Abstract:

The helping professions hold a common thread that individuals dedicate their working lives to the repair, advancement, support, and empowerment of others. Such professions include counselling, coaching, and healthcare, and of course the focus of this study, teaching, which unlike some other such professions does not provide regular one-to-one supervision for practitioners. In many cases, individuals in these professions also dedicate much of their personal lives to helping others and it is perhaps surprising on one level and unsurprising on another that we do not hear the words “What about me?” uttered more frequently. Or that when we do, such conversations often come too late and loaded with frustration or upset.

In this study, I ask “what about me?”, “or him?”, “or her?”, “or them?”, “or you?” in empathy for different stakeholders and the toll that being a professional helper in the field of education takes on motivation, creativity, and well-being. I explore implications for successful leadership when individual needs, desires and fears clash with institutional priorities, or are eclipsed by student needs, or overshadowed by the demands of an increasingly burgeoning metrics culture of an increasingly challenged sector of Higher Education.

Drawing on founding humanist theories of Rogers (1977) and Maslow (2011) and synthesising leadership models, such as Adair’s (1979) action-centred model and distributed leadership approaches (Bolden, 2011; Bolden et al, 2015), I explore the importance of empathy in leading education initiatives, and in leading others through change and the acquisition of new responsibility. I encourage the embedding of “what about you?” conversations into daily leadership practice and I explore the person-centred and affective factor approach I have taken to leading a departmental review of Learning Enhancement Strategies at Middlesex University and distributing leadership responsibilities for heightened innovation and enhanced student impact.

Through this phenomenological study, I reflect on my lived experience and emotional journey as I purposefully applied this person-centred empathic approach to supporting a team through significant change. I focused my attention and concern on how they felt and how they wanted to feel, rather than on their skill, expertise, or performance (areas in which I already had great confidence). I draw on testimony from that team of highly skilled educators who have given years of quality service to the development of others, but who have different passions, anxieties, ambitions, and personal histories and experiences as individuals.

I hope this study will demonstrate errors and successes but ultimately champion for the foregrounding of conversations about emotion as a leader’s pro-active daily practice with individual stakeholders in Higher Education.

References:
[1] Adair, J. (1979), Action-Centred Leadership, London: Gower Publishing Ltd
[2] Bolden, R., Jones, S., Davis, H., Gentle, P. (2015) Developing and Sustaining Shared Leadership in Higher Education, Advance HE.
[3] Bolden, R. (2011). Distributed leadership in organizations: a review of theory and research, International Journal of Management Reviews 13(3): 251–69.
[4] Khan, H. (2022) Leadership, Reinvented: How to Foster Empathy, Servitude, Diversity and Innovation in the Workplace.
[5] Maslow, A. H. (2011), Hierarchy of Needs: A Theory of Human Motivation, Kindle edition: Amazon.
[6] Rogers, C. (1977), On Becoming a Person, London: Robinson Publishing

Keywords:

Empathy, Higher Education Leadership, Humanism, Person-Centred Leadership, Creative Synthesis, Distributed Leadership, change management.