How Leaders Undermine Their Own Efforts To Promote Sustainability Within Their Staff
Leaders of schools and other organizations often hire me to work on sustainability among their staff. These leaders recognize signs of burnout and sincerely want to support those they lead in reducing their workloads. They are even willing to invest time and money to address these problems.
While this is admirable, it is often ineffective. Why?
These leaders have a blind spot: their own unsustainable, unhealthy workloads that they see as necessary.
When this is the, the effectiveness of any sustainability work for the organization as a whole is limited.
The leader doesn’t see that they can't get what they want—a healthy, sustainable organization—as long as they aren’t changing the way they work.
There are three reasons why this is true:
➡️ First, “do what I say, not what I do” doesn’t work. As parents or educators, many of us instinctively know this is true with children.
As leaders, however, we often fail to recognize that this is equally true for adults. When our staff sees us working long hours without boundaries, the message to them is clear: “What’s valued around here is your willingness to work long hours, despite what I’m saying about wanting sustainability for you.”
➡️ Second, leaders need to do "the work" themselves to be able to support their staff in doing the work.
By “the work,” I mean working on their own unhealthy, unsustainable workloads. This includes many dimensions: focusing on the most impactful tasks, setting boundaries, learning to say no, addressing people-pleasing, shifting from the victim mentality, and understanding that we can often be more effective by working less. (I’ve previously written about how “time management” skills are insufficient to prevent burnout.)
When leaders don’t do this complex work themselves, they can’t truly understand what their staff is going through and create obstacles for their staff who are trying to progress.
➡️ Last, as coach Jerry Colonna has pointed out, if you’ve built a machine that depends on the senior leader(s) working unhealthy hours, you have necessarily built an unsustainable, unhealthy machine. End of story.
In my work with schools, the pattern has been clear: the organization progresses when the senior leader does the work themselves.
When the senior leader does not work on themself, the organization does not progress with sustainability.
Even when some staff participate in coaching and workshops with me and do make progress, these participants are trying to operate in an environment that creates serious obstacles on their journey to health and sustainability. Even when they overcome those obstacles and make remarkable progress as individuals, they remain just a minority in a larger group.
The good news is, of course, that there is a simple solution: senior leaders working on themselves to make their own workloads manageable.
That is my call to action for school and non-profit leaders who care about the sustainability of their staff: Start with yourself!
Starting with yourself might mean working with a professional coach or a group of fellow leaders who are on the path. It doesn’t matter as long as you’re not trying to do it alone. This work is too complex for that
Are you a leader who is walking the walk? A leader who cares about your staff but is resisting doing the work on themselves? A teacher who sees the impact of their leader’s actions? Share your experiences, questions, and challenges in the comment below.
