Making sense of complexity : executive leaders and executive leadership in an English Multi-Academy Trust

The emergence of new, multi-school organisational forms in England has been accompanied by distinctive new roles for school leaders, extending beyond individual schools. In multi-school organisations with formalised relationships, the new roles are commonly characterised as executive leadership and an increasingly common organisational form is a Multi-Academy Trust (MAT). The new executive roles represent a significant professional challenge for individuals. This study sought to understand and explain the response of individual leaders in new executive roles to the complexity they experience. A single embedded case study design explored how executive leadership was enacted in a MAT in relation to a domain of leadership practice, educational improvement. Executive leadership was considered to extend beyond an individual school and embrace both the principal executive leader (EL) and others involved in leadership in a MAT. The conceptual framework underpinning the study draws on insights from complexity theories, seeing everyone as embedded in ongoing networks of interaction and communication. Leadership is conceptualised as plural and relational, arising from multiple loci, with contextually specific configurations of leadership relationships emerging from peoples' enactment of leadership practices, through processes of organisational sensemaking. The analysis combined qualitative data with analysis of socially constructed instrumental and expressive social networks. Findings show how the actions of the EL cannot be understood in isolation from the networks of relationships and flow of interaction and relating that constitute the organisation, and that leaders draw on familiar practices to bring about educational improvement in novel contexts which nevertheless challenge identities, roles and boundaries. Some distinctive practices associated with executive leadership are identified. The study contributes by proposing the idea of flows of enactment to describe the complexity experienced by leaders, unfolding shifting configurations of relations, emergent figurations of power, and plural sensemaking. Implications for MATs as organisations are also explored.