Layers of Leadership and Teacher Voice

Can teacher voice be buried under too many layers of leadership?

For example in a distributive model where a team of teachers make decisions about the work they forward, teacher voice may be a top layer of leadership, however when teacher voice has to go through three or more layers of leadership, it's likely that his/her voice is lost or distorted by the time it makes it to the decision maker's table.

In the best of circumstances, perhaps many layers of leadership work as a refinement process where a request, decision, or idea becomes more and more refined along the way, but I suspect that typically when there are countless layers of leadership much of the initial message is lost in translation.

This is another reason why I am a big proponent of utilizing as much distributed leadership as possible when making decisions in schools. Time and time again, I have read about the importance of the voices of those on the front lines of any organization as they are the people who work with the organization's main focus--their voices matter. When too many layers of leadership exist, the words, ideas, and problems from the front line are often lost. Pink's book, Drive, exemplifies this as his focuses on the potential of autonomy, mastery, and purpose int he workplace.

I thought of this today as I advocated for an important need close to my students--it's a need I'm acutely aware of since I face this need every day and every minute that I teach. I know from my research and experience, that I have a good idea about how to make positive change in this regard, yet I have about four layers of leadership to work through to gain a response to my idea. This means I have to argue my idea with evidence, write letters of request, wait for the layers of leadership to meet and discuss the need, and then work with the response I get when I get it. This is a timely, and probably costly, process when the situation itself is not so deep or dire, but essentially a fairly easy idea for betterment, one my team could implement with minutes of decision making, and what I believe would be hours of betterment.

The synergy, process, roles, and layers of organizations are important considerations. We never want layers to be too many that stymie good ideas, process, and growth, yet we also don't want to exist without any layers of refinement or betterment. In every organization there will be a best equation for this. What will your organization's equation look like and how will that foster optimal performance and result?