Tackling Tension within Your District: Steps for K12 Leaders

#Leadership

Casey Hernandez

by Casey Hernandez

Casey Hernandez Digital Media Team Manager

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Quick: How do good leaders diffuse tension among their staff and beyond?

Instinct may suggest you channel the class clown to diffuse the tension with a laugh, but that doesn’t bode well for long-term solutions or resolving intense conflict. Leaders don’t always cause disagreements, but they’re responsible to support solutions. Here’s how to manage tension in the ranks without burning away all your emotional and diplomatic energy.

Building relationships before tension arises

As a trusted leader, you’ve already laid thousands of hours of groundwork. Strengthening a relationship between yourself and your direct reports looks different for every leader, but each has an underlying element of psychological safety. People feel comfortable becoming vulnerable, a key step to identifying and puzzling through a problem with you.

With any luck, they will remember that psychological safety before tensions flame.

To solve disagreements between parties in your district, you’ll be tasked with the difficult role of neutral mediator. Staff on your team may feel you’re not supporting them as well as you could, and families or community members will feel you’re siding too strongly with your staff. But toughing it out between this rock and hard place can transform school culture.

Discovery

Tension is a symptom of a conflict, not the problem itself. The process of identifying the actual problem is nuanced: as a neutral party, you’ll be pulling at the thread of tension to unravel the conflict causing it.

Start by gathering the facts from the experiences of both parties. Aside from listening in person, surveys, one-on-one meetings, and small group meetings might provide the insight needed. Each person has their own perspective, and the truth exists in the ether between them. If leaders only stopped at individual perspectives, they’d be customizing solutions in endless ways. Instead, leaders hold the thankless task of finding common ground and moving forward.

Folks with backgrounds in customer service may be familiar with the phrase, “Listen to learn, not to form your rebuttal.”

Both parties will appreciate being validated. This doesn’t mean you’re agreeing with their assertions. It simply means you acknowledge their feelings and hear their words—believe it or not it helps a lot to hear that out loud. “I hear you. Let me repeat your points back to you to make sure I have them right.”

Simplify

Once you understand where each party is coming from, it’s time to distill the problem down to its purest form. Sure, a parent might be irate that their student’s school bus has been late for the last two weeks, but that tension could be completely unrelated to the true cause (perhaps the bus driver has a personal matter interfering with work scheduling, for example, something you unearth during your discovery mission).

Your calm neutrality is crucial to diffuse the emotional tension obscuring the true conflict, which will give you the clues you need to invent a solution, however complicated or simple it may be.

Diffusing tension between your team and outside stakeholders

As the mediator, you’ll need to be willing to be a go-between in the face of rising tensions. Your mission is to work hard to see where each opposing force is coming from. Resist the bewitching temptation to pick your teammate’s side by default, adopt an adversarial mindset, and set up camp—doing so will create an even greater amount of tension. Plus, your community deserves a fair shot at being heard.

Why are district leaders roped into conflicts between staff and families, anyway? Not only do your teams look to you for guidance and protection, but there’s the simple fact that your district exists under your leadership. Each person who represents the district represents you. “The Buck Stops Here” isn’t just a cheeky sign on a former President’s desk—it’s a leader’s choice to accept the consequences of behavior on behalf of a direct report who is unwilling or unable to do so. And when we agree to become leaders, we agree to stop passing the buck. The environment you create in your district is your responsibility, during smooth sailing and during rough waters.

It’s still part of your job to get into the weeds and figure out classroom stuff alongside educators. This includes parental conflicts and concerns at the classroom level.

Taking feedback and making it right

If the art of giving feedback is delicate and nuanced, the art of receiving feedback is even more so. It’s easy to downplay your involvement with a situation—so easy we do it unintentionally, telling ourselves it doesn’t concern us or require our attention. The problem is in the eye of the beholder, we reason: their opinion is theirs and not widely shared.

This may or may not be true, but as a leader you still need to track down the facts and do something about it. If nothing else, your inaction will send a message to your team: there’s no point in giving feedback if nothing will come of it. Over time, hard-won trust is eroded.

Now, this also doesn’t mean you need to jump into action and solve problems as quickly as you can—on the contrary, you’ll need to be prepared to outline your plan for addressing the problem. Try to be transparent about a timeframe for resolution. People may not be happy (after all, instant gratification has bewitched the population) but at least you’ve held up your end of transparency.

Be as open as possible but stop short of breaching confidentiality. You can still validate and assure a fix is in the works without spilling all the relevant details.

What if there’s tension but people won’t talk about it?

As a leader you’ll face uphill battles trying to implement a culture shift with veteran staff. When the climate between staff becomes toxic but no one is willing to talk it out, what options are you left with?

Leaders do still have a responsibility to step in. You’ll need to rely on skills such as patience, investigation skills (think neutral questions, “I statements,” etc.), and relationship building. If people are unwilling to respond verbally, an anonymous survey might lead you in the right direction.

The process will be slow, but your actions should aim to build trust to get closer to a solution. It’s still worth working at a problem for a 50% solution. It’s better than nothing. Progress builds trust over time.

Last but certainly not least, building a positive school culture with a mission, vision, and values can help create a unified image of success. At the very least, falling back on that foundation can help remind all parties what’s really important: the students we serve.