Dear School Leader:
Given the current environment, meaningful change on your campus will require lots and lots of one-on-one conversations. To engender calm and seed innovation you need to proceed from the bottom up and from individual to community, not the other direction.
For elite education, whether at the colleges everybody wants to attend or the high schools playing the game of admittance into those colleges, anxiety is the energy of the day, as everyone knows.
We all know the sources of this anxiety too. Working at the pace of technology grinds everybody down even as devices promote constant comparison and reckless expression. Envy and anger do not lend themselves to community building and the impact of the latest toxic post, if not the one that feels imminent, puts everyone on edge. Meanwhile, climate change, the future of work, and social divide raise fear, stymie hope, and strain relationships. The average student does not lack for demands, tension between those who stand at a lectern and those who cut the grass is awkward, if not fatal, and everyone feels the exhausting after-effects of the pandemic.
No wonder then, that when you say “we,” the word rings out with less resonance than it once did. What’s more, “we” now includes every parent, each member of the local neighborhood, and some blogger a thousand miles away who aims to increase readership by writing about gossip in your dining hall. Everyone has access and opinions and sees themselves as a stakeholder. Sure, in theory, this inclusiveness is a positive, especially as it concerns staff and those who work and live just beyond campus. The “we” of the past surely ignored lots of folks. In practice, though, as we have seen nationally, trust is harder to maintain and togetherness is harder to count on.
None of this makes it easy to initiate new programs. Since everyone already feels over-scheduled and at the mercy of an endless to-do list, a workshop meant to bring people into a common purpose and spur innovation feels like a burden. When employees guard time as their most precious commodity, adding anything to the calendar, even a delicious offsite, risks pushing them away rather than drawing them in. And in an era of switching jobs every few years or giving priority to your side hustle, the “here” of campus becomes more a stop-over than a place to settle.
When distraction, overwhelm, and distrust are the baseline of your culture, you have to step back and build confidence and community one person at a time. Smirk because you see this reality as the result of tech-fueled narcissism. Cry as you think of all there is to do. Or smile if you recognize this as an opportunity to commence overdue change. But before you ask those in your charge to see what you see or rally them to your call, they will need to be seen and heard as individuals, uplifted in their roles on campus.
A Department Chair, I am suggesting, needs help running a better meeting. The Head of Buildings and Grounds may want to talk about managing staff. An assistant professor could well be in search of advice their senior colleague, acting as a mentor towards tenure, cannot offer. For these and all the situations like them, you need a campus coach who can offer generative support, who does not come from HR, and whose only agenda is helping the person they are talking with.
Because whether it is a tenured professor or the secretary in that professor’s department, everyone wants validation and sees their journey as their own, and rightfully so. And if they can get the support that makes them sunnier about the path they are on or in finding a happy way to change paths, that’s good for everyone.
Someone offering lots of coaching conversations could also promote, however gently at first, new partnerships across silos. This would soften the ground for innovation and lead to a greater sense of investment among those on campus.
I imagine a campus coach as someone who hangs out in your figurative public square, if not the actual quad, someone there to aid anyone who might be in need of support. I like this image because a healthy village is one model schools can adopt to fend off fragmentation and materialism. Just the idea of a “village advisor” offers a different take on “we” and “here.”
But however you position it, such support would help people feel clearer about their work and so more in sync with themselves and those around them. The disgruntled would be more likely to move on with less drama or, better still, find new ways to engage in their work. Increasingly, businesses make such support a standard perk of company life, and, come to think of it, all of your athletic teams have at least one coach, if not more. Why do you make sure your basketball teams have someone there to ensure a positive culture and to offer the skills needed for success but do not offer the same to departments? Indeed, in the future, I suspect every department and division on campus will have a coach to help the people there thrive and invest in their work and community.
You want happy campers, not disgruntled employees, engaged villagers instead of stressed-out citizens. Make support in the form of one-on-one conversations easy to access so that people can feel better about their work and their lives. Over time, no one will benefit more than you.