Compassion and Accountability Are Not Opposites

[upbeat music] Now, imagine a teacher's just submitted their planning late for the third time in a row.

They know the expectation, you've already talked about it, and you also know they're going through a pretty difficult situation at home.

You care about standards.

You care about this person, too.

What do you do? Well, maybe your first thought is, "We've been through this.

Other people are managing.

I need to be clear." Or maybe it's, "Oh, they've got enough going on.

I'm gonna give them some more time." Have a little think about where your mind went first.

And now, what might that response miss? Because if you insist on the deadline without understanding what's happening, you may ask for something that the teacher genuinely can't manage.

But if you keep extending it, well, colleagues, they might end up carrying more work.

Preparation for pupils might suffer.

You can care about both things, you see, and still have to make a difficult choice.

Now, this week, I was working with a bunch of school leaders on my intensive program on values, and we began by identifying what mattered to us, and then we moved into the harder territory.

What happens when those values meet the daily realities of leading in school? And that's where I wanna spend a little bit of time today.

How do we put our values into practice when they seem to pull us in different directions? And there's one question I'd like you to keep in your mind through this episode: what is each value trying to protect? Now, Rushworth Kidder described right versus right dilemmas, situations where there's a legitimate concern on both sides, just like what I described, and that's a really useful way to describe some of the discomfort we experience as leaders.

Feeling torn can mean you're noticing several responsibilities at once, and you still need to work out how to respond.

In the session I did, I brought together five practical moves.

We named both concerns and explored what they protected, we looked for another route, made a choice and acknowledged its cost, and then we rehearsed the response.

Now, this is my own little teaching synthesis I use, drawing on several different approaches, but let's work through it with that planning scenario we talked about.

I think you'll find it useful.