萝莉网

What it takes to create conditions for mental wellness among school district staff

As a new middle school principal with a 2-year-old and a newborn at home, my life was defined by two things: work and parenting. My exercise routine disappeared. Weeks would go by that I wouldn鈥檛 speak to my siblings and months for friends. I had chronic heartburn and worried about the number of antacids I took every day.

I worried I might not make it to the end of each year.

By year four, I found a way to lead a school and live a healthy life, but too many of my talented fellow principals did not succeed in our school district with its 30 percent leader attrition rate annually. Now, 15 years later, I coach and train school leaders.

Sustaining oneself in the role always has been a core focus of my work, but since the pandemic, it has become coaching issue No. 1 for most leaders. Most of them have a story like mine, but with additional post-COVID challenges that make their work significantly harder.

My team and I have built a comprehensive, systemic leader wellness program in response to education leaders鈥� needs. Serving more than 50 educational organizations and hundreds of leaders, we have gotten clear about what we mean by mental wellness in school leadership and what it really takes to create the conditions for that in a district.

A Wellness Antidote

As a sector, we lack a clear common understanding of what we mean by wellness and what we鈥檙e trying to solve. As a result, organizational interventions tend to be scattershot. I have found the concepts of 鈥渟acrifice syndrome鈥� and the 鈥渟acrifice and renewal cycle鈥� to be the most galvanizing clarifiers of the wellness challenge and its antidote for school leaders.

In their book Becoming a Resonant Leader: Develop Your Emotional Intelligence, Renew Your Relationships, Sustain Your Effectiveness, Annie McKee, Frances Johnston and Richard Boyatzis describe the sacrifice syndrome as 鈥渁 vicious cycle of stress and sacrifice, resulting in mental and physical distress, burnout and diminished effectiveness.鈥� When the sacrifice syndrome becomes our way of being, we become a fraction of ourselves 鈥� our capacity, our presence, our passion and joy. Further, our energy is contagious to our teams and our students and ultimately impacts our ability to sustain in our roles.

I used to think life balance was the antidote to the sacrifice syndrome. I have come to understand that balance is an unrealistic and even dangerous goal as leading schools inevitably requires periods of sacrifice. If our goal is balance, then we risk perceiving times that require sacrifice as a personal failure.

What is realistic, however, is a cycle of sacrifice and renewal, illustrated at left. Leaders can create deliberate periods of renewal (practicing self-care and recharging their reserves) after being called on to react to deeply adaptive crises and threats, according to Becoming a Resonant Leader.

Across organizations and levels of leadership, the idea that wellness is creating healthy cycles of sacrifice and renewal resonates with school leaders. These cycles look different for all of us as individuals, but they all require knowing what we need to renew, prioritizing renewal behaviors and holding boundaries.

The biggest misconception underlying most leader wellness interventions is that they focus only on individual leader support. Overcoming the sacrifice syndrome and creating sustainable cycles of sacrifice and renewal is not just personal leadership work but also organizational work.

We work in systems that encourage or require some of the behaviors we are trying to change. To focus on self alone is inequitable and feels disingenuous to leaders. Effective efforts to improve leader wellness require work at the personal, cultural and structural levels.

Leader Intervention

When I was a principal, my idea of supporting wellness was offering my team on-site yoga classes or surprising them on a professional development day with a massage therapist. Staff appreciated these gestures, but they missed the mark on promoting sustainable wellness. So do wellness efforts that teach new strategies.

Our leaders and teachers know how to take care of themselves. They just aren鈥檛. The issue is not a skill or knowledge gap. It鈥檚 a mindset gap. We are making choices to prioritize work over self because of deep internal beliefs and stories. Wellness interventions must focus on increasing self-awareness about these limiting beliefs and stories as a prerequisite to supporting leaders to build stronger sacrifice and renewal cycles.

The following strategies help leaders develop renewal mindsets and behaviors:

Aspirational visioning. Leaders who identify what self-care ideally looks like for them start the journey motivated by clear personal goals grounded in their values.

Stronger boundaries. Leaders who can accept that the work is never done and who can truly make their wellness a priority on par with their work learn to carve out sacred time for themselves. Further, when leaders make their boundaries public (no e-mail on weekends or Thursday afternoon gym time, for example), they also are giving their teams permission to create their own boundaries.

Weekly calendar audits. When leaders analyze how they spend their time through the lens of wellness, they build new awareness about alignment to priorities and their own resistance to delegation and holding boundaries. Setting goals and reflecting regularly builds new muscles.

Confronting limiting mindsets. The work above brings up intense emotions and surfaces self-limiting mindsets: the stories we tell ourselves about prioritizing self-care. Leaders who examine and debunk these stories can replace them with new ones, grounded in their authentic core values that support deep habit change.

Cultural Intervention

How comfortable would you be sharing your stress level and your plans to prioritize self-care in your next team meeting? Your answer is a direct reflection on the culture of wellness in your organization.

Leaders rarely create and maintain strong renewal habits in cultures that over-prioritize sacrifice. Conversely, school districts can harness the power of culture to create the conditions for wellness growth by creating community around self-care.

We help districts do this by building community self-care check-in rituals. When teams share their self-care challenges and aspirations openly over time, several powerful things happen. They experience catharsis (the lid is somehow lifted from the pressure cooker) and deeper connection (I am sharing myself at work in new ways). Teams also surface and confront collective mindsets that are getting in the way of prioritizing self-care.

Finally, teams give each other the permission to prioritize self-care and support each other in community over time to build new habits. This community building is taking place in a cohort of District of Columbia Public Schools principals. (See related story, right.)

Wellness community building can happen at different levels of the district, but it must start at the top. Organizational culture shift only happens when senior leaders walk the walk and makes it safe for others to follow.

Structural Intervention

As leaders do the personal and cultural work above, they inevitably surface opportunities and obstacles in the district鈥檚 structures. If an authentic and robust reflection on organizational structures does not follow, wellness initiatives lose momentum. District leadership can do this by conducting an organizational systems audit. There is always low-hanging fruit that can dramatically shift the experience of leaders and teachers.

Effective audits should include the following:

Gather stakeholder input. Collect information from stakeholders across different levels of the system. Collate themes and create lists of district structures that could be opportunities.

Create a graphic representation summarizing strengths, pain points and opportunities.

Engage key stakeholders for feedback. Reflect, iterate and identify potential wellness interventions.

Present findings to the larger community, identifying potential interventions and entrenched issues that take more time.

Implement select structural shifts and regularly communicate across the organization to demonstrate the district鈥檚 investment in wellness.

It helps manage perceptions and generate honest feedback when an external consultant facilitates this process. Even then, the audit requires skilled adaptive senior leaders who create the psychological and political safety for stakeholders at different levels of the system to 鈥渟peak truth to power.鈥� This is done by honoring and protecting participants from potential retribution and by compensating them for taking on the burden of representing their interest group. When done authentically, this process has countless positive impacts on morale as well as efficiency.

Matthew Taylor is founder and chief operating executive officer of the Noble Story Group in Washington, D.C.