I work with a lot of educators who started working in schools so they could positively impact young people's lives. This work comes in many forms – through teaching in classrooms, organizing programs and activities for young people, assisting them one-on-one with work and projects, coaching them in sports...the list goes on.
These people love working with kids. It's that part of the job that brings them to school everyday. It's good work by design because it reflective of their interests and draws on their passion.
Often, the people who perform the best in these jobs, who don't burn out after the first few years, get tapped to lead schools as administrators. Off the bat, it makes sense. Why wouldn't you promote your highest performers into leadership positions?
This career trajectory comes with a lot of advantages, including more money, power, and the ability to make decisions that have greater scope. And we need good leaders to occupy these positions and impact it for the better.
Something I've seen a lot of school leaders realize after the fact though is that, although they still work in an environment full of young people, getting an administrator's job pivots them overnight from predominantly working with kids to adults. Also, career educators, even those who have been teaching for 10-20-30 years, often don't have the requisite adult management experience to seamlessly make this transition. And it's an important one because kids and adults undeniable require different management styles.
Ok. No big deal, right? Educators know how to solve problems through education, so people go back to school in order to bolster their qualifications to fill this gap. However most people who are skilling up are pursuing professional doctoral degrees not necessarily in the areas of management that would help them in their new positions, but in areas that they are already proficient in.
The corporatist higher education system also markets these degrees for newly overwhelmed school leaders strapped for cash and time. Their courses of study are often still rooted in student-centered subjects, which are inadequate preparation for leading adults in the workplace.
The culture of the profession is fueling both the supply and demand of these misaligned options, and this problem is prevalent everwhere.
This misalignment has rendered many unhappy school administrators – great educators who feel disconnected and eventually develop deep dissonance from why they got into education in the first place: to directly shape young people's lives.
I'm not saying their work as leaders doesn't achieve that. It does in many cases. Yet people are unhappy because there is suddenly a greater distance between them and that impact. The fulfillment loop they had so painstakingly constructed is now overstretched due to their advancement.
This is one example of a massive problem when it comes to how work and advancement are designed. How mission drift happens in our lives without us even it realizing just because of how growth is set up within the systems, professions, and industries in which we work.
My reflections on this phenomenon often emerge from education because, as a freelancer, I've spent a lot of time there in recent years observing and talking with leaders caught in the whirlpool of school administration.
In education, some are able to recognize the state of dissonance their promotion has put them in and remedy it through small strategic ways of staying connected to students, such as through coffee chats and mentoring. These are tiny examples of prototypes that empower individuals to design their way into a state of resonance where their job stops distancing them from their original source of inspiration. It takes some curiosity and resilience with unhappiness though to embark on this process.
Are you swept up in the fringes of this kind of dissonant upward mobility? What work has plucked you out of your mission, now or ever, leaving you supposedly better off yet missing deep and familiar fulfillment?
How can you prototype your way toward greater coherency between what you love doing – your "why" – and what you're doing now?