"I'm so terribly lonely": Helping leaders transform their emotions into effective action
In which I put the spotlight on school leaders
Teaching through Emotions is all about teachers. That middle class between students, who obviously have needs and demands, and admin, who also have needs and demands.
Different needs and demands from each group.
Students, of course, need to grow and develop. They’re learning, which means they’re changing, which means they’re taking risks that might make them very uncomfortable and therefore resistant. Teachers’ responsibility to students is to support this growth and development. Like parents, they are developmental partners, people who know what it’s like to make it through the school learning process and are trained to help students succeed at it.
The needs and demands from admin are different. Administrators need teachers to provide the data that will keep funding coming and state and federal regulators off their backs. Forgive me for the over-simplification, but it does seem to me that administrators are dependent for their sense of success and well-being on other people. Namely teachers. Whom they can’t control. Which, I imagine, leads to some strong emotions.
Frustration. Fear. Panic. Loneliness.
Teachers can’t control their students. Of course. No one can control anyone but themselves. But at least teachers are in the same room with their charges. They can have real-time, long-term relationships with them. They can get to know their students, their habits, their preferences, their strengths, their weaknesses. They can try experiments with them and see immediate results. Theirs is a world of bodies and behaviors and lived reality.
Administrators’ worlds seem to me to be much more abstract. They deal with numbers and policies and missions. They put out fires that they didn’t start and had no part in. They straddle many different worlds: the classroom and parents, boards of education and the realities of school (teachers’ realities, paras’ realities, staffs’ realities, students’ realities), legal mandates and federal decisions and, again, realities on the ground. All from their offices or the conference room or, if they’re lucky, from a few classroom observations or fast walks down the halls.
I’m probably totally wrong in my imaginings about administrators’ lives. My point is simply this: I’m guessing administrators have emotions. Sometimes even debilitating emotions. I’m guessing some administrators are in danger of burning out just as their teachers are. Or they’re in danger of becoming impatient with or contemptuous of their teachers or the students they serve or the parents who can’t stop nagging and complaining.
Which would be totally normal.
TTE works with teachers, yes. But it also works with leaders. Who are human. And need support, too. Who can grow and develop through the shitshows of their jobs, which they contribute to because of the ways they fit with the world. The needs and expectations and beliefs that they bring along with them, unconsciously, that determine how they view and do their jobs. That lead them into burnout or heartburn or insomnia or Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
TTE can help leaders, too.
Contact us.
This is actually an advertisement for the podcast episode that’s dropping on Thursday. It’s a conversation with an organizational consultant, someone who works with leaders to figure out what’s going on dynamically in their workplaces. He’s brilliant and will surprise you with the amazing stories he tells of his work. The quote in today’s title comes from a leader he worked with.
You can contact him, too.
But you have to tune in on Thursday!