The Consequences of Unkind Leadership (Challenge #84)

For obvious reasons, I talk a lot about the benefits of kind leadership and the ways implementing it can heal yourself, your organization, and the community you serve. But during a recent impromptu livestream on LinkedIn, I considered a slightly different question—what are the consequences of practicing unkind leadership? I got a little more passionate than usual as I talked, and realized that I wanted to expand a little bit on my rant, plug in my good microphone, and share my thoughts with all of you.  

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Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, where every Monday morning I teach you to heal your school or library in the next ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to advise a growing community of educational and library leaders who want to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind leaders make the tough decisions without becoming jerks. We plan effective systems that help us get the job done with less money and effort. And we’ve learned that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, any vision becomes possible. To be clear, Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but it’s rarely easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around to learn how to create a legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

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I talk a lot about the upsides of the benefits that come from growing humanely, managing effectively and creating collaboratively, because I know from personal experience that implementing those three skills can heal yourself, can heal your team, can heal your broader organization and the community you serve and build a better world, which is why all of us educational library leaders are doing this thing. However, just as kind leadership comes with benefits, unkind leadership has consequences.

To be clear, when I say unkind leadership I don't necessarily mean just being rude or being cruel, though those things can certainly be a part of it. When I speak of unkind leadership, I mean something broader. When we as leaders are not in touch with ourselves and our values, it becomes very hard to confidently decide what we need to do. When we don’t have structures and systems and plans that honor our organization’s real world limitations and opportunities, we struggle more than necessary to achieve our goals. And when we don’t have, safe, trusting, conflict-friendly relationships with our teams, our stakeholders, and our community. We won’t be able to scale our team’s impact to achieve the vision that we want to see in our world. 

I'm going to be blunt here. We are losing good people from our k-12 schools, our libraries, our universities, our corporate training and development teams, and other mission-oriented organizations because we, as leaders, do not have our own stuff together. We can’t process our feelings and connect with our values well enough to confidently make decisions, so our best people lose confidence in us in turn. We as leaders are allowing knowledge gaps and inertia to keep broken systems in place, forcing our best people to apply band-aid after band-aid till they burn out or break down. And we as leaders are losing good people because we don't take the time to talk to each other, to connect with each other, to understand where others are coming from so that we can actually work together and realize we all want the same thing and get stuff done. 

That is the consequence of not following kind leadership, because your best people, the people who are most committed to your organization, to your school, to your library, to your community, those people have options. And if they are forever running into roadblocks, into struggles, because you don't have your stuff together, because your organization doesn't have your stuff together, They will move on. I’ve seen it in every organization I’ve ever worked for. I see it in my social Saturday interactions where I run into a lot of people who are interested in my podcast but who are also seriously considering leaving the profession or have left the profession because of this kind of nonsense. And who is responsible for running those people out of professions that at their best have the proven ability to improve critical thinking, reduce income inequality, build community wellness and engagement, and in short build a better world? Unkind Leaders are. More accurately, we are.

And I say WE because a kind leader isn’t something a person is. Kind Leadership is something we practice, and some days we do better than others. All of us, myself included, have to wake up every day and resolve to do the best we can to grow humanely, manage effectively, and create collaboratively so we can heal our organizations’ doubt, dysfunction, and drama and turn them into the instruments by which all of us can build a better world.

No, we do not have power over all the ills that plague our schools and libraries—internal or external. That’s why a kind leader needs to get REALLY familiar with the serenity prayer. We have to address the things that we could control, and that we can improve. We also have to find ways to address, to mitigate, and influence the things that are not in our zone of control. Because if we do not shift every day to a stance of kind leadership, we are going to continue losing good people. We are going to continue having struggles with our communities. And we are even going to risk losing the spark of vision that keeps us going when times are hard. 

There’s a lot of cynicism and suspicion right now in some corners of the culture about education and libraries. People are questioning what we do, how we do it, and why it matters. Sometimes that questioning is a good thing, because it suggests people are thinking for themselves and brave enough to ask uncomfortable questions. But I’m not naïve either. Some of that questioning is deliberately stoked by people creating scapegoats as an easy way to get clicks, votes, money, or some combination of the three. I don’t know the solution to that suspicion, if it’s even a problem that needs solving as long as it doesn’t cross the line to harming others. But I do know that that suspicion of an educated, informed, and equitable society is a sign that there’s a lot of pain that needs to be healed both inside and outside our organizations. It isn’t our job to heal that pain, but it is our job to provide spaces and opportunities for healing to take place. 

So this week’s challenge is pretty simple—how are you going to be a kinder leader this week? Let me know over on the linkedin community.

Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge, and for growing humanely, managing effectively, and creating collaboratively in your own organization. And if you know someone who might find this episode helpful, hit share in your podcast app or send them over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/81. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.