Reflection as a vital leadership practice
This is an edited version of an article I wrote for the wonderful people at ForumStrategy in January 2023:
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This year’s Teacher Wellbeing Index (TWIX22), published in the dark month of January, paints a pretty grim picture of workplace wellbeing in UK schools, with senior leaders returning particularly troubling results. 87% reported experiencing poor mental health due to their work. 37% attributed this to burnout. 84% said their stress had led to irritability and mood swings. One commentator - a former head who runs a free helpline - told The Guardian that heads are “losing it … they often cry in voicemails. They are like sponges mopping up everyone else’s problems, and they just need to talk.”
That first made me sad at the thought of a hard-working headteacher at the end of their tether, having to leave a tearful voicemail, and then mad. Why are they having to call a part-time helpline manned not by professional counsellors but by former heads? Why does their school’s trust or governing body not have anything more effective in place for them?
The report goes on to provide an answer. 59% of senior leaders said they did not feel confident enough in their employer to disclose unmanageable stress or mental health problems, and 51% said that they did not feel their organisation supported employees who experience problems with mental health and wellbeing.
That's staggering. What is going on?
The causes of stress amongst teachers and leaders in schools and MATs are not new and, as the TWIX22 report tells us, their impact on the wellbeing of staff is well known and has been getting worse for years. So why have system leaders failed to respond? How have these issues become systemic norms?
Through my coaching and consulting work with school and MAT leaders, I identify three interacting reasons for this:
Poor training - One of the most fundamental problems is that school leadership training doesn’t cover the areas of knowledge that equip leaders to approach the human aspects of leadership with confidence. The fields of organisation development, strategic HRM, work psychology and so on are broad and deep, well researched and incredibly dynamic, yet school and MAT leaders are not routinely exposed to them as leaders in other fields are. NPQH and EL programmes focus exclusively on the technical (or horizontal) aspects of leadership rather than the psychological (or vertical) aspects which cause my clients their most complex and sticky challenges. I address this ‘gap between NPQEL and reality’ in my workshops and programmes, but the question remains ... why?
Wilful blindness - There’s also something in the nature of schools as psychodynamic systems that means people seem to turn away from the difficult emotions that accompany workplace challenges. Feelings of vulnerability, incapacity or incompetence seem unbearable, regardless of their cause. This denial of weakness or fragility is certainly a constant feature of my coaching work. It presents in the masks leaders talk about wearing in front of their colleagues, for example, and in the myths they share about those they respect. A MAT director recently described - with admiration - how a head who had died of cancer last year had “insisted on working up to the very end”. It wasn't until I suggested that this might be something to be pitied rather than respected that they began to explore the extent of their own sacrifices. The fact that 61% of senior leaders told TWIX22 that they always come to work when unwell suggests that the drive behind this sort of masochistic behaviour is quite widespread.
Me=Work & Work=Me - Many who work in schools seem to internalise and own the challenging emotions that arise as part of their work, instead of seeing them as externally caused in the complex organisational system of which they are a part. Indeed it seems that being good at this - being a good 'sponge' as the commentator puts it above - is considered a desirable quality that gets one promoted into leadership positions. Leadership is emotional labour and the feelings it provokes in a system - envy, anxiety, insecurity, pride, etc - swirl around like steam but always condense at the top.
It is a feature in all forms of human organisation - from the family to the factory - that emotions play a far more significant role in our experience than we admit. Indeed, for the pioneering psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and her intellectual descendants, our behaviour in the factory is in fact largely defined by what we learned about the world as infants in our family, and that what goes on under the surface of organisational life has at least as much - and arguably a great deal more - influence on decisions, culture and strategy as what goes on above it. What is avoidable however, is people owning emotions and feelings that are not theirs to own, and in particular, the coalescence of all the most difficult ones in you as leader.
I’ve made that sound easy, but you’ll know it’s not.
The great irony of achieving a position of authority is the sense of powerlessness that accompanies it. You’ll know what it feels like to be overwhelmed by not just the things you have to do but also the feelings of inadequacy, unpreparedness, fear and isolation that make it seem impossible to do them. Where do these feelings come from? Are you sure they’re yours or might they be coming from others?
As the leader of a school or a trust, you’re responsible for its success or failure, but you are unable to control most of what determines that, and can never quite know what’s really going on anyway. How do you tend to feel and act in other areas of your life when you don’t have the control or oversight you feel you need?
You have more authority than anyone else in the system, but can’t wield it without making someone unhappy, including the people you need as allies. How does it feel to you to know that some of the people you like will be unhappy as a result of your leadership?
Leadership is a privilege but it is also tough and emotionally draining, particularly in a context - like the school system - where heightened emotions are part of everyday experience. And what we know about emotionally draining work is that, if it is ongoing and unacknowledged, it leads to burnout: a state of physical and emotional exhaustion that can occur when you experience long-term stress in your job, or when you have worked in a physically or emotionally draining role for a long time (Burnout - Mental Health UK (mentalhealth-uk.org).
So how can you try to avoid burnout in yourself and your team at a time of such extraordinary pressure and change?
One of the first - and most powerful - things to do is to acknowledge the complexity of your leadership role, and carve out opportunities to reflect on both the nature of this complexity and its impact on your effectiveness. And by reflection I mean: stop working, move away from the physical place of work, and create the conditions in which you can think deeply about your experience of work. With practice, this can be done on your own but you have to be pretty disciplined. It can be easier to learn how to reflect in a space created and held by an appropriately trained coach or, if in a group, a skilled facilitator.
This concept of reflection has become mixed up with mindfulness and meditation, but the idea is to adopt what psychoanalysts think of as the ‘third’ position - a place from which you can see yourself in action whilst being in action, noticing how the feelings and emotions you feel come from different places and different people, and that they are data for you about what’s going on. This process of ‘mentalisation’ is actually developed through healthy development as a child, but can be sharpened as an adult in ways that are proven to improve leadership effectiveness.
At their most effective, reflective spaces are free of preconceptions, expectations and judgement. As a participant, you can just be, following your thoughts and expressing them, and - for example - considering why you think that way and why someone else thinks another way, and then what it means in the workplace if those two ways of thinking meet.
The outcome of this sort of reflective practice - though only after sustained effort - is a far greater understanding of one’s inner world; a greater appreciation - even respect - for the specific and unique drives that propel you in your work, and which react at particular moments in response to particular stimuli. For those at the cutting edge of leadership development, this is at the core of effective leadership in today’s dynamic and unstable organisational context. Deborah Rowland’s beautiful research (here and here, for example) into what enables successful organisational change is clarifying that a leader’s capacity to tap into their ‘inner state’ - to understand their quality of ‘being’ - is a vital pre-cursor to anything related to effective ‘doing’:
“The entire quality of your ability to lead the swirl of change starts here: in stillness, with your ability to both notice and regulate your inner mental and emotional response to experience. When you can do this, you will perceive and receive the external world more clearly, and can therefore take more appropriate action. We call this being before doing."
And yet prospective clients will still tell me that they “cannot spare the time” to engage with coaching or reflective practice groups, because in a sector driven by a technocratic understanding of the leadership role, reflection is still seen as a luxury. And again, that both breaks my heart and angers me. Because reflection is not just a way for you to manage your wellbeing and cope with the stresses and strains of your work; it’s actually an essential aspect of your development as an effective adult and leader, and a key component of effective practice. Given the work you have to do, both of these seem far from luxuries. They actually look more like responsibilities.
How much longer can you afford to not spare the time?
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Please get in touch if you'd like to discuss creating a reflective space for yourself or your team, or if you'd like support in embedding reflective practices into your organisational routine.
