Leadership, System-Oriented

System-oriented leadership (SOL) is a goal-oriented approach to organizational leadership where the [Page 582]functioning of an organization is seen as a whole (i.e., cultural symbols and values, formal structures, environment) and allows organizational members to focus on factors that align key processes and resources to improve performance. SOL is not the purview of administrators, and may include students to school board members. In sports or medicine, SOL is analogous to including a person's state of mind and conditions of use or recovery in the treatment, in addition to the body.

As state governments have established learning standards to address accountability issues in public schools, student and stakeholder needs have become increasingly important. Meeting the challenge of accountability means a systemwide change in educational organizations from a product-focused, industrial model to a learner-focused, continuous quality-improvement model. SOL is a key component of a learner-focused, continuous qualityimprovement model.

SOL was well described as a systems perspective in 1966 by Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn in The Social Psychology of Organizations, as well as in 1969 in Systems Thinking, a collection of essays on the topic edited by F. E. Emery. There are five basic characteristics of SOL that continue to reverberate through school reform literature. School leaders that are system oriented

• 1.
  Look for demands, opportunities, trends and patterns, and change in the external environment (e.g., stakeholder needs and requirements, funding sources, legislation).
• 2.
  Identify important internal organizational factors based on the needs, requirements, cultural symbols and values, and relationships between organizational subsystems (e.g., students, teachers, grade levels, classrooms, departments) and the organization as a whole.
• 3.
  Recognize that an organization is intertwined, influenced, and interactive (open) with its environment.
• 4.
  Filter environmental information for external factors that are related to important internal organizational factors to focus planning and action.
• 5.
  Provide freedom to diverge from the existing organizational structure and commingle organizational elements (e.g. time, space, grade levels, content areas, departments, personnel, stakeholders) to achieve organizational goals.

The first two characteristics set the expectation that educational leaders seek information externally from stakeholders and internally from staff and students, as well as have knowledge of educational research and societal trends. Educational leaders must know how to identify local, state, and national resources that might be leveraged to improve educational performance.

There is interplay between characteristics 2, 3, and 4; needs, requirements, and cultural symbols and values identified externally from students and stakeholders, as well as internally from faculty and staff, should be reflected in the school's or district's goals and improvement planning. The interplay between internal and external factors through goal setting and planning should result in shared norms and alignment of learning standards, curriculum, instruction, performance standards, and feedback/reporting.

Finally, SOL sets the expectation that educational leaders will be able to look beyond the formal organizational structures of schools to accept, support, and capitalize on innovation to improve organizational performance. Important developments often surface on the boundaries of seemingly unconnected elements of a system.