Five
principles for welcoming soul into school leadership
“What are the ‘inner’ skills and
strengths you have cultivated and sustained that make you a
strong leader today?” I asked Bob Adams, the superintendent in
Aurora, Colo.
by Rachael Kessler, The School Administrator Web Edition,
September 2002, Nurturing Deep Connections
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www.bridges4kids.org.
“What are the ‘inner’ skills and strengths you have cultivated
and sustained that make you a strong leader today?” I asked
Bob Adams, the superintendent in Aurora, Colo.
“It’s about relationship,” he replied. Whether it was with his
students in his days of teaching or with the principals and
teachers he leads today, “the relationship is critical.”
The quality of relationship came up again and again as
superintendents around the country shared their thoughts and
experiences about the soul of leadership.
“You begin to learn from people you connect with, some feeling
about them. Some friendship, some connection. It's the human
part of what we do,” Adams said. “Principals come to me and
say we need to recreate our culture. I ask them, what
behaviors are you willing to change? Because you can't talk
yourself into culture, just as you can't legislate morality.
You do it by the way you behave, the way you relate and
connect to other people.
“If in leadership your first resort is to use the power of
your title, the relationship never occurs except that someone
always knows that you have a title.”
Adams conveys a more subtle power than the force of title or
position. Fostering a climate for meaningful connection, his
leadership works toward a transformation from within, which he
distinguishes from “cosmetic compliance.”
Often missing in the equations of school reform is the
dimension of soul. In my book The Soul of Education, I provide
a framework for nourishing the inner life of students in ways
that honor the separation of church and state and the deeply
held beliefs of families and teachers.
This framework is organized around a set of yearnings or needs
that students express in their questions and their stories
about what matters most to them: the search for meaning and
purpose, the longing for silence and solitude, the hunger for
joy and delight, the creative drive, the urge for
transcendence, the instinctual need for initiation and,
permeating them all, the yearning for what I have called "deep
connection." Many simple, ordinary, respectful practices can
be integrated into classrooms to honor these gateways to the
soul of students. But what does soul have to do with school
leadership?
Soul Defined
Let’s begin with a definition of soul—not from a religious
treatise but from an experience palpably felt in classrooms,
in meetings principals hold with faculty or in meetings
administrators have with their teams.
When soul enters the room, we listen in a new way. We listen
not only to what is spoken but also to the messages between
the words—tones, gestures, the flicker of feeling across the
face. When soul is present in education, attention shifts. We
concentrate on what has heart and meaning. Questions become as
important as answers.
In almost 20 years of exploring the spiritual dimension of
education, I found that the experience of deep connection
stands out most in the stories of students, teachers and
school administrators. A quality of relationship that is
resonant with meaning and authenticity, deep connection was
evoked again and again when superintendents and assistant
superintendents from California to Colorado and Connecticut
talked with me about the power of relationships, listening,
empathy and compassion.
In a classroom, school or district where the soul of education
is welcome and safe, deep connection allows masks to drop
away. Colleagues begin to share the joy and success they once
feared would spur competition and jealousy. They share the
vulnerability and uncertainty they feared would make them look
weak in front of peers and superiors. And they rediscover
meaning and purpose in their collective responsibility for the
children.
Deep Connections
The soul of leadership begins with deep connection to the
self, the source of what administrators called “personal
integrity,” “resilience in the face of setbacks, criticism and
even misrepresentation” and “the capacity to reflect and
create opportunities for silence.”
Next comes deep connection to others: “the ability to listen
deeply to others, to their beliefs, dreams, opinions, visions
and strengths;” “empathy and compassion;” and “respect for
others who differ in any and all ways.”
And for some district leaders, what most defines the soul of
leadership is their deep connection to a higher power: “a
sense of awe for infinite mystery” or “a relationship with God
in which you learn to be humble enough to forgive and to use
your influence only to help others.”
Sustaining deep connection to themselves has become quite
natural for the leaders with whom I spoke. This ease carries
over to their one-to-one work with those they lead.
Individually, they bring their capacities for listening
deeply, respecting others with fundamental differences, and
connecting meaningfully with empathy and compassion. But for
all of them, deep connection to community—bringing soul into
their work with their teams—is a more daunting challenge.
As administrators reflected on what allowed them to sustain
and strengthen their own inner dimension of leadership, the
power of silence stood out.
Eileen Howley of Farmington, Conn., was emphatic about the
urgency of silence to maintaining her connection to herself
now that she is an assistant superintendent, saying, “In this
work, you’re constantly supporting people’s needs and thinking
about policy. You’re always giving out to others and you’re
constantly on stage. I can’t go to the grocery store without
someone knowing me. I need that stillness to come back into
myself.”
These leaders had discovered subtle ways to infuse silence
into their leadership with others. “In small ways, I try to
cultivate more of the stillness and less of the busyness.
Sometimes it’s about dropping away one item from the agenda,”
Howley said. Adams, the superintendent in Colorado, offered:
“I pose a question and then say, I don't expect you to answer
me now. Just think about this, and then next week, let’s talk
about this again.”
Leadership With Soul
“A critical sense of leadership is a true sense of empathy—the
ability to stand on the other side of the mirror,” Adams said,
describing his belief that real behavioral change can only
come through the depth and consistency of relationship that
coaching provides. “There’s never been a champion without a
coach.”
“I need to have an individual I can trust to talk with about
issues that concern me,” Howley said. The quality of
connection to her own superintendent was her first response
when I asked her what sustained her strength as a leader.
“I could be concerned about something a principal said or did
in a meeting,” said Howley. “It sustains me that I have a
superintendent whom I can go to who helps me think things
through. He’s a powerful influence in helping me problem
solve.”
When it’s her turn to be the coach, Howley has discovered the
humility and openness that leads to true listening. “I’ve had
to cultivate a part of me that can listen incredibly hard to
people, to try not to bring in my own biases and responses.
It’s hard when they’re critical of something you’re passionate
about. But I really try to hear people. It requires an inner
suspension of my own issues,” she said.
An assistant superintendent in California wrote: “Accept that
your truth is only yours.” Another said, “I’ve learned to hear
criticism and not get overly wounded, but to get curious and
involved. I’ve learned to listen for the need expressed within
the issue presented. And to sustain a sense of self even when
my actions and decisions are purposely misrepresented by
others.”
Challenge of Fear
The issue of fear, of working with people who threaten and
feel threatened, surfaced again and again. Some administrators
were explicit about the current climate in which educators
don’t just feel threatened—they are threatened—by humiliation,
intimidation and even loss of leadership and livelihood as
accountability is measured almost exclusively on the basis of
high-stakes tests.
“Many of our assistant superintendents have stopped coming to
our professional development if the subject is anything but
strategies obviously related to test scores,” lamented one
participant in a workshop for assistant superintendents.
“Building and district leaders are feeling more competitive
with each other because they’re being publicly compared to
each other, ranked in ways that make it hard to build trust
and collaborative leadership.”
While discussing their views on the soul of leadership, a
group of assistant superintendents in San Bernardino, Calif.,
offered poignant stories of healing relationships they had
with students in the days when they worked as assistant
principals. In each of their stories, a chronic troublemaker
frightened about punishment grew into a committed student
when, for the first time in his schooling, he felt deeply
cared for.
I asked these school leaders how they bring this same quality
of connection into their work with teams of principals. They
sighed with frustration. “It’s just so hard to make changes
there when the system runs on hierarchy. How can we build that
trust when people are so afraid to reveal themselves in a
climate of fear?”
Superintendent Adams delved deeper into the systemic sources
of fear: “In our society, we spend more time as critics than
as builders. We seem to feel this entitlement to do that in a
punitive way, an atmosphere of ‘gotcha!’ And that creates
fearfulness.” At a recent in-service program, he offered his
school leaders an alternative message: “The thing to remember
is, if there’s enough love, fear can’t exist in most places.”
Teams with Soul
Working with groups, the challenge to move from fear,
polarization, or even efficiency to soul increases. Yet
meaningful connection in teams can dissolve this fear and
build trust across the divides of beliefs, roles, hierarchy
and competition.
When we introduce the value of soul into school reform, we are
engaging in a radical enterprise: the gradual softening of the
boundary between the public and the private self. We do so for
a reason.
In every sector of society today, people express a yearning
for authentic community, for opportunities to express more
fully who we are in the places we spend most of our time. In
the workplace, schools, towns and even in the political arena,
leaders are responding to this call by bringing in leadership
tools that can foster more authentic expression.
While the call is loud and clear, the personal risks are high.
Whether it is students in the classroom or adults in team
meetings, some people are afraid to reveal themselves or feel
it is inappropriate to do so. Our job as leaders is to
acknowledge these risks and to respect that caution. If we
want people to share their souls, we need to create
environments where it is safe to do so.
Five principles of leadership are essential in implementing
new strategies or structures, especially when we ask people to
open their hearts or reveal the longings in their soul. I
learned these principles first with adolescents, a time in
students’ lives when the world is full of rumors, cliques and
bullying and when the risks of being authentic are the most
dangerous.
These five principles undergird the practical strategies for
creating a climate in districts and schools where the inner
life becomes safe and welcome and people feel a part of a
meaningful community.
* No. 1: Personalize
Create opportunities for your team members to reflect on and
articulate their own personal goals in welcoming the inner
life to schools. Sometimes this awareness emerges when they
share stories of what inspired them to become educators or
reflect together on their own sense of the purpose of
education.
Howley, the assistant superintendent in Connecticut, uses the
“five-minute biography,” a technique she learned from her
husband Patrick, a staff development specialist at the School
Development Program at Yale University. People describe three
decisions that have led them to where they are today, in this
building, this district.
Says Howley: “You get to know something personal about each
colleague. You see the threads that connect what we all care
about. Even principals who strongly prefer thinking over
feeling as ways to lead have come to me with enthusiasm about
the impact of carrying this into their schools.”
Once your team has a taste of the power of inviting the
personal dimension, collaboratively create the ground rules
they need to feel safe enough to risk revealing their fears,
their gifts, their mistakes and their passion. Ask them a
question such as “What conditions do we need to create for our
meetings to become a place where you can talk about what
matters deeply to you?”
After doing this with hundreds of educators and students, I
see remarkable commonality in what they propose: respect,
honesty, fairness, openness, commitment and genuine listening.
* No. 2: Pacing
Move slowly, gently, respectfully. Invite. Offer. Nurture.
Affirm.
Howley speaks of “a gentle way of moving leaders to identify
what they need for themselves, a gentle encouragement about
how to help each other grow and grow together.”
For many educators, good pacing means providing lots of theory
and research up front that demonstrates the connection between
a soulful pedagogy and successful learning, between authentic
community and a successful organization. For others it means a
quick dive into experiential activities that provide an
immediate felt sense of what this work is about and why it is
urgent at all levels of the school. Find a balance and a pace
that honors both.
Honor the principle of “skirt/scout.” Most people want to
learn as much as possible about others while revealing as
little as possible about themselves. As a leader, you can
design respectful opportunities for people to get to know each
other gradually. Provide themes for discussion or for personal
stories that honor the group’s pacing in the slow growth from
cooperation and companionship to compassion and communion.
* No. 3: Permission
“Leaders get into power struggles because they push and others
resist, “ says Adams. “It’s a natural reaction. But what will
happen if you stop pushing? Some of the resistance begins to
drop away. You have to take the time to watch and to listen to
understand where people are.”
When you stop pushing, you can let people choose when they are
ready to speak or engage in any activity that may evoke a
sense of vulnerability of heart, soul or body. If no one
mentions “the right to pass” when agreements are being formed,
the leader can assert this vital need.
You also can give people who opt out the dignity of being a
“witness.” This means that if they choose not to participate,
they don’t slip out to the bathroom or get a cup of coffee.
Witnesses provide silent support to those who risk
participation. They watch and listen for dynamics that those
in the midst might never see. When the activity is over, the
witnesses have an opportunity to share their observations if
they want to.
* No. 4: Protection
Protect reluctant team members from the pressure to
participate.
As leader of the meeting, your ultimate responsibility is to
protect your flock from interruptions, putdowns or other forms
of disrespect such as dominating the conversation. “When I
hear killer statements from someone in a meeting, I let them
know quickly that they will be held accountable,” said one
administrator.
Adams fosters a sense of trust and authentic community in his
cabinet through storytelling. “Sometimes I use it in serious
ways and sometimes in humorous ways. Often stories bring
meaning to what you are trying to say.”
Use your own heart and body as a gauge for depths that are
safe. Tell the first story so you can model the level of
vulnerability appropriate for your faculty/staff. Once you
have established your willingness to disclose, model the
courage to pass when the day or subject feels too raw or you
feel called to just listen.
* No. 5: Paradox
Model the willingness to hold the tension of apparent
opposites: standards and soul, privacy and community,
collaboration and authority, caring and rigor.
One administrator credited her leadership strength to the
capacity to “deal with uncertainty and to create a meaningful
direction out of chaos.” Adams described a practice in
openness: “You may come to me with the most bloody outrageous
idea in the world, but I will listen to it. I take bits and
pieces of wisdom from each person. I keep listening, not just
to the words, but to the behavior.”
Robert Johnson, author of Owning Your Own Shadow, speaks of
“the art of taking the opposites and binding them back
together again, surmounting the split that has been causing so
much suffering.” He calls this art the “religious faculty,”
saying, “It helps us move from contradiction—that painful
condition where things oppose each other—to the realm of
paradox, where we are able to entertain simultaneously two
contradictory notions and give them equal dignity. Then, and
only then, is there the possibility of grace, the spiritual
experience of contradictions brought into a coherent whole,
giving us a unity greater than either of them.”
I heard this grace in the administrators I interviewed—a
superintendent striving to maintain the paradox of
collaborative and directive leadership styles, always watching
for what was most appropriate in the situation and with the
person involved. In another district, this same tension was
held by the partnership between the superintendent and
assistant superintendent: “My superintendent has a very
directive style and I’m very collaborative.”
Perhaps the most challenging paradox a leader must hold today
is the tension between standards and soul. A school based
solely on "standards" could easily become an arid, numerical,
test-driven landscape that cannot nourish true learning, turns
teachers into managers and students into robots.
Conversely, a school based exclusively on "soul" could become
lost in the inner world of its students, a pedagogical
free-for-all where nothing is required and everything becomes
an expression of each person’s precious uniqueness.
But when both soul and standards are honored and school
leaders ride the paradox, an environment for learning is
created that is strong enough to hold all the tensions, trends
and turmoil of American life.
Restoring Sweetness
Ultimately, infusing soul into leadership is about serving our
students. Or as Janice Jackson, former deputy superintendent
in Boston, puts it: “the imperative to deal with the inner
lives of children while we develop their intellects.”
It was the blossoming of wisdom, peace and leadership I saw in
students when we honored this hunger that inspired me almost
20 years ago to leap into this once taboo territory of the
spiritual dimension of education. I was spurred on by the
self-destructive and violent behavior that persists when a
spiritual void in youth leads to alienation, meaninglessness
and despair.
To bring this experience of soul to the students in our
schools, we need a chain of trust, reflection and meaningful
connection that begins with superintendents and moves down to
those who more directly honor these in students.
In the process of weaving this “soul chain,” we will begin to
redress the alarming losses signified by our national
principal shortage and high teacher dropout rates. Without
soul, without authentic and meaningful connection between and
within people, between learning and our lives and longings, we
will continue to lose our school and classroom leaders.
A story is told about how the ancients set the stage for the
love of learning: When the elders wanted to begin teaching the
children Torah, they needed first to teach the alphabet. So
they carved each letter on a stone tablet. Then they covered
each letter with honey. The child would lick the honey off of
the letter. And so, sweetness and learning would be one.
We can restore sweetness to learning. I’m not talking about
the saccharine sweetness of “ac-cen-tuate the positive and e-lim-inate
the negative.” The sweetness of soul in education is about the
joy of playing and learning together, of celebrating our gifts
and triumphs. But it also includes the sweet poignancy of
feeling our grief together as a community, or of discovering
through authentic, open-minded dialogue the ally inside the
colleague or parent we were afraid would thwart us forever.
While many forces threaten to put our schools on a diet of
sawdust, we also can choose from a menu of principles and
practices that offer an alternative that is more nourishing.
The collected insights in this issue reflect a growing body of
wisdom in educational leadership.
Without sacrificing accountability, without undermining
quality, school administrators today can choose to cultivate
in their own leadership and those they lead a host of
practical strategies that allow us to genuinely nurture each
other in the process of building school communities where
learning can thrive and teaching can, once again, be a
calling.
Rachael Kessler is executive director of the PassageWays
Institute, 3833 N. 57th St., Boulder, CO 80301. E-mail:
PassageWaysRK@aol.com.
She is the author of The Soul of Education: Helping Students
Find Connection, Compassion and Character at School.
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