What Are You Carrying That Isn’t Yours? The Emotional Workload of School Leadership

What Are You Carrying That Isn’t Yours?

There is a particular kind of pressure that can come with being an assistant or deputy headteacher in a school. You are often the person people come to when they have something on their mind, whether that is a difficult conversation with a colleague, a concern involving a parent, a challenging class, or simply a decision they are unsure about. A colleague might catch you in the corridor and ask, “Have you got five minutes?” because they know you are someone they can talk to.

Being approachable is one of the important strengths of an Assistant Headteacher or Deputy Headteacher. It means people trust you, and it means you are often able to support colleagues when they need it. But I wonder whether we sometimes underestimate what it means to be the person everyone comes to, and the emotional workload of school leadership that can come with that responsibility.

Leading from the middle

Middle and senior leaders can occupy a slightly unusual position within a school. You may still be teaching, on the playground at lunchtime, walking the corridors and seeing colleagues every day. You are close enough to the day-to-day reality of school life that people feel you understand what they are experiencing.

At the same time, you are carrying leadership responsibility. You are thinking about staff, pupils, parents, curriculum, accountability, improvement and the decisions that sit behind all of those things. You can find yourself moving between roles constantly: teacher, leader, line manager, problem-solver, listener and mediator, sometimes all within the same hour.

Because of this, there can be an unspoken expectation that you will simply absorb whatever comes your way. When you are used to being the person who helps solve problems, it can become difficult to know when you are supporting someone and when you have started carrying something for them.

When being supportive becomes carrying

I think there is an important distinction between supporting someone and carrying something for them.

Supporting someone might mean listening, asking a question that helps them make sense of a situation, or encouraging them to think through their options. It might mean offering advice when it is appropriate or helping someone feel more confident about a conversation they need to have.

Carrying it is different. It is leaving the conversation and continuing to think about it that evening. It is replaying what they told you, wondering whether you should have said something different, or feeling responsible for how the situation eventually turns out. It can mean taking on someone else's frustration, worry or uncertainty as though it belongs to you.

None of this necessarily happens consciously. In fact, it can happen precisely because you care. You want to help, you want things to be okay for your colleagues and you want to be a good leader. But caring about someone doesn't mean taking responsibility for everything they are experiencing.

You don't have to have the answer

This is something I have become much more aware of through both my own experience in education and my coaching practice.

I spent more than 12 years working in education, including seven years as a Deputy Headteacher and three periods of acting headship. I know what it feels like to be in the middle of a busy school day when someone says, “Have you got five minutes?” Sometimes those five minutes become twenty, and sometimes the conversation stays with you long after it has finished.

There can be an instinct to solve the problem because that is what leadership often requires us to do. But not every conversation needs a solution from us.

Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is help someone think.

Instead of immediately offering an answer, we might ask, “What do you think you need?” or “What is actually within your control?” We might ask, “What would you say to someone else in this situation?”

These questions don't mean we care less. Sometimes they are how we care without taking responsibility for something that belongs to someone else.

There is a difference between helping someone find their own way forward and taking the problem away from them. The first can build confidence and ownership. The second can leave us carrying something that was never ours in the first place.

Perhaps one of the most useful questions for leaders is a very simple one:

What is mine to carry?

The decision might be yours. The responsibility might be yours. But the emotion isn't necessarily yours.

Someone else's frustration doesn't have to become your frustration. Someone else's uncertainty doesn't have to become your uncertainty. Someone else's problem doesn't always need to become your problem.

This doesn't mean becoming detached or less compassionate. It means developing enough awareness to recognise where your responsibility ends and someone else's begins.

That can be particularly difficult for leaders who take pride in being supportive. If part of your identity is being the person people can rely on, creating that distinction can initially feel uncomfortable. But being reliable doesn't mean being responsible for everything.

A small pause can change the conversation

For leaders who are constantly approached by others, sometimes the most helpful thing is simply to create a little more space before responding.

Instead of immediately offering a solution, ask a question. Instead of taking the problem away, help the person explore it. And instead of leaving the conversation carrying it with you for the rest of the day, take a moment to ask yourself:

Is this mine? What is actually being asked of me? What do I need to do next - if anything?

These are small shifts, but over time they can change the way leadership feels.

Being a supportive leader doesn't mean being endlessly available, endlessly responsible or endlessly resilient. It means being able to support people without losing yourself in everything they bring to you.

Perhaps that is one of the most important things we can give the people leading from the middle: not another leadership strategy or another thing to do, but the permission to care deeply without carrying everything.

If you are a school leader who often finds yourself being the person everyone comes to, it might be worth asking yourself:

What am I carrying right now that isn't actually mine?