Embedding well-being when you are starting from behind
September brings a new school year and with it the hopes and dreams that come with a fresh start. But school culture, story and history are developed over time and there are often challenging situations that don’t simply disappear over the summer. What if you are a leader of a team where something difficult or potentially traumatic has occurred? If you have left in June with staff not speaking to each other or the presence of the crisis response team in the school lobby, then embedding well-being into this year is definitely needed but it needs a little bit more attention and intention.
How can you keep that freshness and promise of the new school year and embed well-being when you are starting from behind?
Avoid: Ignoring the elephant or “fresh starting” it away
When your team experiences something difficult and painful such as loss, crisis or relationship-damaging conflict, you can’t ignore it or fresh start it away. It is tempting, of course, just as leaving this part out of the previous blog on psychological safety was tempting. We all just want to let the hard stuff go and start fresh.
Why bring up the painful past again?
One can get very creative with reasoning to support the fresh start argument, but often it is really just a way to avoid feeling uncomfortable or because we are at a loss as to what to do. Sometimes a fresh start is the excuse accompanying a new leader or after a big turnover of staff. While those situations have elements of fresh start, they are not a good reason to ignore or sidestep the hard conversations. The installation of a new leader may be a great organizational strategy but even the best leader does not have a magic wand to make the past go away.
I am a big fan of Sarah Noll Wilson’s book, Don’t Feed the Elephants: overcoming the art of avoidance to build powerful partnerships, where she talks about the different types of elephants that we pretend not to see in our workplaces and how these things damage relationships and work teams. She reminds us that if we don’t address and free these elephants, they just keep growing.
Instead: Acknowledge the tension.
It is possible to feel the excitement and hope for the new school year and also feel sad, angry or disappointed at the same time. When tension exists, you don’t have to choose one over the other. Instead, acknowledge and normalize the tension. This week I have watched, along with so many of you, the devastation caused by forest fires in British Columbia where I live. Many people will return to work having been impacted by this in some way. It will go a long way towards building trust, relationships, and authenticity if people don’t have to choose and can talk about what is happening for them and still be able to enjoy and appreciate the good stuff. Life will often bring unexpected challenges and the goal should not be to ignore or to get over them but to move through them together. This builds resilience and strengthens relationships. It is what we hope to teach, model and live.
2. Avoid: Engaging in Messaging
Sometimes we try to make a difficult message easier for others to hear or ourselves to give, so we engage in what I call messaging. Messaging is when we share information that is not completely true. Most of the time this comes from a good place where leaders are trying to find a way to soften a difficult message, but it often backfires creating a lack of trust. People prefer to hear a decision or message they don’t like over one they don’t trust.
If a leader is being asked to deliver a message that they don’t believe in or agree with, it can be particularly damaging to trust and relationships. It also impacts the leaders’ own well-being as they are being forced to choose between their own integrity and following the rules of the system.
Instead: Try these 4 ideas to stay accountable to hard conversations
Start with yourself.
Be open, honest, and clear about where you are in this situation. It is important to be clear about your own part in the situation, where you are on the self-awareness journey and your intention to create a safe(r) team environment together. This is the task for everyone not just the leader, but it definitely starts there. Go back and read the self-awareness part of the book (p.30) for more detail.
2. Ask for assistance.
It is absolutely okay and often a really good idea to seek support and gather ideas about how to approach a difficult topic. Depending on the scenario, there are usually experts who can offer advice on crisis response, grief, dealing with relational conflict or any number of tough situations. Let the experts do the coaching or walk alongside you but don’t hand all the communication over to them. You and the rest of the team still have to do the hard work together.
3. Choose collective responsibility.
Repair and healing are relationship-based tasks that no one can do alone. Ask yourself: How can we support each other in this situation? Has there been harm that must be repaired? Building a team charter or plan (see last week’s blog (link)) to prevent further harm going forward is critical in these situations. Whatever the plan is, reiterate that feedback is essential and that perfection is impossible so everyone can start to lower their defences a little. In the book I talk about Dr. Amy Edmondson’s advice that it is not just good enough to not shoot the messenger, you must embrace them with gusto! This means that if someone talks about something difficult, asks an uncomfortable question or shares some difficult feedback, this is the time to thank them for speaking up even if it is hard to hear. When things are tough, teams need courageous conversations which makes this the most important time to embrace the messenger (p. 89).
4. Don’t let this part of the story define you
As much as we need to address difficult situations when we find ourselves in them, we also need to hold on to the good stuff and the important task at hand. You do beautiful and impactful work together so lean into this. It is not a one-or-the-other situation, it can be both. Make it an intentional practice to lean into the good stuff that is already happening and to create a vision of where you want to be. This crisis or problem is not your story. It may be part of your story, but you get to write the rest. I really like the compassionate systems leadership exercise on creative tension that uses the elastic band as a visual to show the tension between where we are right now and where we want to be. To make the two ends meet we can either move towards that vision or lower the expectations to bring them closer to reality. So, acknowledge the tension and then ease it off a little by working towards that vision. When we share our stories and our vision, we can see our common humanity more clearly and connect in a way where healing seems possible.
Remember that if your team is starting in a difficult spot this year, approach this back-to-school transition with compassion for yourself and each other. No one has a script for this stuff so you will not be perfect at it and thank goodness for that. This is the time to embrace the messy, beautiful complexity that is life and that, my fellow educators, is some of the best learning there is.
Thank you for reading along and thinking about this topic with me. I’d love to hear from you about what resonates or ideas I have missed. Please share your experiences or ask questions. I won’t have all the answers, but someone will.
On that note, please help me grow this community and spread the word about well-being by sharing this post and encouraging others to sign up on the website. Another really great way to help is to rate and review the book on Amazon or the podcast on any platform you listen to.
Gail