The Succession Challenge
Building and Sustaining Leadership Capacity Through Succession Management
- Dean Fink - Educational Development Consultant, Ontario
Foreword by Andy Hargreaves
Learn about the root causes of the leadership shortage in education and how you can ensure smooth transitions!
Throughout the world there is a perceived shortage of educational leaders. Most investigations look at the issue as a problem of mathematical misalignment. This book looks at the roots of the "succession challenge" internationally and more specifically through the eyes of present and potential leaders to suggest how enlightened approaches to succession management can ensure a steady supply of high-quality educational leaders. The author focuses on specific areas such as:
- Basic issues of leadership succession
- Demographic and generational roots of the succession crisis
- Patterns of succession management and their implications
- Successful succession practices from around the world
'Business organizations have long understood the value of succession planning to ensure leadership development and capacity building. Dean Fink's concept that school districts should build a 'reservoir' of prepared and available leaders by creating optional paths for teacher leaders is a critical consideration for all school districts as we experience the ever-narrowing administrator pipeline' -
Donna Wright, Assistant Superintendent Knox County Schools
'Dean Fink has managed, in this book, to take the complexities of succession planning and make them both visible and accessible. He takes us far beyond the numbers into the real issues of life style, accountability demands, overload and distractions from instructional leadership and situates these issues, not in the present, but in the future that is looming. His vivid examples of ways in which succession planning happens (or doesn't happen) and of trajectories of changes in leadership in genuine contexts fraught with political and relational issues, take the reader deep into the fabric of schools and districts as they anticipate and negotiate the real world of educational change in a landscape where local leadership must constantly be renewed' -
Lorna Earl, Director Aporia Consulting Ltd
An excellent and informative text that is extremely useful for pratical application. Not suitable on this occasion for the level 4 module but would provide great application for managers of SME's and also for students from level 5 and upwards
This is a good source of supplemental reading on our masters programme for clinical leadership. it is short, focused and relevant
