Be Well Or Burn Out

Great teams have balance. Everyone who’s ever worked as part of a team, I suspect, knows this, and yet I still see teams all over the place being formed by simply thrusting people into the same room and hoping that everything will be fine. As counterintuitive as it may seem to some, great teams aren’t just a collection of seemingly great people with great CVs assembled at great cost to make a great organisation even greater. When you’re putting a team together, it pays to think about how all the different pieces of the jigsaw you’re creating are actually going to fit together. My favourite analogy – other than jigsaws – about building teams, should you be interested, was probably one made by the former football manager Lawrie McMenemy when he stated that a truly effective football team is made up of four violinists and seven street sweepers. If you want to find out more about this idea, and assuming that you really have got nothing else to do, then click here.

Anyway, the best teams I’ve worked in usually have a blend of experiences and ideas as well as having colleagues from different backgrounds who bring a range of perspectives and outlooks. Even though they may differ in style, their variations complement each other because they all understand that they’re working for the same shared purpose and common goals. There are frequent disagreements, but this loyal dissent takes place in a safe space – and more accurately in meeting rooms with doors closed – and the team always presents as a united front once discussions are over. The team knows how to disagree agreeably with each other, basically, so that ideas are constantly stress-tested prior to implementation. If this didn’t happen, then everyone knows that you’ll simply get one wacky new initiative after another and that most of them will last for about a couple of days before they fall flat.

I’ve also seen some pretty ineffective teams over the years, to be honest. And, I should add, a common characteristic that they all shared was that team members behaved like pre-programmed robots and didn’t seem capable of either challenge or original thought. On some occasions, this was probably out of fear because they knew that to offer a dissenting voice was akin to asking to be ostracised, or perhaps worse. The leadership team, usually as a result of the tone set by the leader at the very top, worked within a deafening echo chamber, and no one was ever prepared to even intimate that they didn’t agree with whatever was being suggested. There was typically also no balance, because everyone simply ended up – no matter how long it took to get there – thinking and saying the same things. Professional growth, both for individuals and for the organisation itself, was stunted as the emphasis was much more about maintaining the overbearing control systems than it was about actually seeking continuous improvements to practice.

In recent years, I have also learned that having effective balance in leadership teams requires some members to have a real focus on and a genuine commitment to both personal and professional wellbeing. If no one on the leadership team is advocating for this, then things can get out of hand pretty quickly, in my experience, and you can end up with everyone working ridiculously long hours simply because to do anything else is seen to be less than one million percent committed. When this is the norm, those at the top start to measure the input of colleagues – the hours worked – rather than their output. The emphasis is put onto quantity rather than quality, essentially. So, it’s increasingly the case that you need people who not only understand the importance of promoting wellbeing in the workplace but who also can present some of the most pertinent pieces of recent research into the topic. In the paragraphs below, I’m going to lay out some of the most important findings of the current era.

Firstly, let’s go with the World Health Organisation’s 2014 definition of positive mental health, which is written as follows: “A state of well-being in which every individual realises his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community. Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” There are other pieces of essential reading on the topic which have been published in recent years as well, most notably perhaps The Impact of Teacher Well-Being and Mental Health on Pupil Progress in Primary Schools by Glazzard, J and Rose, A in 2019 and the DfE’s 2017 Green Paper on mental health in schools which, quite helpfully, identifies that one in ten children and young people have a mental health need but also, quite dismissively, gives no attention at all to the mental health or wellbeing of teachers and other professionals. Maybe next time, eh?

Not everyone ignores the wellbeing of educational professionals, mind you. The Royal Foundation, for example, has outlined its commitment to addressing the mental health crisis through its Heads Together campaign and it has endorsed the Mentally Healthy Schools website which has been developed to support primary schools in this regard. Even Ofsted, in their revised 2019 inspection framework (and which is still the case in the 2023 version), gave greater emphasis than ever before on ensuring that teacher workload in schools was addressed by leaders, although I am presuming that irony filters were turned off when this news first came out. Let’s be honest, if you’ve ever worked in a school anywhere, but especially in the UK, I would suggest, over the last decade or so then you will probably have noticed that teacher stress is pervasive. In their 2017 publication, Gray et al outlined that this is evident across all sectors of education and can be seen in many countries (not just the UK, as it happens), and most importantly found clear links between teacher burnout and lower job satisfaction (you don’t say!) Similarly, and perhaps more worryingly, Stansfeld et al commented in their 2011 publication that of the many professions researched teachers are consistently reported to experience an increased risk of developing mental ill health. It’s always been a tough gig being a teacher, and perhaps one of the most difficult parts of it is how hard it is to have a day off, even when you’re not feeling well. By way of illustration, The Teacher Well-being Index by the Education Support Partnership in England found in their 2018 publication that 36% of education professionals believed that taking time off work due to mental health symptoms had a negative impact on their students and a further 15% felt it impacted negatively on their students’ results. And, if the teachers aren’t well mentally, then neither are the young people in their care, according to recent research. Harding et al reported in their 2018 publication, for instance, that there appears to be a causal relationship between teacher and student mental health.

So, what to do? To my mind, as stated above, you’ve got to have professionals in your team who really, really get the value and importance of genuinely effective wellbeing strategies. The most effective strategies, in my opinion, focus on creating a supportive school culture rather than implementing gimmicks. Seriously, if I see another school thinking that they’re addressing wellbeing because they’re putting chocolates into pigeon holes once every half-term then I might scream, but not in a way which affects the wellbeing of others, obviously. Recent research also backs up this idea that it’s culture not gimmicks which creates the right climate in a school and which promotes wellbeing. The same report as noted in the previous paragraph by Harding et al from 2019, for example, states that teacher wellbeing is influenced by factors such as life satisfaction and personal happiness (which the writers term as the hedonic perspective) and positive psychological functioning. Teachers are able to demonstrate the latter, they note, when they are able to form good interpersonal relationships with others, have a sense of autonomy and competence and when they have opportunities for personal growth. Similarly, Beck et al reported in 2011 that “School climate influences teachers’ daily experiences in school. It is shaped by the school ethos which is established by the senior leadership team. Limiting teacher agency can result in diminished teacher wellbeing, which detrimentally impacts on teacher performance.” Even the DfE, in their 2018 Mental Health and Behaviour in Schools release, stated that “The culture, ethos and environment of the school can have a profound influence on both pupil and staff mental wellbeing”. On the flip side, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Grayson and Alvarez, way back in 2008 when wellbeing was still regarded slightly cynically as little more than a passing new-age fad, noted that a negative school climate can lead to high rates of teacher absenteeism and staff turnover.

When wellbeing isn’t present in the workplace, of course, it doesn’t just lead to issues around absenteeism. What we’re increasingly talking about now is the idea of presenteeism, also referred to in some circles as quiet-quitting, which I’ve written about previously here. There is a growing body of work on this subject, almost all of which is indicating that presenteeism is evident when teachers with poor wellbeing and mental health continue to work and that this in turn affects the quality of their relationships with their students (Jennings and Greenberg, 2009), student wellbeing (Harding et al, 2019) and overall teacher performance (Beck et al, 2011; Jain et al, 2013). In settings where wellbeing isn’t prioritised, there’s often a reasonable chance, in my opinion, that you won’t need to look too far to find teachers who are quiet-quitting – who are there but not really there, if you know what I mean. They keep on turning up every day but they’ve zoned out because they haven’t been looked after and valued as professionals. They’ve lost their mojo, and sometimes this is all because those at the top didn’t get just how important it is to care for colleagues on a human level. In the Harvard Business Review article below, Paul Hemp very succinctly articulates the crux of the issue as follows: “Researchers say that presenteeism—the problem of workers’ being on the job but, because of illness or other medical conditions, not fully functioning—can cut individual productivity by one-third or more. In fact, presenteeism appears to be a much costlier problem than its productivity-reducing counterpart, absenteeism.”

So, in very simple terms, if you’re a school leader then you’ve got to make wellbeing a priority in your setting. If you don’t, then don’t expect to get the best out of your teachers, because no one is effective if they’re burned out. In leadership teams, there needs also to be a strong advocacy for the value of wellbeing and the promotion of a school culture which promotes positive mental health amongst teachers. When approaches are imbalanced in favour of pushing too hard, then it’s likely that ineffectiveness will follow.