When I first entered a classroom as a high school history teacher in fall 2010, I thought I knew what it meant to be an empathetic leader. I had a fresh teaching license and shiny new master’s degree, and I was 24, so of course I knew it all. I can say, with the wisdom of hindsight, that I was a bit naïve.
I come to this working group from the teacher education and curriculum development team at the Minnesota Historical Society. My work requires bridging the K-12 world, which I hail from, with the world of public history. The more I learn about empathetic leadership in the context of professional teams and departments, the more convinced I am that it is another form of good teaching.
The core of my teaching practice centers around empowering students through rigorous, relevant learning experiences. While I currently do not supervise any permanent employees, I do supervise two interns who assist in the development of our state history textbook, Northern Lights. I apply the same central principles of teaching to the way I supervise these interns.
I consider their skills and background knowledge, then I apply that to design relevant tasks for them to do. I’m transparent with them about the ways I think the task connects to their prior knowledge, and I ask them to weigh in on whether they agree that it’s a sound connection. I design on-boarding tasks and reading assignments to help enhance their pedagogical knowledge (they often come with an interest in education but incomplete experience with it from the teaching side). I do this because effective delegation of tasks is, in essence, giving an effective assignment. We can’t expect students to complete an assignment we haven’t taught them how to do; similarly, we can’t expect employees to complete tasks they haven’t been taught to do (even if they have experience doing them for other employers). I really believe that relevance, both in the classroom as relevant content and meaningful tasks, and in the workplace as meaningful connection and purposeful work, can bring people together towards a common goal.
I also find out what my interns’ career goals are, include them in opportunities to socialize and make connections across the organization, and set them tasks to conduct informational interviews. To be clear, I also assign them a lot of tasks I don’t have time to do or that I don’t want to do (like recount the 1850 state census so we could get the optimal cross-section of data for a classroom activity…), but because I’ve built a relationship with them that demonstrates I care about their future success, we are all able to get what we need from the internship experience. We hear this all the time, but communication is key, and there’s no shortcut to building genuine relationships with people.
My hope for this working group on empathetic leadership is to drill deep into the ways expectations around hierarchy, power, and authority are undermining our efforts to build workplaces that inspire purposeful, meaningful, collaborative work. Public history isn’t here to make a profit — we’re here to make an impact in our communities. Yet we often struggle inside institutions that were created to justify the settler-colonial project. Education faces similar tension, where hierarchical systems built to assimilate children and develop their human capital get in the way of passionate efforts to provide them with equal access to an education.
Both worlds have a big problem with conflict and compliance. I see time and again, employees speculating about what potential conflict could arise and complying with an expectation or standard that was never directly stated. Then on the contrary, I see conflict received with accusations of unprofessionalism and disrespect, where a misalignment of values or simple miscommunication leads to cutting off connection, or leads to discipline against an employee. I cannot emphasize enough how similar the education and museum fields are in this regard.
One solution can be holding conversations reflecting on individual and shared values. Not the kind of values that make you sound good on a job application. The real ones that drive us, not just in our work, but in our lives. The ones that get us out of bed in the morning, or make us physically nauseous when we violate them. These values can help us dismantle the conflict and compliance dichotomy and find a touchstone to help us make decisions in line with our most imperative priorities.
My team at MNHS has done a good amount of work to improve collaboration and communication, especially as we work on revising our textbook under a very tight timeline. We have eight full-time team members, two interns, and one volunteer. We’ve used values to talk about our priorities in our work and in our lives, the impact we want to make, and what we bring to the table. This shared language helped us revise our team norms last fall and think more practically about what our shared values look like as behaviors. Even when our values are disparate, knowing what drives each of us to get out of bed every morning helps us enumerate the ways we complement one another and how to fill each other’s cups so we can carry on doing impactful work without burning out.
People are messy. We’re historians; we should know this by now. So why do we expect employees and leaders to be pristine? What if we could rise above the dichotomies of conflict and compliance? What if we knew ourselves and each other well enough to withstand the tension of inevitable disagreement? What if we respected one another as human beings, and trusted each other to make mistakes? In the political sectionalism of the 21st century, we can’t teach the public how to do this if we can’t practice it ourselves.