I’ve often heard school leaders, and even teachers, talk about their school’s as ‘one big family’. For a long time I thought this was such a beautiful way for someone to feel about the places they worked, and maybe also felt like something was missing when this wasn’t the case in my places of work. Ten years into school leadership I’ve discovered that it’s quite a bit more complex, and have begun to think about other metaphors to describe the relationships we have at school.
Before delving in, it’s worth addressing why metaphors and symbols matter. After all, we know a school is not a family, but a metaphor for one. And yet, metaphors and symbols have the power to shape our thinking, to help us make sense of complexity by simplifying something to its analogous essence. They are a kind of shortcut to making sense of complex ideas in a more easily comprehensible form. They can also carry emotional weight, like talking about a group of people who one is close with or depends on as a family, when in fact they are not strictly so.
I think the family metaphor works as a Jewish Day School for two reasons. The first is that at its core, education is a caring profession. Relationships and support are a deep part of a teacher’s commitments, and often, successes. The second, for Jewish Day Schools in particular, is that we are part of a People, and so in some sense, a family. So the metaphor works. To a point.
That point becomes painfully obvious to anyone who’s had to fire someone. As they say, you can’t fire family – but you will have to fire an employee. It is not responsible to employ staff who are at best not performing well, or who are at worst negatively impacting others. There are less severe gradations of this of course, but in the end, work relationships demand a distance that family cannot offer, and which the hierarchies of school generally demand. This can play out in how we give feedback, who’s entitled to set the direction of the institution, and more.
Now, I recognize of course that the use of family here is as a metaphor, not a directly parallel structure. But metaphors have both intellectual and emotional power, as I discussed above, and this one creates challenges around the misperception of relationships and limitations in decision making. I fear it creates problematic expectations, sometimes more than the good it serves.
Seeing this, I thought about how other metaphors might play out. Thinking about work as a ‘team’ is one I’ve heard before, and has some merit. It recognizes that our group has the same set of goals, and depends on one another, as a team does. But it also acknowledges that when people aren’t performing, or new talent is needed, someone can be let go or demoted. It might be a sad moment, but we recognize it as part of how great teams operate.
The limitations in this metaphor for me is its coldness that emerges in service of the end-goal, and education, as I said above, is a caring profession. Perhaps more, Jewish Day School demands visionary work, and ‘team’ simply doesn’t have the energy, the passion that is required to carry what is needed.
I was recently re-reading Rabbi Sacks z’l book Morality, and came across a metaphor he uses in a Torah context that I found quite powerful for schools. Rabbi Sacks makes a distinction between two types of relationships. One is what he calls ‘contracts’, which reflect instrumental relationships. In this model we are all selfish, and act in our own best interests. But we know we need each other, so we engage in mutually beneficial relationships, or contracts, for these purposes.
The second is what he calls ‘covenants’, which he describes as follows:
In a covenant, two or more individuals, each respecting the dignity and the integrity of the other, come together in a bond of love and trust, to share their interests, sometimes even to share their lives, by pleading their faithfulness to one another, to do together what neither can achieve alone (p.62)
Torah is a covenant, as is marriage. At first this seemed an imperfect analogy to Jewish education by dint of the implied intimacy, though much closer to what I was looking for. But rounded down to its essence Rabbi Sacks explains that, “a contract is about interests, whereas a covenant is about identity,” and day school work is very deeply about building identity – both for the students and the teachers. Contracts are about competition, while covenants are about cooperation. And even while contracts may be embedded in covenants, like in a marriage, that is not what it is at the root. And what drives a covenant? Emunah, the translation of which is not faith, he says, but faithfulness, fidelity, and loyalty. That is a metaphor that carries a lot of conceptual and emotional weight.
As a metaphor, more than family or team, a covenant has an inner logic and power to guide our work at day schools, with far less downside on where they can mislead us or fail to inspire us. Teaching Jewish children isn’t just another job of course, and with that vulnerability and strength acknowledged, the work that comes from such a commitment should be different, as should be the relationship with the people we work with, no matter where we sit in the organization.
John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach, said the following in an interview, which I think reflects the consequences of this perspective on leadership. He explains that, “The supervisor must make sure that all of those under his supervision understand that they are working with him, not for him. I think if you work for someone, you punch the clock in and out and that’s it. If you’re working with someone, you want to do more than that.” The first emerges from an instrumental, contractual relationship – you work for me, the boss. The second a relational, covenantal relationship – we work together, towards a common purpose, and with a deep commitment to one another because of our higher goals.
I’m curious whether others have found metaphors about work that work (I hope you noticed the pun in the title of this post!), and what they are. Will ‘covenant’ work better than ‘family’? It sounds a bit more formal than how I’d normally speak, but I’m going to give it a try. I’ll keep you posted.