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We would like to update this industrial age (1980s) list of reasons for team leadership, by adding the
following reasons why schools in the post‐industrial knowledge age should nurture team leadership:

9. Schools of the 21st century need to facilitate learning from emerging knowledge, not past
knowledge (Burkhardt, 2003); capturing and incorporating new knowledge is the work of
teams of individuals, each with different interests and different access to information.
10. Knowledge age schools now focus on outcomes, shifting emphasis away from traditional
inputs such as teacher‐centred activities and the importance of the hours spent in the
classroom in front of students. Teachers need to be leaders of learning, leading their students
through a variety of learning experiences to achieve outcomes. As such, each classroom
teacher is a parallel leader (Crowther, Hann & McMaster, 2001) in the business of learning.

11. When Yukl was writing in 1989, many teachers tended to stay in one school for their whole
careers and school leaders were appointed from within from the long term 'proven' teachers
of merit. In the 21st century we are not only in the knowledge age but the 'portfolio' age,
where school leaders rarely spend their entire career in one or two schools. Instead they
move regularly between schools, school systems and even countries. Shared team leadership
is therefore essential to capture values, traditions and beliefs and to ensure that corporate
knowledge is not lost when individual leaders leave to join other schools.
12. Schools of the 21st century are complex, not complicated. Organisational theories based on
'systems thinking' borrowed from industry and input‐process‐output models are of limited
value. In an age in which the usefulness of Complexity Theory (Rosenhead & Mingers 2001) is
more widely regarded than the work of Behaviouralists, leadership by teams is more valid than
hierarchical command and control mono‐leadership.
Regardless of the reasons, it is a truism that in schools of the 21st century that teamwork is both
essential and 'par for the course'. In the next section we will briefly describe a framework for
understanding what makes productive teams.

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