Facilitative Leadership: An Exercise of Influence

A woman wearing glasses and a suit is smiling in front of a flag.

Sim Loh is a family partnership coordinator at Children’s Village, a nationally-accredited Keystone 4 STARS early learning and school-age enrichment program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, serving about 350 children. She supports children and families, including non-English speaking families of immigrant status, by ensuring equitable access to education, health, employment, and legal information and resources on a day-to-day basis. She is a member of the Children First Racial Equity Early Childhood Education Provider Council, a community member representative of Philadelphia School District Multilingual Advisory Council, and a board member of Historic Philadelphia.

Sim explains, “I ensure families know their rights and educate them on ways to speak up for themselves and request for interpretation/translation services. I share families’ stories and experiences with legislators and decision-makers so that their needs are understood. Attending Leadership Connections will help me strengthen and grow my skills in all domains by interacting with and hearing from experienced leaders in different positions. With newly acquired skills, I seek to learn about the systems level while paying close attention to the accessibility and barriers of different systems and resources and their impacts on young children and their families.”

Whether you are at the novice, capable, or master level of leading others, you may frequently find yourself wondering, “How do I best use my power to lead and also empower those around me?” When you work daily with dedicated staff, or have a goal to have dedicated staff, your overall use of your position’s power is often times a “make or break” reality for empowering others. So, how can you reflect upon your power and its use by being a facilitative leader? Let’s find out with an overview of the sources of power and facilitative leadership as described by Paula Jorde Bloom in her book, Leadership in Action: How Effective Directors Get Things Done.

Authority and power are concepts early childhood leaders can’t ignore. Being clear about your own management philosophy as it relates to these issues will help you to better understand the difference between terms like authoritarian and authoritative, cooperation and collaboration, and patronizing and empowering. Put simply, how you view yourself as the person in charge impacts the interpersonal dynamics every day in your early childhood program.

SOURCES OF POWER

Power is a dynamic that exists in all adult/child and adult/adult relationships. It is the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. In its simplest form, we can think of power as control, authority, or dominance over another individual or as sharing authority and responsibility with another person. So, the central question is not “Will power be used?” but rather “How can power be used wisely?” How can it be used to engage, guide, and support staff in the pursuit of common goals?

The concept of power can be further understood by exploring the reasons that prompt individuals to comply with requests, requirements, or demands from others. Early childhood leaders derive power from personal as well as organizational sources. The following summarizes the five kinds of power that are at play in all types of organizations, including early care and education programs, and can be grouped into two broad categories—organizational and personal.

The different kinds of power based on the work of French & Raven (1959) are as follows:

ORGANIZATIONAL

Reward power is the early childhood leader’s ability to influence staff by rewarding desired behavior. This includes the extent to which the leader controls teaching schedules, classroom assignments, and routine housekeeping duties. They have reward power over staff. In many programs, staff comply with a program director’s request because they expect to be rewarded for compliance—the leader has established a quid pro quo relationship. In some programs, reward power is openly promoted through bonus or merit performance systems.
Coercive power is essentially the flip side of reward power. Program leaders have the ability to influence staff by punishing them for undesirable behavior. Punishment can be in the form of a reprimand, undesirable work assignments, closer supervision, or even termination. Punishment can also be viewed as the absence of rewards or resources.
Legitimate power is an individual’s ability to influence behavior simply because of the formal authority accorded to the position. In most organizations, employees readily accept that individuals in certain positions on the organizational chart have the right to make decisions and issue directives and that employees have an obligation to comply. Authority exercised through legitimate power is often expressed as orders, commands, directives, or instructions.

PERSONAL

Expert power is a leader’s ability to influence others because of his or her credentials and specialized knowledge and skill. Staff believe that the leader possesses knowledge and skills they do not have, so they willingly follow the program leader.
Referent power is based on the staff’s respect and admiration for the leader. Staff identify with the program leader because of his or her personality and interpersonal skills. The program leader is perceived as a role model to be emulated, and staff comply with requests because they respect the values and principles for which the program leader stands. Overall, reward, coercive, and legitimate power are bound to the position in the organization. So, the greater the authority attached to a position, the greater the potential for use of these types of power. In contrast, expert and referent power depend more on the personal attributes of the individual, such as personality, leadership style, knowledge, integrity, and interpersonal behavior. These types of power do not depend on occupying a formal position.

Adapted from French, J.R., P., Jr., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Carwright (Ed.). Studies in social power (pp. 150-167). Oxford, England: Univer. Michigan.

As you reflect on the use of different types of power in your program, consider the outcomes of each approach as they relate to your employees’ behavior:

The use of reward power, so commonplace in organizations, promotes compliance with specific rules or requests. Over time, however, employees may perceive reward power as manipulative. When misused, reward power can result in competition among staff, thus undermining your efforts to establish norms of collaboration.
Although coercive power yields short-term compliance, over time it results in resentment and alienation of staff. Staff who quit without notice or walk off with a year’s supply of classroom materials are often retaliating in response to coercive power.
Legitimate power, like reward power, promotes compliance, but it seldom motivates staff to long-term commitment to a program.
Expert power can move employees beyond mere compliance to deeper levels of commitment if they perceive that the knowledge and skill of the program leader (or other authority figures in the program) are essential in promoting their well-being.
Referent power is the type of power most likely to promote long-term commitment to an early childhood program, particularly if staff identify with and admire the values and principles of the program leader or other leaders in the center.

Power need not be thought of as a negative or constraining force in early childhood organizations. In fact, by being aware of the power dynamics at play in programs, program leaders can become more cognizant of how they might put power to good use to energize and empower staff. This requires a paradigm shift from thinking about power over others to thinking about power with others through facilitative leadership.

FACILITATIVE LEADERSHIP

Empowerment is the process through which program leaders share their legitimate authority and power, helping others use it in constructive ways to make decisions affecting themselves and their work. Empowerment happens when staff are helped to find greater meaning in their work, to meet higher level needs through their work, and to develop enhanced personal and professional capacities. This form of power is unlimited and can create the foundation for facilitative leadership.

Rethinking personal conceptions of power and moving to a model of facilitative leadership means rethinking the specifics of how you can create partnerships in every facet of the early childhood program’s operations. It means finding ways to give a greater voice to staff on issues that affect them every day—allocation of educational resources, curriculum, and scheduling. Program leaders who view themselves as facilitative leaders think about ways they can help individuals and groups in the program environment to reflect on and improve the processes they use to solve problems and make decisions. In other words, facilitative leaders help others learn how to learn. They understand that while rewards and external controls generate compliance, it is the staff’s internal sense of mastery, accomplishment, and validation that generate their long-term commitment to an early childhood program.

Facilitative leadership is a reciprocal process between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. It is not something that is done to people, but rather working with and through other people to achieve organizational goals. Trust is essential for this kind of leadership. Staff need to believe that you, the program leader, are operating in their best interest, not out of self-interest. Facilitative leaders exemplify the qualities of competence, connection, and character. They understand that leadership is not about being in charge but about serving and supporting others. It is about compassion and the day-to-day practice of social justice in a caring community.

One resource to explore these concepts and ideas of enhancing leadership’s influence is the McCormick Center’s online module, Leading the Way, which is based on Paula Jorde Bloom’s Leadership in Action: How Effective Directors Get Things Done (2014). This module is part of our online national director credential, Aim4Excellence™. You can learn more about the credential on our website, or directly access the Leading the Way module here.

Dr. Jane Humphries serves as a Professional eLearning Specialist for the McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership at National Louis University. She has written curriculum and facilitated online learning in graduate and undergraduate level courses since 2004. She is currently the curriculum developer of the Aim4Excellence™ program, an online National Director Credential recognized by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Accreditation and several states’ quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS).

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Measuring Organizational Conditions for Improving Quality

By McCormick Center • May 13, 2025

Leaders, policymakers, and systems developers seek to improve early childhood programs through data-driven decision-making. Data can be useful for informing continuous quality improvement efforts at the classroom and program level and for creating support for workforce development at the system level. Early childhood program leaders use assessments to help them understand their programs’ strengths and to draw attention to where supports are needed. Assessment data is particularly useful in understanding the complexity of organizational climate and the organizational conditions that lead to successful outcomes for children and families. Several tools are available for program leaders to assess organizational structures, processes, and workplace conditions, including: Preschool Program Quality Assessment (PQA) 1 Program Administration Scale (PAS) 2 Child Care Worker Job Stress Inventory (ECWJSI) 3 Early Childhood Job Satisfaction Survey (ECJSS) 4 Early Childhood Work Environment Survey (ECWES) 5 Supportive Environmental Quality Underlying Adult Learning (SEQUAL) 6 The Early Education Essentials is a recently developed tool to examine program conditions that affect early childhood education instructional and emotional quality. It is patterned after the Five Essentials Framework, 7 which is widely used to measure instructional supports in K-12 schools. The Early Education Essentials measures six dimensions of quality in early childhood programs: Effective instructional leaders Collaborative teachers Supportive environment Ambitious instruction Involved families Parent voice A recently published validation study for the Early Education Essentials 8 demonstrates that it is a valid and reliable instrument that can be used to assess early childhood programs to improve teaching and learning outcomes. METHODOLOGY For this validation study, two sets of surveys were administered in one Midwestern city; one for teachers/staff in early childhood settings and one for parents/guardians of preschool-aged children. A stratified random sampling method was used to select sites with an oversampling for the percentage of children who spoke Spanish. The teacher surveys included 164 items within 26 scales and were made available online for a three-month period in the public schools. In community-based sites, data collectors administered the surveys to staff. Data collectors also administered the parent surveys in all sites. The parent survey was shorter, with 54 items within nine scales. Rasch analyses was used to combine items into scales. In addition to the surveys, administrative data were analyzed regarding school attendance. Classroom observational assessments were performed to measure teacher-child interactions. The Classroom Assessment Scoring System TM (CLASS) 9 was used to assess the interactions. Early Education Essentials surveys were analyzed from 81 early childhood program sites (41 school-based programs and 40 community-based programs), serving 3- and 4-year old children. Only publicly funded programs (e.g., state-funded preschool and/or Head Start) were included in the study. The average enrollment for the programs was 109 (sd = 64); 91% of the children were from minority backgrounds; and 38% came from non-English speaking homes. Of the 746 teacher surveys collected, 451 (61%) were from school-based sites and 294 (39%) were from community-based sites. There were 2,464 parent surveys collected (59% school; 41% community). About one-third of the parent surveys were conducted in Spanish. Data were analyzed to determine reliability, internal validity, group differences, and sensitivity across sites. Child outcome results were used to examine if positive scores on the surveys were related to desirable outcomes for children (attendance and teacher-child interactions). Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to compute average site-level CLASS scores to account for the shared variance among classrooms within the same school. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to group the scales. RESULTS The surveys performed well in the measurement characteristics of scale reliability, internal validity, differential item functioning, and sensitivity across sites . Reliability was measured for 25 scales with Rasch Person Reliability scores ranging from .73 to .92; with only two scales falling below the preferred .80 threshold. The Rasch analysis also provided assessment of internal validity showing that 97% of the items fell in an acceptable range of >0.7 to <1.3 (infit mean squares). The Teacher/Staff survey could detect differences across sites, however the Parent Survey was less effective in detecting differences across sites. Differential item functioning (DIF) was used to compare if individual responses differed for school- versus community-based settings and primary language (English versus Spanish speakers). Results showed that 18 scales had no or only one large DIF on the Teacher/Staff Survey related to setting. There were no large DIFs found related to setting on the Parent Survey and only one scale that had more than one large DIF related to primary language. The authors decided to leave the large DIF items in the scale because the number of large DIFs were minimal and they fit well with the various groups. The factor analysis aligned closely with the five essentials in the K-12 model . However, researchers also identified a sixth factor—parent voice—which factored differently from involved families on the Parent Survey. Therefore, the Early Education Essentials have an additional dimension in contrast to the K-12 Five Essentials Framework. Outcomes related to CLASS scores were found for two of the six essential supports . Positive associations were found for Effective Instructional Leaders and Collaborative Teachers and all three of the CLASS domains (Emotional Support, Classroom Organization, and Instructional Support). Significant associations with CLASS scores were not found for the Supportive Environment, Involved Families, or Parent Voice essentials. Ambitious Instruction was not associated with any of the three domains of the CLASS scores. Table 1. HLM Coefficients Relating Essential Scores to CLASS Scores (Model 1) shows the results of the analysis showing these associations. Outcomes related to student attendance were found for four of the six essential supports . Effective Instructional Leaders, Collaborative Teachers, Supportive Environment, and Involved Families were positively associated with student attendance. Ambitious Instruction and Parent Voice were not found to be associated with student attendance. The authors are continuing to examine and improve the tool to better measure developmentally appropriate instruction and to adapt the Parent Survey so that it will perform across sites. There are a few limitations to this study that should be considered. Since the research is based on correlations, the direction of the relationship between factors and organizational conditions is not evident. It is unknown whether the Early Education Essentials survey is detecting factors that affect outcomes (e.g., engaged families or positive teacher-child interactions) or whether the organizational conditions predict these outcomes. This study was limited to one large city and a specific set of early childhood education settings. It has not been tested with early childhood centers that do not receive Head Start or state pre-K funding. DISCUSSION The Early Education Essentials survey expands the capacity of early childhood program leaders, policymakers, systems developers, and researchers to assess organizational conditions that specifically affect instructional quality. It is likely to be a useful tool for administrators seeking to evaluate the effects of their pedagogical leadership—one of the three domains of whole leadership. 10 When used with additional measures to assess whole leadership—administrative leadership, leadership essentials, as well as pedagogical leadership—stakeholders will be able to understand the organizational conditions and supports that positively impact child and family outcomes. Many quality initiatives focus on assessment at the classroom level, but examining quality with a wider lens at the site level expands the opportunity for sustainable change and improvement. The availability of valid and reliable instruments to assess the organizational structures, processes, and conditions within early childhood programs is necessary for data-driven improvement of programs as well as systems development and applied research. Findings from this validation study confirm that strong instructional leadership and teacher collaboration are good predictors of effective teaching and learning practices, evidenced in supportive teacher-child interactions and student attendance. 11 This evidence is an important contribution to the growing body of knowledge to inform embedded continuous quality improvement efforts. It also suggests that leadership to support teacher collaboration like professional learning communities (PLCs) and communities of practice (CoPs) may have an effect on outcomes for children. This study raises questions for future research. The addition of the “parent voice” essential support should be further explored. If parent voice is an essential support why was it not related to CLASS scores or student attendance? With the introduction of the Early Education Essentials survey to the existing battery of program assessment tools (PQA, PAS, ECWJSI, ECWES, ECJSS and SEQUAL), a concurrent validity study is needed to determine how these tools are related and how they can best be used to examine early childhood leadership from a whole leadership perspective. ENDNOTES 1 High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, 2003 2 Talan & Bloom, 2011 3 Curbow, Spratt, Ungaretti, McDonnell, & Breckler, 2000 4 Bloom, 2016 5 Bloom, 2016 6 Whitebook & Ryan, 2012 7 Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010 8 Ehrlich, Pacchiano, Stein, Wagner, Park, Frank, et al., 2018 9 Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008 10 Abel, Talan, & Masterson, 2017 11 Bloom, 2016; Lower & Cassidy, 2007 REFERENCES Abel, M. B., Talan, T. N., & Masterson, M. (2017, Jan/Feb). Whole leadership: A framework for early childhood programs. Exchange(19460406), 39(233), 22-25. Bloom, P. J. (2016). Measuring work attitudes in early childhood settings: Technical manual for the Early Childhood Job Satisfaction Survey (ECJSS) and the Early Childhood Work Environment Survey (ECWES), (3rd ed.). Lake Forest, IL: New Horizons. Bryk, A. S., Sebring, P. B., Allensworth, E., Luppescu, S., & Easton, J. Q. (2010). Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons from Chicago. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Curbow, B., Spratt, K., Ungaretti, A., McDonnell, K., & Breckler, S. (2000). Development of the Child Care Worker Job Stress Inventory. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 15, 515-536. DOI: 10.1016/S0885-2006(01)00068-0 Ehrlich, S. B., Pacchiano, D., Stein, A. G., Wagner, M. R., Park, S., Frank, E., et al., (in press). Early Education Essentials: Validation of a new survey tool of early education organizational conditions. Early Education and Development. High/Scope Educational Research Foundation (2003). Preschool Program Quality Assessment, 2nd Edition (PQA) administration manual. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press. Lower, J. K. & Cassidy, D. J. (2007). Child care work environments: The relationship with learning environments. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 22(2), 189-204. DOI: 10.1080/02568540709594621 Pianta, R. C., La Paro, K. M., & Hamre, B. K. (2008). Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. Talan, T. N., & Bloom, P. J. (2011). Program Administration Scale: Measuring early childhood leadership and management (2 nd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Whitebook, M., & Ryan, S. (2012). Supportive Environmental Quality Underlying Adult Learning (SEQUAL). Berkeley, CA: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California.