive or agile leadership zones. To this purpose, the leadership undertaken by principals is complex and can change gears while generally moving from crisis leadership to adaptive leadership and then onto agile leadership approaches.

Figure 2 demonstrates how these emotionally intelligent leaders engage in more than one individual leadership style during a protracted crisis while engaging and changing gears across three kinds of organisational leadership approaches being utilised within their school communities. This link between emotionally intelligent leadership and organisational school leadership plays a central role in developing resilient school communities (Allen, 2011; Benson et al., 2014). Figure 2 also indicates how these six individual leadership styles and three organisational approaches are interconnected and provides a conceptual framework for how complex school leadership practices take place during protracted periods of crisis or change.

Research methods

This qualitative study involved collecting and analysing data via semi-structured interviews of school principals across 42 independent schools in regional and metropolitan Victoria. This study used a narrative inquiry approach as its research design where self-narratives by principals on their leadership practices during the early stages of the pandemic was recorded using open-ended interviewing processes. “Narrative inquiry, the study of experience as story … is a way of thinking about the experience” (Connelly and Clandinin, 2006, p. 375) and provides the researcher with various points of reflection within that story. By using narrative inquiry dimensions: temporality, sociality and spatiality, stories of school principals' lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic was mapped out investigating their individual leadership styles (Goleman et al., 2013; Goleman, 2019) alongside their organisational leadership approaches. These self-narratives provided an opportunity to analyse, understand and present a rich description of school leadership experiences through an exploration of the meanings that these participants derived from these experiences (Wang and Geale, 2015). Storytelling provided a way for amplifying participants' voices and for communicating their realities to a wider audience (Riessman, 2008) over three temporal points: Lockdown One, Lockdown Two and COVID-normal in 2020. This elucidation of real people in their own settings, through the portrayal of their lived experiences (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990) provides richness of interpretation undertaken by qualitative researchers as they decipher and analyse the deeper meanings of personal stories and events (Wang and Geale, 2015).

Sampling

The Independent school sector within Victoria operates due to parent choices that are based on cultural, religious and philosophical grounds for schooling. Some independent schools operate on their own as a standalone basis, while others are formed as a part of a system of schools with a common bond. In 2022, there are approximately 150, 926 students enrolled across 382 independent schools in Victoria with 13,715 teachers and 7,431 support staff working in these schools (ISV, 2022). Approximately 70% of these schools are located in metropolitan areas while 30% are located in regional areas of Victoria. All schools in Victoria operate within the bounds of state and Australian Government legislation in areas such as finance, accountability, curriculum and assessment and reporting. However, the schools belonging to the independent school sector are distinguished by their own management and governance structures which makes them different to schools operating within the public or Catholic sectors of schooling that operate under central systems of administration such as the Department of Education and Training, Victoria (for public schools) or the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria (for Catholic schools).

Earlier in the pandemic, 90 principals across 382 independent Victorian schools had taken part in an initial study conducted by Independent Schools Victoria (ISV) during the first lockdown to identify the challenges being faced by independent schools earlier on in the pandemic in relation to education, finances, health and wellbeing. Of these 90 principals, 42 principals opted to participate in this research study conducted in partnership with Monash University. Before fieldwork, the researchers sought and received ethics approval through Monash University. The current paper focuses on findings from 22 early-career principals whose leadership experience ranged between one and five years. Table 1 provides the demographic details of this sample.

As Table 1 indicates 13 of the 22 early-career principals had two years or less experience as principals and were located in metropolitan schools. In all 18 principals were in metropolitan areas and had tighter lockdown measures imposed on them as compared to regional schools. 16 schools were medium to small-sized schools of which 8 schools were being led by principals with 2 years or less experience. 18 of these schools were combined (F-12) schools of which 10 schools were led by principals with 2 years or less experience.

Data collection

Each principal was interviewed for forty-five minutes by a team of independent school consultants over October–December 2020. This team had previously interviewed the cohort of 90 school principals. In order to maintain rigor and trustworthiness (Lincoln and Guba, 1985), the team was trained in doing semi-structured interviews and kept reflective notes on each principal using a pre-set observation and reflection performance prepared by the researchers. The data collection tools were developed in line with the aim of this study. All interviews were recorded and transcribed, making use of member-checking to further establish trustworthiness (Birt et al., 2016) of the collected data set. Since a narrative inquiry approach was used, having stronger trust relationships with the interviewers allowed for deeper questioning of the participants as they discussed their lived experiences.

Data analysis

Coding is a decision-making process that helps researchers to make sense of data by mapping or indexing it (Elliott, 2018). Three stages of coding were conducted by the researchers as they coded the transcribed interviews and reflective notes of the interviewing team. Firstly, initial coding involved using inductive and open coding procedures through which a set of preliminary emergent codes was developed. Making use of the three narrative inquiry dimensions of sociality, spatiality and temporality, mapping of chronological patterns of the principals' experiences within the ever-changing socio-political context was done while coding at this stage. Initially, 38 inductive codes were identified but after the removal of redundant codes (Creswell, 2015), 24 codes were shortlisted. These codes were then collapsed and categorised across six organisational leadership themes (see Figure 1). These six categories were used to cross-code the coded data simultaneously across six individual leadership styles (Goleman et al., 2004) as discussed in the conceptual framework (Figure 2) so that the coded data could be organised under these cross-connected categories using narrative configurations to emplot each of the organisational leadership approaches emerging through the principals' lived experiences (Polkinghorne, 1995). This deductive approach of cross-coding the data across the six main categories of organisational leadership while cross-coding them along six main categories of individual leadership styles helped to identify patterns or themes of emotionally intelligent leadership emerging within the personal narratives of early-career principals.

Theoretical discussion of findings

The researchers found that the six main organisational leadership themes needed to be collapsed into four main themes since in some cases overlaps were found in the organisational leadership approaches taken by these early-career principals where strong distinctions could not be drawn across some of their leadership styles and approaches. Through emplotment, four emerging organisational leadership approaches are presented as storied productions (Polkinghorne, 1988) of leaders who used a range of emotionally intelligent leadership styles while leading their schools over this period (see Figure 3).

These four main themes presented with metaphoric descriptors are: (1) Periods of High Crisis Leadership – Commander-leaders; (2) Periods of Low Crisis and Low Adaptive Leadership – Conductor-leaders; (3) Periods of High Adaptive and Low Agile Leadership - Gardener-leaders; and (4) Periods of High Agile Leadership - Engineer-leaders. Metaphors have long been acknowledged as a mode of communication that allows the expression of a complex idea or concept to be discussed in terms of another phenomenon (Randell and Yerbury, 2020). By making use of leadership metaphors (Alvesson and Spicer, 2011; Oberlechner and Mayer- Schönberger, 2002) an emplotment of four emergent thematic organisational leadership approaches are presented through the theoretical discussion of the findings from this study.

High crisis leadership: Commander-leader

During the first lockdown, a number of principals indicated that they had to lead their schools using a commanding leadership style that involved setting up a crisis management team and giving clear instructions to multiple stakeholders while understanding the rapidly changing nature of the situation themselves. The high level of uncertainty and mixed information being received from both the federal and state governments regarding school closures and increasing fears within staff and parents around community transmission required principals to lead from the front and provide clear directions that had to be followed and strictly complied with. As one principal said, “planning for the bigger picture is difficult when you don't have the bigger picture, when you're running day to day” (PR 1).

This rapid period of change also required the principal to get their teachers to prepare and present for the first time ever through an alternative mode of delivery, teaching and learning activities for their students. The heightened anxiety by the teachers was found in schools where technological infrastructure was not fully developed to handle this load and limited skill-sets for delivery of a blended remote learning offering found (Huber and Helm, 2020). Teachers were expected to up-skill themselves in less than a week and be involved in extensive planning, operationalisation and improvement of delivery within two to three weeks. The magnitude of change and high levels of uncertainty left teachers and principals exhausted but willing to serve their students and parents within their respective jurisdictions (Longmuir, 2021). Home-school partnerships developed overnight allowed teachers and parents to become co-partners in providing a remote learning platform through their homes (Gurr, 2020; Gurr and Drysdale, 2020). For some schools, the infrastructure at school needed to be immediately upgraded to deliver this kind of learning, in other schools, parents struggled with not having sufficient devices, wi-fi or the technical know-how to help their children learn online (Rincones et al., 2021). As one principal described, “The school has made a huge leap because technologically we weren't advanced as a school. That was certainly an area that I'd started to work on, but necessity breeds change, and I'd had to make that leap in 2020. I think we're going to be able to leverage from the leap we've made …” (PR 24). As one principal discussed,

… the nature of leadership then, particularly at my school, had to change and one of the strongest and saddest implications for me is that the leadership went from being instructional, and I’d like to think strategic, to totally directive. (PR 34).

The fear of losing enrolments of international students due to state and federal restrictions and the implications of this on their own viability was real for some schools. As one regional principal discussed, “I've got the whole international student cohort to still deal with … our international students were impacted most and it's much harder to figure out how to teach some kids in some classes overseas with English as a barrier” (PR 39). In the messiness of crisis leadership (Harris, 2020), principals made mistakes at times while at other times suffered from exhaustion however, they found that keeping up a steady momentum while getting through challenging situations was important.

Low crisis leadership and low adaptive leadership: Conductor-leader

Once schools started to work remotely, the intensity of the crisis reduced and the leadership style of some principals moved from being controlling to pacesetting or even democratic. Some school principals felt they were still dealing with a less intense crisis while others felt that they were working through and building buy-in and consensus from the school community, by using relational leadership approaches. At this stage, while there was still a level of direct leadership exercised at some schools, there was more evidence of collegial and democratic leadership found amongst most schools. Hence the metaphor of a music conductor fits well with this role as while the principals worked at supporting new systems that were being built they also began to open up adaptive work spaces for their teams to experiment with these new systems and develop new ways to work. But as a conductor-leader, it was when the work of various teams came together that the whole school benefited from this collaboration and innovative coordination. Being responsive to the needs across teams was essential as a conductor-leader. As one principal discussed,

My staff were appreciative that I was making quick decisions during the year, but I realised that some decisions I made may have been a bit difficult for them, and once I spoke to them we had to change our approach. Now before making certain decisions I just get more feedback from staff. That’s what I now do differently (PR 16).

In schools where the main crisis was still impacting the teachers and students, a pace-setting low crisis leadership approach was required. Mostly in these situations the abruptness of the change highlighted deficiencies in infra-structural systems or skill-sets that needed to be addressed while going through the transition. Hence leadership efforts were focused on enhancing their systems, on-boarding teachers, students and parents and looking after emerging wellbeing issues. One principal described this pace-setting experience as, “we had to build some systems that we didn't have. The first one was an online system … we had 14 days to build a platform that was stable and safe for students”. (PR 7).

Principals found that distributing the work across their teams and then directing them forwards, was required. This pace-setting style of leadership approach involved principals in being operationally-oriented. As one explained,

During the first lockdown period as a principal I was really in the nitty-gritty of the operational, every minute of the day … I think in any kind of crisis, as a principal, you need to be right in there, managing, whether it’s people, or operations, whatever it might be, and you’re responding, you’re constantly responding. (PR 29).

In a low adaptive stage, principals worked more collaboratively with staff (Heifetz et al., 2004) in determining how best to work out a blended learning model, maintain the wellbeing of staff and students, communicating the everyday situation and its impact on everyone and dealing with emerging issues around finances, loss of student enrolments, redundancies and other financial aspects of school management. Frequent and open communication channels whether in low crisis leadership stages or low adaptive leadership stages was central in keeping the school moving ahead. As this principal discusses,

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate! We did that quite early on, and I could see a lot of other principals doing the same. Even if you didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle yet, being very open and transparent about that was important. So yes, communication was really key (PR 29).

In this zone of disequilibrium while engaging in adaptive strategies (Heifetz et al., 2004; Uhl-Bien, 2021a, b), principal and staff wellbeing and self-care became central (Longmuir, 2021) since the crisis was protracted and the level of uncertainties remained high. This principal summed it up saying, “I have never been so exhausted in my life … I'm very fortunate to have a great community who also look out for me. I have also made a conscious effort for my staff to take time for themselves” (PR 40). During this low adaptive stage, many of these principals normalised the practice of and discussions about wellbeing and self-care with staff, students and parents (Urick et al., 2021), making it a priority during Lockdown Two.

High adaptive leadership and Low Agile Leadership: Gardener-leader

Over the second lockdown, Victorian schools sustained what had already been learnt and put in place in Lockdown One. As indicated in the findings, principals changed their approach and were using affiliative and coaching leadership approaches at this stage. Schools had greater opportunity for adaptive work with trust maintained (Bagwell, 2020) while focusing on the wellbeing of students, staff and principals as well as continuing with the main business of schools – the teaching and learning process. The metaphor of a gardener-leader becomes central when leading schools that are in high adaptive zones or have even entered agile leadership spaces because much of the work is now being down through teams and their levels of trust and agency must be maintained. The findings indicated that relational leadership became critical (Grissom and Condon, 2021) as schools worked on increasing student engagement and building strong home-school partnerships during Lockdown Two. In the case of some schools, they developed their adaptive expertise and ventured into strategically improving their educational services for students as COVID-normal planning began. These changes indicated how these schools were addressing the adaptive issue and working together on adapting their work environment (Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2017, 2018) and building their agility even amidst a crisis (Yang and Liu, 2012). School leadership facilitated the school with a growth mindset that coached them (Goleman, 2019) into realising what they could offer in COVID-normal times. As one principal discussed, “We realise that change is not the end of the world, and we're perhaps a bit more eager or open to listening and looking at change …” (PR1). For another principal this occurred through a sense of letting go,

I think the pandemic has definitely allowed me to be more flexible. I usually like things controlled, I plan the year very thoroughly down to the minutest detail if I can. During this pandemic I have learnt to become a bit detached from my plans, which is important … (PR 16).

The need to look after the welfare of their staff and students by continued efforts on the maintenance of good relationships within their school and its community remained salient (Longmuir, 2021). In the words of a principal, “Schools are fundamentally about relationships. And nothing beats relationships with staff and students, and engagement … we realised that community and connection are much more important than perhaps we previously understood them to be” (PR 18).

In developing the adaptability of their school, a principal described how they had tailored their communication to help their school community during the pandemic demonstrating the gardener-leader approach that they had adopted. They spoke of the concerted effort being made on ongoing recovery and reflection through their increased focus on relational leadership emphasising on the wellbeing of their school community (Mutch, 2015). The principals indicated how this agile work was highly complex and required new thinking and greater team work and collaboration (Yang and Liu, 2012). Much of the work of gardener-leaders is in pruning and planting as well as weeding out and sowing new seed. This is done not by the principal along with the collective agency of their teams as they work together.

The findings indicate how for the principals, agility meant responding skilfully to the external environmental changes as well as internal organisational changes taking place. (Plummer and McCoy, 2006). These realisations led to agile changes in how the school program was to be delivered in COVID-normal times such as moving in the future to online parent-teacher conferences, online staff check-ins and staff meetings. As a principal discussed, “As I'd changed my perception to being a leader of a community and not a principal doing the job of leading a school, something changed within me for the better (PR 39). Or as another principal discussed their inner agile leadership transformation (Appelbaum et al., 2017a, 2017b; Cai, 2011) within their organisational leadership approach,

… To try and be a good and timely communicator, and to focus on relationships. I think these have been the critical goals for us during the pandemic … Key lesson learnt: anything is possible … like almost six months of students offsite, remote learning and virtual learning … I led our team to critically and reflectively evaluate Lockdown One and to set goals for what it would look like if we were to go again. Then we did go again, and it was just seamless. (PR 40).

These findings indicate how principals found that their leadership styles in Lockdown Two and Covid-normal times needed to be different than what it was at the start of the pandemic. Having once been through the first lockdown they found that a gardener-leaders making organisational adjustments in the second lockdown were easier to lead and manage. Some were also starting to look ahead into Covid-normal times and what this meant for their school.

High agile leadership: Engineer-leader

The metaphor of an engineer-leader provides us with insight into how visionary leadership still requires scaffolding and strategy (Koning, 2019) integrated into whatever is being engineered in plans or in actions within the school community. The engineer-leader also has a strong creative and innovative role that they play because they are helping their school as a whole to start working on something new that has not been done before. This comes with the realisation that after having passed through a crisis, their teams have become adaptive in their and now are able to moving onto new ground. This engineer-leader works on moving their schools from adaptive to agile work spaces where new ideas are being grounded and put into motion.

Over 2020–21, independent schools in Victoria, Australia needed to develop the ability to respond rapidly and proactively to an ongoing changing educational environment that had direct implications on their own viability as effective educational institutions (ISV, 2021). Most schools moved through levels of crisis leadership into becoming adaptable but for some schools their adaptability further grew into organisational agility where they began productively responding to the rapid changes by innovating and creating new assemblages of educational delivery not previously offered. These agile schools worked on sensing signals in the environment, worked on processing them, mobilised their resources and organisational processes and appraised viable future opportunities that were being presented through these rapid changes, all the while continuing to learn and improve their ongoing operations (Desouza, 2006).

Agile principals were able to take advantage of the crisis situation and speed up change processes otherwise impeded by entrenched and rigid school improvement approaches and traditional structures. The findings indicate that this organisational leadership approach was demonstrated by emotionally-intelligent principals who as engineer-leaders used a strong visionary leadership style in leading their schools into COVID-normal times as schools returned on-site over October and November 2020. Transitioning into a COVID-normal world gave an opportunity for schools to refine their new transformational changes and refreeze the new normal and boundaries they had set for themselves by responding skilfully to the ongoing changes that had been faced through the lockdowns (Plummer and McCoy, 2006). As emotionally intelligent leaders (Goleman, 2000, 2019) these leaders drew out hidden potential in themselves and others to face change, harness it and make it work for the betterment and further growth of their school (Nelson and Low, 2011). These visionary principals continued to build trust in their ongoing decision-making, frequent communication and were actively nurturing the collaborative school cultures that were already in place (Sutherland, 2017). As one principal described this transformative work,

… As an independent school we’re aware that the decisions we make need to reflect the needs of our school community and we really felt that the school community appreciated being conservative and safe during this time … I think staff have learnt a lot about what they can handle and the new changes that they can make and the level of new change that they can absorb. So, it’s definitely beneficial moving forwards (PR 21).

Another principal found that their visionary approach led them into considering how their remote learning model could provide new pathways and models for learning that futureproofed students and developed independent learners through its agile transformation in student learning. In their words,

… the biggest lesson for our executive team and certainly for me, has been this whole notion that remote learning taught us the importance that’s it’s about teaching students how to learn and unlearn, rather than content … That notion is around future-proofing our students and ensuring that they don’t just have the knowledge but those skills to build and grow … (PR 35).

This visionary leadership style allowed some principals to look more deeply into strengthening home-school partnerships because that was a new space that offered new directions for their school. As one principal discussed,

[What] we saw magnified as a result of the remote learning, was parents really took on that role as shared educators, and worked closely with our teachers … the long-term plan is to improve parent-student-teacher partnership by having our students more involved in that partnership as well. Seeing themselves as learners and understanding their own learning needs, and helping us to plan for them (PR 4).

For other early-career principals who adopted an engineer-leader approach, developing a strong strategic vision based on student and staff wellbeing was imperative for a smooth transition into a COVID-normal world,

I have put in place a significant staffing and leadership restructure for next year, both around teaching and learning, and also around hopefully creating new roles in the school to assist with student wellbeing issues … And, I think there was a need for our staff to feel supported, and appreciated, and respected, so I had to look very hard at that … One of the things we talked about in COVID 2.0 was trying to be as empathetic and as conscious around what was happening at home, as much as what we wanted to achieve here at school (PR 11).

These findings indicate that these visionary early-career principals found it imperative to communicate their visionary ideas to their immediate leadership teams, teachers, students and parents and then to plan and lead these stakeholders with a certain level of new freedom to grow in these spaces (Koning, 2019; Yang and Liu, 2012).

Implications for school leaders

Kearney et al. (2014) suggest that, since principals are regularly dealing with a host of stakeholders such as teachers, school staff, administration, school board members, students, parents and the community in general, understanding their own emotional intelligence skills and its relationship to their leadership practice is significant. This study found many instances where the emotional intelligence skills of the school principals influenced their organisational leadership approaches while they were transformatively leading their schools through the pandemic.

The current study found that emotionally intelligent principals are more capable of getting teachers to collaborate (Cai, 2011) and facilitate supportive relationships with their peers (Sadri, 2012). In multiple instances, principals spoke of the sheer volume of change that needed to be managed and led over the crisis. They spoke of their own exhaustion and that of their staff. They discussed the resilience that grew from this exhaustion within themselves and their staff. The findings suggested that this mindset was developed when principals transformed themselves from being school leaders to community leaders and were open in their communication to others as well as open in their thinking of new ways of working during the protracted crisis they were leading their schools through.

Four distinct organisational leadership approaches were required whether as a commander-leader, a conductor-leader, a gardener-leader or an engineer-leader because at different stages of the crisis, the principals found that their schools required different approaches to leadership and their own individual leadership styles changed accordingly. This required a strong emotional labour that these leaders undertook within their schools. Wilkinson et al. (2018) have acknowledged the strong invisible labour that principals engage in while leading their schools. The findings indicated how these principals conducted themselves through this pandemic as made sense of the crisis and its lockdowns on their school communities; built social cohesion within their schools; and envisioned a COVID normality for their schools that they could collectively and transformatively focus upon.

School leadership is a socially complex and adaptive process (DeRue, 2011) due to the many changes that takes place within schools on a regular basis. The COVID-19 pandemic created the largest disruption of education systems in Australia and also brought out with clarity “pre-existing educational disparities that reduced the opportunities for many of the most vulnerable children, youth, and adults … to continue their learning” (UNO, 2020, p. 2). Heifetz and Linsky (2004) acknowledge the complexity that schools face discussing how, “Leadership in education means mobilising schools, families, and communities to deal with some difficult issues —issues that people often prefer to sweep under the rug” (p. 7). The protracted nature of the crisis in Victoria provided schools with a unique opportunity to engage proactively with change and to allow complex adaptive work within their schools to grow. The findings from this study correlate with the literature around the kinds of leadership required by schools to move not only through a crisis but also through a new adaptive stage which if led well provides the basis for a school to grow its agility.

Across the four emergent organisational leadership approaches that were identified in this study, a strong basis for principals to be emotionally intelligent leaders who lead self-managed teams can be made. Bagwell (2020) suggests, “adaptive leaders work at understanding how trust, flexibility, and autonomy encourages organic expertise to flourish, which can motivate others to take creative approaches in tackling unforeseen challenges and needs as they arise” (p. 32). Within Victoria, 2020 provided schools with this time to look at the viability of the change brought about through online remote learning and its reality within their own schools. It allowed them time to observe, interpret and intervene the changes and adaptations (Daly and Chrispeels, 2008) required so that when schools re-opened, school stakeholders were able to work at new level of adaptation and resilience (Kuntz et al., 2017) than they had in pre-COVID times.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on education has brought into open consideration the importance of school improvement work employed in 2020–21 that focuses on creating multiple, viable modes of delivery of education, new vibrant and authentic curricula, more personalised models of student, teacher and school assessment and realistic and contextually-centred professional development approaches. This work cannot be shouldered by the school principal or a few senior leaders at the top instead it needs to be carried out through self-organised teams working across schools and operating in agile working spaces (Lipman-Blumen, 2000).

Principal and staff wellbeing as well as student wellbeing became strong themes that emerged through this study and brought out the need for Victorian schools in a COVID-normal world to develop more caring empathic places of learning. However, it was found that this did not just happen as a transformation from crisis to agility rather that for many schools the COVID-normal reality remains situated in continued complex adaptive work that requires adequate time and resources given to it. Maintaining this position over time will help these schools to also work at transforming themselves into agile schools as indicated within some of the schools where the impact of an agile school leadership approach was already found evident.

A limitation of this study is that it provided insights into the work of principals in the independent school sector and with a sample of 22 early career principals, similar studies in the public and Catholic sectors are required to be able to explore the transferability of these findings across those spaces. Further research on each of the six individual leadership styles needs to be conducted so that nuances between low-crisis leadership approaches and low-adaptive leadership approaches can be further explored and defined. Similarly, the nuances between high-adaptive leadership and low-agile leadership need to be further explored and defined as well. These are important nuances that will assist in giving deeper insight into the specific kinds of skillsets that should be included in professional development programs and aspiring principal programs (Lakomski and Evers, 2017) to future-proof our early-career principals and aspiring principals when leading their schools through crisis periods (Riley et al., 2021; See et al., 2022) and in immediate post-crisis periods (Reyes-Guerra et al., 2016). Further studies on the lived experiences of early-career principals in COVID-normal times are also recommended as follow-up studies, especially in cases where adaptive and agile leadership approaches are found in order to see how these schools continue their transformative work. More focused professional support for aspiring and early career principals is needed in these COVID-normal times so that can these principals can continue to transition smoothly into becoming experienced principals (See et al., 2022) through support systems that provide regular emotional maintenance of their health and well-being. These supports need to be warranted through government policy as well as through professional associations and unions. In addition to this targeted principal preparation programs and early career support programs are also recommended at both policy, system and institutional levels to avoid the very real risk of principal stress and burnout (Riley et al., 2021) being experienced in Australia and internationally as well.

Conclusion

Schools and principals must be recognised for the massive change effort made to pivot their school during the lockdowns and changing modes of delivery in 2020–21 and in COVID-normal times. The nuances of school leadership and emotional intelligence required by principals in looking after their school community was found in the changing leadership styles and approaches that needed to be taken. At times, multiple styles were activated at the same time, depending on the contextual realities that school communities were experiencing. The pandemic has provided an opportunity for exploring how schools can change and be organic and flexible even during heightened periods of stress. It provides evidence that school leadership is complex and that those leading schools require supports and networks in place especially during their first five years of principalship to help them lead their schools.

The invisible labour of school leadership must be recognised and existing policies and systems strengthened to help early-career leaders during a crisis and post-crisis as they lead their schools during adaptive and agile times because the leadership styles required across each of these periods of change are different. These findings have implications for principal preparation programs to equip aspiring leaders with suitable emotional intelligence capabilities that will help them transition through crisis and post-crisis times. The findings also provide insight into the consideration on the inclusion of program elements that focus on mentoring and coaching aspirant principals in the first few years of principalship so that specific emotional intelligence skill sets can be developed in them.

Figures

Figure 1

Nested organisational leadership approaches in COVID-19 times in Victoria, Australia

Figure 2

Complex school leadership practices during periods of crisis or rapid change

Figure 3

Storied productions of four emerging organisational leadership approaches

Table 1

Demographics of the Early Career Principals sample in this study

Years of experience	Early career Principals	School location Metro	School location Reg	School type Combined	School type Primary	School type Secondary	School type Special	School size >100	School size 100 to 299	School size 300 to 499	School size 500 to 699	School size 700 to 999	School size 700 to 999	School size >1000
One	6	4	2	4	0	1	1	3	0	2	0	0	0	1
Two	7	6	1	4	2	1	0	3	2	1	0	1	0	0
Three	2	2	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	0	0	0
Four	3	2	1	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2	1	0	0
Five	4	4	0	2	0	2	0			1			2	1
Total	22	18	4	14	2	5	1	7	2	5	2	2	2	2