As I am thinking about how to build humane leadership and work cultures, I’m struck by the idea that what I want empathetic leadership to mean and what our institutions allow it to mean may be at odds. I have worked mostly in academic contexts, though not exclusively, and in partnership with a variety of nonprofits. I’m grateful to have been in the public history world for a while now, and I am friends or friendly with individuals at all different levels of the work. Everyone still has a “boss,” a leader or a group that they are accountable to, in addition to being accountable to their publics and coworkers.
I’d like to think that an empathetic leader is in solidarity with all of their workers, and uses the privilege of their position to advocate for more for them: more money, more understanding of neurodiverse and physically divergent needs, be they needs of a worker or that worker’s family. In practicality, this would mean, at a minimum, things like:
- arranging comp time for salaried employees without a heavy sigh,
- working with people who are sick or have personal or family needs,
- hiring enough people to cover the work that needs to be done,
- seeking genuine input from impacted people when developing policies,
- advocating for employees with their own bosses or the board, and
- modeling not working on their time off, not making things seem like emergencies that are not, and taking their own days off.
But what I see is that there is a disconnect between even this minimal ideal and what people are (or feel?) empowered to do. Doing all of those things takes funding, because they all really come down to hiring enough people at good wages to ensure that everyone is covered, that overtime is minimal and well-compensated, and that when someone has an emergency or takes their vacation time the rest of the team can absorb that without too much stress. Meeting this threshold should also lead to people staying in their positions longer and developing skills and institutional memory. In an ideal world, empowering empathetic leadership and being empathetic leaders ourselves, as much as we can regardless of job title, would be simpler. Then again, in that ideal world, would we need so much of this empathy?
In the end, it comes back to what I see as one of the foundations of public history work: self-reflective practice. Each of us has to evaluate what we are and are not empowered to do to build humane working conditions; we must ask ourselves if we can do more and reflect on what has worked or didn’t work in the past. What can we do to build empathetic leadership when we don’t have the power to make concrete changes? There are options. Lately I’ve been inspired by the work of historian Catherine Denial in her book A Pedagogy of Kindness (bookshop.org link), which I recommend even if you aren’t in an academic setting. Denial emphasizes the kindness that comes from consciously recognizing each other as human beings with needs and boundaries, not platitudes or niceness. She talks specifically about how we can create kinder university classrooms built on our values, but also about being kind to ourselves. If we aren’t careful, particularly in situations where the institutions cannot be remade, our empathetic and kind leadership can end up meaning more work for us.
I like the idea of coming back to our own values when faced with the conflict between co-creating an empathetic workplace and institutions that are often unwilling or unable to foster such leaders. This helps me to recognize what I can do in working with students, external partners, and colleagues:
- I can communicate what I need, and why when that would help;
- I can not send work-related communications in off hours;
- I can be flexible with due dates
- I can work with people who are sick or have personal (or family) issues
- I can ask questions and not assume that I know what the answers are in advance
- I can operate under the assumption that the people I’m working with have other things that are more important to them, but that this does not mean they don’t care about our work together
These are just quick examples; there are detailed specifics that work at my institution that may not work at others.
To be honest, this does not feel like enough, and that’s a big part of why I’m participating in this working group. How can we build more humane workplaces when the training ground for many public historians is in a world that does not center such an approach? It often feels like the values I hold as a public historian are at odds with those practiced by my institution, and it can be a struggle to maintain those values with students, when the institution that I’m part of isn’t maintaining them for me, particularly in the southeastern US political climate.[1] I want to learn more and to think intentionally about how to cultivate a humane leadership and work culture from graduate school forward, both for my students and myself, recognizing the great privileges that I have in my position. I believe that helping people learn to build humane work cultures is more possible when those of us responsible for graduate programs in the field also operate transparently empathetic classrooms. I know that empathy alone is not enough to solve all of our workplace issues; I wish it was. Perhaps it is a foundation for leaving us with the energy to put towards those things, and, for now, that’s the assumption I am working under.
[1] It is worth noting here that the leadership of state institutions is typically a blend of former academics and those trained in various business, leadership, and public policy situations. Just as we are trying to do this work between the institution and the students, they, in turn, have the unenviable task of mediating between (among other groups) faculty attempting to cultivate such empathetic classrooms and programs and often hostile state legislators and ruling bodies.