Leading Change in an Unpredictable World

Whether it's politics or a pandemic, when norms are challenged, everything gets harder

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One thing that has come roaring back to me in the past few weeks is the profoundly disorienting experience of leading change when the larger world feels like it’s operating outside ordinary norms. I keep thinking of this bit from a 2018 John Mulaney Netflix comedy special about the horse running loose in a hospital and how, if nothing else, it is extremely distracting because you keep checking for updates as to what the horse is up to now. And whether you’re personally red, blue or unaligned, the shifting political reality is impacting you. Even if you’re hardly online or watching the news - it’s impacting you because it’s impacting people in your community.

You might personally be really glad and think it’s about time for the horse to force the hospital to fundamentally rethink how it functions or you might personally be deeply worried the horse running amok will make the hospital cease to function altogether. Either way, you are trying to lead change - and I would imagine you are trying to lead controlled, orderly change - in a larger context of change characterized by challenges to stable norms. And that is an especially challenging task because implementing orderly change is hard enough but when you have a community distracted or worried, it makes the task exponentially harder.

If you’re a school leader right now, the chances are you are leading change at some level. Whether it’s about meeting new challenges when it comes to hiring and retention, new norms related to human resource management, the quickly evolving landscape of generative AI and how that’s impacting traditional pedagogy - that’s major change. And then we also have a landscape with students managing more mental health challenges - even lower schools are seeing this! And as I know well from my workshops, parent relationships are increasingly a fraught mix of community relations and customer service. Very few schools are operating on memory and autopilot right now.

I am especially sympathetic to the new heads and senior leaders earnestly trying to build up their leadership toolbox when it feels as if emotional fires are lined up around the block outside their offices.

Change provokes anxiety. Grief surfaces and people don’t want to linger on or examine it. If you’re redoing your compensation structures or housing policies for boarding schools or even small things, like faculty perks accrued by years of service (parking preferences, chaperone/extra duty sign ups) it can hit people in deeply personal places they can’t even fully articulate. New daily and weekly academic schedules? Don’t get me started as to how it can really hit at the heart of a teacher’s basic sense of priorities and professional identity.

People have trouble letting go of (an often heavily romanticized) past and that is intensified when people have concerns about the larger world that are completely out of their control. And leaders often misread complaints as obstruction and send multiple signals trying to shut them down. You don’t have to come out and say “complaints aren’t welcome here” in a faculty meeting for people to get the message. Often people need that time to process and “faculty room trash talk” can actually have a beneficial role as a space for emotional support. I remember a faculty meeting decades ago when we did an exercise about what connects faculty and one person offered the observation, “hating together.” We all joked about it, but there is truth there. And really, you need to worry a lot more if you’re not hearing any push back about change - you can take into account, appreciate, process, respond to what you know is being said. You can’t respond to what you don’t know.

This is all extremely taxing!

Leading in a time of disruption and uncertainty makes it very hard to access the internal fortitude you need to get some distance and perspective on the emotionally draining work of change. I read somewhere your iPhone battery’s lifespan is shortened if you routinely let the battery drop below 20% before charging. And I think the same thing is true of leaders. Regularly running on nearly empty just isn’t sustainable.

There’s only so much you can take as you try to model being calm, confident and the master of your school domain. I preferred to be a no drama llama, which meant pretty much always attempting to be self aware as to my own level of distraction and worry about the outside world and intentionally managing it - an impossible task, of course, given that the subconscious is king. I still think it’s worth making it a goal. Your calm impacts your whole team and that impacts the whole school. And some days you fake it til you make it - and other days you fake it and fail. Leaders are humans, too.

For one reason or another, we were making change at school during my entire headship as polarization in the community steadily grew and political norms in Washington were challenged. At one point, one of the school’s neighbors had giant political flags hung on the trees that lined their property and another homeowner on a main route nearby had a homemade billboard-sized sign with an image of President Trump pointing a machine gun at oncoming cars.

The outside world infringes. I remember how tense I was the weekend the president ended up being hospitalized with covid. I remember there was a week or two where every day, I worried there was a legitimate risk of North Korea launching a nuclear missile towards California. In my memory, stuff was happening all the time where you weren’t sure if it was time to reach out to the community or if it would fizzle out at the end of the news cycle. I was in a Zoom faculty meeting on January 6th with one eye on the television, my jaw was on the floor watching protestors break into the Capitol - wondering when to let people know what was going on and knowing many of them probably had their phones blowing up but also wanting us to get through a normal meeting and get school business done.

People in the community are looking to you for reassurance that everything will be OK and you need to keep finding ways to dig deep and give it to them. And all the while, you need to still be doing your job, rolling out the community changes thoughtfully, acknowledging the complaints, finding ways to move forward to best serve students and families and fulfill the mission.

This is about as hard as it gets! And at best, as pointed out in Mulaney’s bit, it’s just distracting - part of the disruption is having trouble focusing and being tempted to constantly check on your preferred social media channel or news app to see the latest.

So how are leaders to cope?

I wish I had some magic solutions for you. What I do have is advice I found helpful at the time and some reflections I have in retrospect, starting with the straightforward and moving towards the more multi-layered.

Spend eight hours a night in bed, even if you’re not an eight hour sleeper.

Advice from a doctor that was a true revelation even though it seems so simple and somewhat obvious. Make that eight hours sacred. If you’re a reader, use physical books or magazines rather than screens. Breathe. Listen to music you love. Be bored. Let your thoughts wander. Chat with your partner about things that are light and pleasant or silly, not making plans for who does afternoon pickup or who will have time to do that errand or who takes Mom to her next doctor’s appointment. Don’t pressure yourself that you need eight hours of sleep and have to efficiently get down to sleeping - worry about getting to sleep fuels insomnia. Think about the eight hours in total as decompression and quiet time to refuel. 

Meditation

Everyone tells you to do this and it’s true. It helps. It’s not for everyone, every day, but it’s a healthy practice and it’s a way to make a little quiet space for yourself. You can do it during your sacred eight hours. There’s a lot of apps that can help, too. I have a particularly wander-y mind and guided meditations were excellent. Surrender, listen and you don’t have to make any decisions.

Give very serious and intentional consideration to what it means to be “the boss”

You don’t have the emotional bandwidth to meet everyone’s needs at this moment in time. It’s just the truth. It’s not a failing although I think many school leaders experience this as a failing. Leading change at your school is an all encompassing and challenging task in the best of environments. When you and your community are navigating disruption and upheaval in norms we usually don’t even think about, you just need to let the idea go that you can meet everyone’s needs, make every decision, and control the fate of your school. (Honestly, you can’t and that’s not your job in times of placid seas either but that’s another article.)

Be intentional in how you use your energy. Do the things only you can do in your role, whether that role is at the pinnacle of the org chart or further down. Work with your team to support them stepping into their authority. That takes effort and is worth your time. Spot them when they need it and let them spot you, too. That might feel like an ill fitting suit, but sit in the discomfort and do it. It will expand both of your capacities. There may be impulses pulling you towards putting out every fire, because that’s what the leader does, but the leader should be giving their direct reports fire-fighting equipment and training on how to use it, too.

“Couch Time”

The head’s suite consisted of my office, the assistant head’s office and an office in between for an EA. The EA’s office space included a couch. It was also equipped with a bowl of candy, mostly of the high quality chocolate variety, mostly stocked by me. There was a big window on the wall where the couch was. Some afternoons when I had “had it”, I would lie on the couch and chat with people - adults and students - as they walked by. (This was a source of amusement for them and for me.) Some late afternoons, often Fridays, a group of people that frequently included my EA, the director of comms, the academic dean, dean of students and various director level folks would end up in there and we’d close the door and complain and tell stories about various ridiculousness-es happening to us that day. One day near graduation, wrapping book awards turned into a chorus of “Tubthumping.” (in a slightly less rousing but nonetheless hilarious version). We came to call this “couch time.”

On a leadership retreat, in a “pair and share” I told my partner I was worried I wasted too much time in this activity and she said, “I think it’s probably a good thing - you even have a name for it.” Laughter and chocolate - find it where you can!

Using a coach

I tried using a coach when I first became head. I engaged someone I really liked and respected and I knew had a well-deserved reputation as a truly excellent coach. It just did not work and I came to feel like our calls were homework on my part - I’d try to figure out how to frame something to reduce it to get the most helpful feedback or support in an hour. It started feeling like I was just bringing problems that I sort of already knew how to address because they were neat and could be solve-able. I was trying to “win” coaching, I think. 

It didn’t feel worth the cost and even though in the scheme of things coaching isn’t an enormous ticket item, I think many heads are reluctant to spend what feels like a significant amount on something that will solely benefit themselves. More to the point for me, it didn’t feel worth the time or energy to keep doing it or to deconstruct what wasn’t working in order to make it work. 

Then during the summer of 2020, I knew I needed someone who was not a friend or mentor or professional colleague or who worked at the school to be there for me to process everything that was going on because it felt like I had so little battery left. And I suspect it was maybe going into the coaching relationship with that attitude - that how I was functioning was so undeniably unsustainable - was maybe the key for it clicking for me. Once it clicked, I did coaching sessions every two to three weeks until I left at the end of June, 2022 and it was completely invaluable to getting perspective on my leadership, helping me be more intentional, have better boundaries and alter some interpersonal (professional) dynamics that always seemed to stall into the same dead end.

I don’t think “coaching” is a blanket solution to anything and I can’t even honestly say I wish I had tried harder to engage with a coaching relationship years before. And again, absolutely no shade on my first coach! For whatever reason, I’m not sure that’s what I needed and I did have mentors I conferred with frequently who were pivotal in leadership development in very different ways. But I think finding the right coach at the right time, a skilled person who you trust, who gets you, who is there for you and can be someone you feel comfortable with so you can put it all on the table, in all its messy glory - that can be transformative, freeing and empowering.

Whether you find our complicated times thrilling or exhausting, it is always impossible to predict the future. Put time and thought into how you will be generous to yourself and how you can find a groove and stick with it - for as long as it works before you need to figure out a new groove. Do this despite any grumbling you might encounter - everyone has plenty of ideas about how leaders should be spending their precious time and energy. We’re all only human. And in being in touch with your flawed humanity, it will make you more tuned in to the flawed humanity in others. 

Remember - bracing for impact only feels like preparation. Try not to get into that habit!

Thinking of you all and grateful you are here in the TOOS community -

Julie

Coming up in Talking Out of School!

Next Tuesday 11/26 - A Thanksgiving post (no post next Friday)

In December:

Helpful Resources Q2 - trustee and faculty ready articles on topics relevant right now

Women and Leadership Part II

Some TOOS stats and what seems to be top of mind for TOOS subscribers