This paper uses data from an Australian study of principals working in remote, regional and urban Indigenous Communities to discuss the leadership learning necessary to prepare newly appointed individuals for unfamiliar cultural settings. The study entitled Principals as Literacy Leaders with Indigenous Communities (PALLIC) was funded by the Australian Government as part of a Closing the Gap Government Initiative for under achieving Indigenous students. A deliberate feature of the project was the establishment of leadership teams consisting of the principal and at least two local Indigenous people. We took this approach because of the emphasis encountered in Australian and international research on the automatic inclusion of local Indigenous people and their cultural knowledge in the creation of productive leadership relationships (Bishop & Berryman (2013); Priest et al. (2008); Frawley & Fazoli, (2012).  

Research Question

• What do school leaders need to learn when they take up new appointments in unfamiliar contexts and why?

Objectives: we aim to:

• reinforce the importance of findings from a generation of leadership literature, namely, the continuing significance of understanding the influence of context on leadership work;  
• show that when the cultural context is one with which leaders are unfamiliar, new dimensions are added to their leadership learning needs. We illustrate this argument using case study data from Indigenous Community contexts to highlight the prominence of a different construction of leadership than that found in mainstream Australian cultural settings, namely; a change from ‘Leadership one way’ to ‘leadership both ways’.
• employ the theoretical work of Hall and Loucks (1978) to discuss the knowledge needs and types of concerns which must be addressed if leaders are to move fluidly into unfamiliar contexts.

From international literature from the 1970s (eg Bridges, 1970; Berman & McLaughlin, 1976), to contemporary times (eg Leithwood et al, 2010; Hallinger, 2011) we show the significance attached to understanding different contexts and their influence on educational intentions and practice. Hallinger (2012) signals a broadening of context related research in his 40 year analysis, acknowledging the power of mutual influence and the need to realise that schools are not static organisations able to be led with a fixed and single set of dispositions, strategies or behaviours. He argues “no such list could fully account for the contextually contingent nature of successful leadership practice” (p. 135) because “the impact of the principal’s leadership is mediated by the culture, work processes and people” (p.137). 

We draw on studies of leadership in cross-cultural circumstances (Bishop et al. 2011; Frawley & Fazoli, 2012; Fasoli et al ,2010;  and Priest et al.,2008) to isolate and describe some fundamental concepts essential for leadership with people in Indigenous communities.

Given that newly appointed school leaders are likely to encounter a range of knowledge needs when moving into different and unfamiliar cultural contexts, we argue that the use of a theoretical framework articulating what happens to individuals faced with change is a necessary aide to understanding the professional learning they require.

Theoretical framework.

We adopt the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) from Hall and Loucks (1978) because of its focus centred on individuals, the needs they feel and the challenges they face as they move into changed circumstances.  While the model of change posits seven Stages of Concern, at its core, CBAM explains the way individuals approach change as a series of concerns related to three sets of questions: first, questions about self; second, questions about the task; and third, questions about impact.

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