TOWARD THE END of a published review in School Administrator of my latest edition of Leading in Culture of Change, the reviewer commented: “Fullan admits to being more skeptical about the future and less certain that leaders can pull off what is being asked of them than he was 20 years ago.”

I didn’t realize I had said it that way, but I guess that is where I was heading. Our society has become ever more complex and, hence, leading a public organization has become dramatically more challenging. In Harvard Business Review, Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman found through a 2014 study using a “complexity index” a 35-fold increase in complexity over the past 50 years. Education, all the more so with COVID-19, is showing compound complexity.

According to several surveys by Gallup and Metropolitan Life, educator engagement has declined precipitously over the past decade. (Teacher satisfaction dropped from 62 percent to 32 percent within the past 10 years, according to one study.)

Gallup produced a major compilation of its studies in 2019, concluding that the single biggest factor related to success was “the quality of managers.” I see increasing reports about the reluctance of would-be leaders to apply for promotions in the principalship and other roles.

A Subtle Difference

I am reluctant to draw a conclusion that the job of education leader is simply too demanding. Rather, I believe many education leaders have not prepared themselves for the real job of leading change in the 21st century (and, of course, we can implicate the systems for not cultivating and supporting such leaders).

The “real job” can be done and can be rewarding — a conclusion I reached in Nuance, published in 2019. I was intrigued by a hunch that effective leaders and ineffective leaders looked similar from afar. All had visions, improvement plans and the like, yet only a minority were effective.

The difference, I believed, must be subtle so I interviewed 10 leaders whom I knew to be effective and who worked at different levels of state and local school systems. I came to call these leaders “nuanced” because they seemed capable of getting at day-to-day details but also were comfortable recognizing or discussing the big picture.

I dubbed Leonardo da Vinci the patron saint to nuance because his modus operandi was to get into details — the mess of change if you like — while arriving at an understanding of the big picture. He worked simultaneously with the big and the small.

Understanding Dynamics

The breakthrough for me came when I could see the flow of complex change for these leaders and how they continually dug into the details and made sense of them. The flow of change consisted of three elements: joint determination between leaders and those they worked with, adaptation as they inevitably encountered problems, and a culture of accountability. The leadership skills within these phases were where nuance could be found.

Nuance means getting below the surface to understand contextual details and then link such understanding to the bigger picture. One leader in the research literature observed: “You have to be right at the end of the meeting, not just at the beginning of the meeting.” The common factor across the leaders I studied in Nuance was that they were experts in “contextual literacy.”

It’s an odd phrase, meaning the leader’s capacity to understand the dynamics or culture of the organization he or she is leading. To give another hint of complexity, this means every time you are hired to a new job, you become instantly and automatically “de-skilled,” which is to say you must become a learner vis-à-vis the situation you’re in.

Cumulative Action

All and all, nuanced leaders and the groups they work with become closer, more committed to the enterprise. They also get more done.

Nuance combines humility and courage. It means being an apprentice when needed and an expert once you have earned it. It means participating as a learner and demanding more of yourself and those around you.

Yes, success is harder to come by these days, but it has lasting impact on the situation and on you as a person.

MICHAEL FULLAN is global leadership director with New Pedagogies for Deep Learning in Toronto, Ontario, and author of Nuance: Why Some Leaders Succeed and Others Fail. Twitter: @MichaelFullan1