In Praise of the Incomplete Leader Activity: Utilize Your Team Member's Strengths & Grow Strong Leaders

Strong school leadership grows from the collective strengths, perspectives, and experiences of an entire school community. When principals intentionally cultivate collaborative leadership, they create opportunities for people to influence decisions, take collective ownership of school improvement, and work toward a common vision for student success.

OBJECTIVES

Create a culture of collaborative leadership.
Leverage complementary leadership strengths.
Include diverse voices in decision making.
Builde collective ownership of school improvement.

RESOURCES

In Praise of the Incomplete Leader

4-Capabilities-Summary-and-Worksheet Download

In their Harvard Business Review article, In Praise of the Incomplete Leader, Ancona et al. (2007) introduce a framework built around four complementary leadership capabilities. Their work offers an important insight for schools: Effective leadership grows stronger when people bring different capabilities and perspectives together.

It’s the leader’s responsibility to create an environment that lets people complement one another’s strengths and offset one another’s weaknesses.

—Ancona et al. (2007), In Praise of the Incomplete Leader

For principals, the opportunity is to build a leadership team that reflects the strengths and experiences of the broader school community and creates meaningful pathways for others to contribute.

Four Capabilities That Strengthen Collaborative Leadership

The authors identify four essential leadership capabilities that can be developed across a team:

Sensemaking: Understanding what’s happening in your school by examining data, listening to different perspectives, and recognizing how school experiences and outcomes vary across student groups.
Relating: Building trust and relationships with students, families, staff, and community members, particularly those whose voices are not consistently represented in school decisions.
Visioning: Developing a common understanding of what the school wants to achieve, with a clear commitment to improving opportunities and outcomes for every student.
Inventing: Turning ideas into action through collaborative problem-solving, inclusive decision-making practices, and a willingness to adapt based on community feedback.

These capabilities become especially powerful when they are connected across a team of influential voices from throughout the school community. Together, they help schools move from individual leadership efforts to a more inclusive and collaborative approach to improvement.

Using the Four Capabilities to Build a Stronger Leadership Team

Building a strong leadership team starts with recognizing that people bring different strengths to the work of school improvement. Some team members may excel at building relationships and creating trust, while others are skilled at interpreting data, bringing people together around a common vision, or turning ideas into action.

The four capabilities provide principals with a framework for identifying these complementary strengths and bringing them together intentionally. Rather than expecting every team member to contribute in the same way, principals can create opportunities for individuals to use their strengths while developing new capabilities through collaboration.

Who participates in leadership matters just as much as how the team works together. A strong leadership team includes key influencers from across the school community and creates meaningful opportunities for students, families, staff, and community members to shape important decisions. This is especially important for students and families experiencing opportunity disparities, whose perspectives may be missing from traditional decision-making structures.

The four capabilities can help teams make this collaboration more intentional. Sensemaking encourages teams to seek out different perspectives before identifying priorities. Relating helps establish the trust needed for honest conversations. Visioning brings people together around goals that reflect the needs of the school community. Inventing supports the development of clear decision-making practices, consensus-building processes, and collective action.

When these capabilities work together, collaborative leadership becomes more than a philosophy. It becomes part of how a school makes decisions, solves problems, and pursues improvement.

By intentionally developing and connecting leadership strengths across their school communities, principals can build teams that make better-informed decisions, strengthen collective ownership, and create more equitable opportunities for every student to succeed.