Voter education programmes make particular demands on those who lead them. The demands are increased if the programme is being run by a coalition.
The Team under Pressure
The education programme team is likely to be
- extended and meeting demands and deadlines on a daily basis,
- under some pressure by those who have certain expectations of what should be done and how it should be done,
- facing a myriad of staff issues, amongst these the rapid growth in the size of the operation,
- dealing with maintaining non-partisanship and neutrality as an election campaign heats up,
- dealing with considerable public relations demands, because of the importance of involving national and community media in the programme.,.
All of these have to be handled in a diplomatic and nonpartisan way, irrespective of the source of the pressure.
Team Leader
Team leaders are also going to be assailed with information from those conducting educational programmes, often negative information about the level of preparedness of the citizenry for example. They have to deal with any negative information in a way that maintains confidence in the electoral process.
A Shared Leadership Approach
Leadership can be centralized. It can even be assumed to be natural. But given the pressures outlined above, it makes more sense to develop a theory of shared and functional leadership in which responsibility and expertise is diversified and shared on the basis of appropriate competence.
Functional and shared leadership is not always easy. It does not ultimately absolve those responsible for the final call. The buck does stop somewhere and under pressure, it is likely to force those who are designated as leaders of the programme to make regular and on occasion unpopular decisions.
Hershey and Blanchard provide a useful model of situational leadership that does not take away responsibility from the leader, but changes that responsibility to diagnosing the appropriate moment to behave in typically four different ways.[1]
- a directive or telling mode
- a persuasive or selling mode
- a participative or consultative mode
- a delegative mode
Each of these modes is based on the leader's diagnosis of the group of whom s/he is the designated leader being willing and able to take on and complete a particular task. In this model, a group may be able to do one thing, and the leader may delegate this and take no further part in it.
The same group may, on another task, be immature or either unwilling or unable to complete the task. Here, the leader may have to take the directive role, determining what should be done and telling people what to do and how to do it.
