Heartache

Heartleading is grounded in love, and practices that are dedicated in both philosophy and practice, to living and leading from this love lens. That doesn’t mean any of the work is easy—leaders sharing out core values with staff, creating language and messaging, constructing an aligned mission and vision, building consensus with a group of human beings with differing stories and views on love, none of it is simple or easy.

All of this is navigated against a backdrop of people working through their own biases, figuring our their own feelings about love in education, buying into the work attached to it…as I said, nothing easy about it.

Bruce Tuckman, in his 1965 research, ‘Developmental Sequence in Small Groups,’ created the concepts of “Storming, Norming, Forming, and Performing,” and similarly in this work, as with the Storming concept, there must be what I will coin ‘aching’ to go along with the heart metaphor of my Heartleader practices. There must be safe, equitable space provided, and time to dig deep into love leading work, in theory and practice, as it applies to school communities—how people talk to one another, to students, to parents, on the phone, in emails, in person; how they listen, how they react and interact—all of it requires time to take apart what those ideas look like, and how they would look/feel in any given school from a love lens. Creating space to acquire voice data from stakeholders is critical to this aching process as well, because it will expose issues and needs that get right to the heart of the matter, and affect people on personal, often intimate levels. As schools dig into data to get to the root causes of issues around academic performance and targeted interventions and enrichment, school communities will also need to consider the social-emotional needs that would be at risk by not digging deep into what it means to love a community to a more social-emotionally successful future—especially as we still exist in the midst of the pandemics of race and Covid illness.

‘Aching’ as a process involves (1) Deciding with your team which question of love to tackle it relates to an area of growth connected with social-emotional wellness (i.e.—triaging trauma and loss). (2) Look at current work, if any, around the topic and the current state of the school community with regards to that topic, (3) Determine action items, as well as staff assigned to work on these items; include resources, funds needed, (4) Create a mechanism to monitor and data collect, and timelines to examine the efficacy of the work being used to ‘answer’ the question, or solve the issue, (5) Provide updates, as well as room to adjust and re-prioritize as necessary.

I feel that the emotional bank of the school will see tremendous dividends from deposits of this type; that providing authentic, and comprehensive social-emotional, wellness work can only increase the climate and culture of a school, as well as the self-esteem and resilience of students, and build trust from families, and secure sustainable local partnerships.

To know and understand what heartleading needs, there always has to be ache, in order to see and feel what is missing. When people come together, in a profession such as this that is so personal, so emotional in scope and focus, tremendous energy can be amplified around the care and safeguarding of our most valuable assets—our people, our community, who we show up for, and love and collaborate with daily.