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Integrity and responsibility! These were two personal qualities identified as essential to leadership in early childhood by center directors participating in focus groups organized by Marianne Jones. In reporting the results of her research in her Exchange magazine article, "What is a Leader, Anyway? (November 2007), Jones elaborated on this point:

"...Personal qualities exist in a context of many interlocking attributes. Integrity, one of the two qualities declared by all participant groups to indicate leadership, is used to illustrate this point. Center directors generally talked about integrity in terms of fidelity to personal moral standards in one’s dealings with others and in one’s trustworthiness. Leadership is a social activity. Therefore, personal qualities demonstrated in the context of leadership are necessarily intertwined with interpersonal characteristics. Integrity, as a personal trait, is anchored to trustworthiness — a quality followers ascribe to leaders. A person cannot speak of one without the other when discussing leader/follower interaction. Leading by example, for instance, is the public representation of one’s honesty about what one stands for and the integrity with which one lives his or her beliefs. Integrity is the source of credibility. Reliability and leading by example are the evidence of one’s credibility. The circularity illustrated here among these various attributes was evident throughout participants’ discussions.

"Directors generally used the term responsibility to describe personal ownership for one’s actions and decisions, and acceptance of what leadership involves. These excerpts reflect the meaning given to responsibility by several directors:

"'[A person is a leader] if they’re willing to take on the responsibility of what they believe in . . . willing to say ‘this is something that is worthy . . . this is something that means something, and I believe in it and, therefore, I’m leading it.’ [A leader is] a person who is willing to take on those responsibilities not only for the glory of it, but the mud that comes with it as well.'

“'. . . when you choose to take on this [leadership] responsibility, you have to know that you’re willing to go the whole nine yards.'”

The entire article, "What is a Leader, Anyway?" can be read on our web site in the "Exchange Ideas for you - FREE" feature on our home page.

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A new resource from Exchange is the valuable evaluation tool, Program Administration Scale: Measuring Early Childhood Leadership and Management by Teri Talan and Paula Jorde Bloom. PAS is designed to reliably measure the leadership and managerial practices of center-based early childhood programs. This thoroughly researched and tested instrument looks at 25 leadership items grouped in 10 categories.

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