The simple start to capacity building

Capacity building can be considered as having two aspects. First, there are stakeholders who need to be “capacitated” – they have the need to develop the ability to make a contribution to the e-learning implementation. It may be a simple technical skill or it may be the responsibility to manage a complex task. Secondly, there are people who have to strategise about an organisation’s and individual’s capacity to function successfully. These people, usually the school management team, will want to grow capacity in others. A good place to start is to identify the kind of capacity that needs to exist or be built in order to successfully implement your school’s technology plan.

The staff of one school were asked what their learning needs were and they listed the items in this table of staff learning needs.

1. Consult your School Technology Plan and identify the learning needs that emerged from that planning process. Update the table to reflect the capacity building needs in your own context. Consider these questions:
   • In your School Technology Plan you also wrote more detailed plans on how you would build support for staff learning needs. Do you have the capacity to implement that? What capacity-building needs emerge from that?
   • Thus far in your School Change Leadership Strategy you have identified processes that have to be put in place. Who are the stakeholders who will be responsible for this? Do they have the capacity to take on the responsibility?

Jim Collin’s identifies a Hierarchy of Leadership:

Level 5 → Great Leader (personal humility, professional will, true greatness)
Level 4 → Effective Leader (galvanizes people to commit to vision)
Level 3 → Competent Manager (organizes people toward goals)
Level 2 → Contributing Team Member (effective contribution to group goals)
Level 1 → Highly Capable Individual (makes productive contributions)

Source: Leadership at Work, Jim Collins and Level 5 Leadership

You may like to download and watch the video in which Michael Fullan discusses this hierarchy of leadership.(41Mb)

1. Join the discussion group for this lesson called Capacity Building.
2. Discuss how you would categorise these levels of leadership in terms of a stakeholder’s ability to a) make strategic decisions about capacity building, b) delegate responsibility, c) monitor the capacity-building process d) build capacity in others. In your experience, can anyone do these things or do you have to possess a certain level of leadership quality?
3. Open the summary of staff learning needs and add two columns as shown in this example.
4. Identify the stakeholders responsible and those in support of the various capacity-building tasks you identified in the previous activity.