The Business Case for Well-Being

happiness, and success of everyone in your organization and why it is even more important for leaders, particularly education leaders, to truly lead this work. Although I wrote this book with school principals and vice-principals in mind, it will be useful for leaders at all levels of traditional educational hierarchies, from teacher leaders and coaches to superintendents. They are the models and teachers for the people they lead.

Workplace well-being, if leaders consider it at all during leadership training programs, is often seen as a soft skill or even something separate from or unnecessary in the workplace. Educators have been taught to think of their work lives as different from their “real” lives. However, educators spend the majority of their waking hours in their workplaces. Work is often a place where educators do noble, creative, and important things, where they develop relationships and discover and cultivate their passions and purposes. It can be a place of thriving and flourishing. If things are not going well at work, however, it can also be a place of great pain and soul-wrenching heartbreak.

Why I Wrote This Book

One of the things I love about learning and developing workplace well-being is the interplay of science and soul. I have been interested in psychology and the study of human behavior for years. With two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees, and a doctorate in progress, I have done a lot of academic learning, which I am incredibly grateful for, but most of my learning and my continued fascination come from my work with people. I have had the opportunity to work in a lot of different workplaces, and so many people and relationships have shaped me. I have worked as a social worker, counselor, teacher, district support teacher, and as an educational consultant for health and well-being with many school districts. I enjoy my work, and, like most educators, I am passionate about the work I do. Other than one particular time in my life, I could pass the Sunday night test almost every week. Then I started noticing that looking forward to the week ahead was more the exception than the rule. I noticed more of my friends and colleagues struggling to come to work. They were having trouble sleeping, working all hours of the day and night, and living for breaks and weekends. Many were starting to lose the passion that had brought them to education in the first place. My reading of the work of great authors and researchers like Brené Brown (2018), Daniel Coyle (2018), Amy C. Edmondson (2019), Shawn Achor (2018), and others showed me both the negative impacts of stress on people’s health and success, and the relatively simple practices that increase well-being. At the same time, I was watching some of the most passionate educators struggling just to

make it through the day or even leaving the profession altogether. I wrote this book to share some of this research and put this research together with stories and examples from the field so you have a guidebook to creating and supporting well-being in your schools and workplaces.

Sometimes people ask me why, when I am not a principal, I direct my message to them. It is an excellent question that requires a thoughtful answer. I could start with the fact that I have read the research that tells me principals have a strong influence on the well-being of those they lead (Atasoy, 2020; Çiftgül & Çetinkanat, 2021), and that principals are struggling themselves with increased stress and decreased well-being (Pollock, 2014, 2017; Wang, Pollock, & Hauseman, 2018). After working for and with school administrators since 2007, the more important reason is that as a leader in a few provincial mental health networks, I know both school and district leaders are intensely aware of their responsibility of care and often sacrifice their own well-being to support and care for their teams. As you read this book, you’ll discover educators need to support one another to do this work. I hope by sharing the research and compiling the stories, I can add one small piece to this important, collective work on well-being and just maybe take one little thing off your most certainly overloaded plate.

About This Book

This book highlights three components of human behavior: (1) thinking, (2) feeling, and (3) acting (or behavior). If you only stick to the thinking part of this book, you will not be disappointed; the science and the business cases for wellbeing in the workplace really are compelling. You can definitely think your way through this book, but I invite you to dig into the feeling and acting parts as well.

I challenge you to feel your way through this book too. Parts of the book will ask you to connect with the material and practices beyond just reading the words on the page. That may involve stopping for a moment and feeling the words you are reading in your body (like you did with the epigraph at the beginning of this introduction), or there may be invitations to remember or visualize something. If you are an education leader, you know connecting at different levels and in different ways to material helps you learn (Rao, 2018), so I invite you to try it.

This book will also be a call to act. What actions move leaders and their workplaces toward well-being? What do leaders actually need to do? I invite you to really dig in as you think, feel, and act your way through this book, making it a tool you can read, use, and refer to as you move yourself and your teams toward well-being.