Wellbeing has become a watchword in all kinds of organisations, especially in schools, where stress and burnout can feel like constant concerns. A healthy team - both mentally and physically - is likely to be more creative, productive and resilient, which means better results for everyone. But how can middle leaders help make that happen?
The lowdown
When you take up the role of a middle leader, you may suddenly find that you are becoming a confidante for multiple people, and thus find yourself having to handle other people’s mental health issues, trauma and challenging personal circumstances, likely with little training in these areas.
So, how should you help your team while also helping yourself be the best manager you can be? How can you provide the right level of support for non-work issues? And how do you ensure you look after your own wellbeing in the process?
What we know about what works
The trouble with wellbeing, according to Bogdan Costea, professor of management and society at Lancaster University Management School, is that the label now often refers to “much more than it can handle”.
“It is fraught with very ambiguous ideas about where the responsibility begins and ends, and institutions of all kinds begin to exaggerate their remit,” he says.
This can lead to an overbearing kind of concern, he continues, with a sense of, “we’re going to make you well, whether you like it or not!”, meaning that team members can, for example, feel obligated to take part in initiatives that they would rather avoid - from shared coffee breaks to group exercise - which can cause its own stresses and negative impacts on wellbeing.
So when things are tough for team members and they begin sharing their difficulties with you, Costea recommends an approach based on compassion but clarity about limitations.
“Sometimes the most practical answer is to draw boundaries,” he says. “On the first occasion when someone shares something very confidential or very personal, whether it’s related to work or related to their life outside, you should have an honest discussion about what you can and cannot do.
“That really is one of the most delicate processes in leadership, because often you would like to help, but you can only help but only so far. You can say that you are willing to listen, but you might not be able to help. You have to be able to tell the truth about what is in your power and what is not.”
Many organisations now offer their staff access to employee assistance programmes, he continues, which typically offer online or phone counselling services that mean “people can ring and talk to somebody who is not from work, who is actually quite good at listening”.
“It’s an outsourcing of the problem, in a sense, but that’s what people want sometimes. If it’s affecting work but it’s a non-work issue, they may want to talk about it with somebody not at work.”
More from Middle Leadership Essentials:
But what about when you feel your own wellbeing suffering as a middle leader? It’s important to remember that you don’t have to manage everything yourself, Costea continues.
“You don’t have to think: ‘This is my time to be the boss, this is my time to show everybody what I can do.’ If you can let go of that, you’ll be OK. If you can’t let go of that, there’s nothing anybody can do. The more you want to hold on to power and control, the less you’re going to be able to look after yourself.”
Instead, he says, it’s about “looking after the household together, especially in the smaller teams”.
“This is the advantage of the middle level: you know your team and your team knows you,” he continues. “You can tell people what’s going on and let them know that you are going to face things together. It’s OK to say you don’t have an answer or an idea of how to approach this. You can invite your team to meet and talk together. So that’s a way of looking after yourself: let go of power.”
The experienced leader view
Jon Hutchinson is director of curriculum and teacher development at the Reach Foundation. He writes:
Many teachers are well acquainted with Sunday night dread. As you stare down the barrel of another week in school, your to-do list looks significantly longer than the hours available. Once you step up to middle leadership, this anxiety is often compounded, because now, if you aren’t prepared for things, you’re worried about letting your team down.
More than this, how can you hold your team accountable for being on top of things if you’re missing deadlines yourself?
Of course, being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work is only one driver of poor wellbeing. Pupil behaviour is another, not feeling recognised in your work, feeling as though you are doing a bad job - this list goes on and on. Some of these challenges are unique to education, but many are remarkably consistent across many professions.
You might hear leaders say that you can’t take personal responsibility for everyone’s wellbeing and how they feel is up to them. There is a grain of truth in this, but it doesn’t quite tell the whole story. As a middle leader, your decisions now carry greater weight, which almost certainly will affect how people feel on a day-to-day basis.
It’s tempting to try and “solve wellbeing” with well-meaning but ultimately tokenistic activities such as after-school yoga sessions or free massages during an Inset day. These are often appreciated by some members of staff, but represent an uncomfortable leap over the personal-professional boundary for many others.
Even generally better-received activities such as “sofa days” or “Christmas shopping mornings” don’t really get to the heart of the matter.
There are two problems with trying to address wellbeing issues in this way. The first is that these kinds of activities are one-offs, whereas poor wellbeing is usually a more sustained issue, unlikely to be resolved with one good shoulder rub. The second issue is that they start with a solution, rather than understanding the problem.
This is where you can have a real impact as a middle leader. Your job is to conduct regular audits to properly understand the state of your team’s wellbeing. What specific issues are driving frustration or anxiety? This may involve sending anonymous surveys out, scheduling one-to-ones, or holding regular team meetings where the floor is open to share pain points.
If done well, this has a doubly positive effect. First, people like to be heard, especially around things that are annoying them or cause them stress. Second, once armed with this information, you can build a plan that helps to address the issues systematically.
This could be as simple as shortening a morning briefing by five minutes so that people have more time to prepare before the children arrive, or as dramatic as abolishing a “non-negotiable” document on marking.
These decisions are the sort that change the nature of the job every day, and therefore have a positive, compounding effect to not only remove unnecessary stress but also create an environment where people feel valued, recognised and successful.
