Key points:
- Education has always been a sector based on relationships
- 5 ways school districts can create successful community partnerships
- Sailing through adversity: 4 Olympic-sized lessons in educational leadership
- For more on district management, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership hub
In one of his many great YouTube clips, Simon Sinek talks about what key and successful teams seek in their leaders. Performance and ability–sure. But even more important is trust, and trust outweighs ability.
Trust in your team is key, but so is their trust in you as a leader. Not trust that you can do the ‘job’–the tasks and duties–so much as trust in you as a person. Will you have their back? Can they rely on you?
And how do we build trust? We all know how we can lose it well enough. Be inauthentic, unreliable. Say one thing and do another. Not be there when people need support. And be more concerned about yourself, or the tasks, rather than the people.
Building trust isn’t that complicated. It starts with a mindset that the people are the most important part of the equation. It starts with appreciating your team as colleagues and team members. It begins with acknowledging–verbalizing, as well as demonstrating–that you value everyone and their opinions. It’s about understanding the feelings and emotions of your team.
Concern. Feelings.
The Greek word for feelings is pathos. And the word we use for understanding people’s feeling in English is empathy. Em (in) + pathy (feelings). Empathy is trust in action. It demonstrates concern and it builds trust.
But for the longest time, we have been told to demonstrate un-pathy in the workplace. How many times have you heard the phrases “it’s nothing personal, it’s business;” “leave your personal issues at the door;” or “here we keep our personal and professional lives separate.” We have been instructed and often rewarded to show un-pathy. To be un-feeling, un-sympathetic, and un-emotive.
We’ve also been told that these things–the two ends of a continuum–are a binary choice. We are either demonstrating un-pathy or em-pathy with no middle ground.
It seems that both things are incorrect. Concerns for others can operate in the same space as concern for what we are trying to achieve. And concern for others can also boost effectiveness and efficiency. (I’ve purposefully avoided the word productivity, as I feel that’s now a loaded word that plays directly into this concept of un-pathy).
Building trust starts and grows with being empathetic. That’s the starting mindset.
We can then grow it by understanding more about our actions with others and how they feel about any interactions. We can focus on our credibility, our reliability, and our intimacy. But we also have to be aware of how we are seen and heard. Do we come across as self-interested or self-oriented? Do others take our C, R, and I with a pinch of salt as they don’t see us as having their back, but rather our own back? If so, this will undermine everything we are doing to grow trust.
In education circles, we are often told to run our schools and our districts with a business mindset. What is intended here is to show more un-pathy. Yet what many businesses have recently discovered is that it is trust, built through empathy, that provides energy for growth and, dare I say, productivity.
Education has always been a sector based on relationships. It is a people-dominated profession where the relationships form the synapses for effective teaching and learning. Great teachers know what makes their students tick and what will engage them. Likewise, great leaders know what makes their colleagues and teams tick and how to motivate and spark them. It’s about knowing people, their feelings, and circumstances.
Rather than avoiding such relationships, we should instead be nurturing them.
Rather than considering them to be distractors to the work, we should be viewing them as requirements for the work.
Rather than displaying un-pathy we should be targeting more em-pathy.
