We Need Educational Leaders, Not Managers

Our field is experiencing unprecedented burnout and stress levels, with talented educators leaving the profession. There are myriad reasons for this trend and no singular silver bullet to solve the crisis. Yet still, educational leaders should be part of the solution. How then do we begin to heal our profession?

I was recently sent an email from a top education platform in which they polled school leadership about their biggest fears. The top three results were as follows:

1. Is my school doing its best to prepare students for the uncertain world of the future?

2. How do I get better at giving feedback to people?

3. How do I inspire trust in my team?

While these questions would certainly keep any caring manager up at night, they almost miss the very nature of our job as leaders within the school community. Why aren't leaders more concerned about the lack of structural support offered to teachers, thus keeping them from doing their jobs well? Surely a thorough investigation of this question would lead to solutions to the three aforementioned 'fear'. Instead, the email offered the following sessions:

• a discuss on how school leaders can lay the foundation for continuous innovation

• a masterclass on creating a culture of feedback in your school

• a session where leaders can learn how to inspire greatness

Don't get me wrong. These sound like interesting topics of exploration. Unfortunately they are missing the very nature of the issue, that some teacher feel abandoned, overworked, underpaid, and under appreciated. So I have a different proposal: Let's reevaluate what it means to be an educational leader.

Simon Sinek, author of Leaders Eat Last Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't, provides a strong foundation for this reconceptualization when he states

Leadership is not about being in charge. Leadership is about taking care of those in your charge.

Our job is to facilitate a teachers day, not manage it. We are there to make their jobs easier not control their outcomes. Yes, quality control is part of leadership, however employees have been shown to produce a higher quality of work when they feel respected and valued in their environments. With this in mind, we must endeavor to be authentic educational leaders, not managers.

Leadership Not Management

In the field of education, we require teacher to be flexible, understanding, accommodating, and dedicated, while meeting rigid standards of curriculum planning, performing task that are outside of their expertise, and providing emotional and educational support to their students. This is untenable for most people. Those who can do this should be seen as the exception, not the rule. So what do we do? It's not like educational leaders are just sitting around doing nothing, everyone is stretched thin.

Simon Sinek again offers a different perspective on our leadership role:

Leaders are not responsible for the results. Leaders are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results.

If leaders took this approach, it has the potential to reshape our relationships with our employees. Instead of micromanaging or modeling, what if we offered options and agency or support for their undertakings or advocated for their boundaries. For goodness sake, what if that meeting really could have just been an email?

I know educational leaders have the capacity for this, because these are considered the best practices for the students we serve. If we witnessed teachers treating students the way management treats staff, it'd be cause for alarm. As leaders, we can and we must do more to direct our attention to the wellbeing of teaching staff.

Subscribe for part two of this post in which I outline tangible strategies to shift from an educational manager to an educational leader.

Further learning recommendations:

Leaders Eat Last Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't by Simon Sinek

Follow _spencermegan on Instagram for more on teacher boundaries

Follow me on LinkedIn for more content