Invidious: The Hidden Cost of Long-Term Leadership

Note: This post is a general piece on school leadership and does not reflect any recent event or any particular circumstance

There is a word I have been thinking about lately: invidious.

It is not a word we use often, but perhaps administrators should.

Invidious can describe a circumstance in which a person is required to make a choice that will almost inevitably produce resentment, criticism, or ill will. It is especially appropriate when the available choices are imperfect—when choosing one legitimate good means sacrificing another, or when responsibility requires a decision that someone else will experience as unfair, painful, or deeply disappointing.

The longer I have worked in administration, the more I have come to recognize these situations as an ordinary, though largely invisible, part of leadership. And after 35 years as a coach, teacher, and an administrator (for 25 of those years)- I can see physical, mental, and physical wear and tear even in my own life.

We often describe administrators as decision-makers, which is accurate but incomplete. Many administrative decisions are relatively uncomplicated: there is a policy, a precedent, a budget, a calendar, or a clearly preferable course of action. Those decisions consume time, but they do not necessarily consume much of us.

The decisions that remain with us are different.

They involve people we know. They contain incomplete information, competing obligations, institutional consequences, and relationships that may be altered permanently by whatever we decide. Often there is no clean answer—only a judgment about which consequence the institution can responsibly bear and which principle must take precedence.

Over a long career, those judgments accumulate.

And I am increasingly interested in what that accumulation does to the person making them.

"Diffusing Atomic Bombs"

There is a metaphor that has occurred to me repeatedly over the years. I often joke about it- how my day was basically diffusing bombs that were ticking......The daily grind of administration can often feel like that.

A situation arrives on your desk already armed- one you did not ask for- and many times one that has nothing to do with you: a personnel matter, an accusation, a student crisis, a parent conflict, a financial problem, an issue involving competing accounts of what happened. Perhaps it has been developing quietly for months before anyone brings it to you. By the time it reaches the administrator, however, there are consequences attached to almost every possible response.

There is a green wire and a yellow wire. You would prefer not to cut either. But there has to be an action or it will get out of control in a hurry.

So you gather information. You listen to people whose accounts do not entirely agree. You consider policy, precedent, mission, personalities, legal implications, institutional history, and the possibility that some important fact remains unknown to you. You consult people you trust. You try to separate what is urgent from what merely feels urgent.

Eventually, however, the responsibility cannot be delegated any further. Someone has to clip a wire.

You choose green. Then you wait. Nothing happens.

The organization continues functioning. Classes begin the next morning. Employees return to work. Students move through the hallways. Parents drop their children off.  What might have become a significant institutional problem simply disappears into the category of things that did not happen.

From an organizational standpoint, this is success. Psychologically, however, something more complicated may have occurred. Everyone else gets to forget the bomb because, in their experience, there never was one.

The administrator remembers holding the wire cutters- and thinks about it sometimes long into the lonely night.

I think this is an under examined aspect of long-term administrative leadership.

The psychological cost of leadership does not arise only from major crises. In fact, those may be easier to recognize because everyone agrees that they are stressful. The more subtle burden comes from the repeated exposure to lower-level conflict, consequential judgment, interpersonal tension, uncertainty, and anticipated reaction.

Any single episode may be manageable. The concern is cumulative exposure.

Over time, an administrator develops an extensive internal archive: conversations that went badly, employees who were terminated, parents who remained angry, students whose situations had no satisfying resolution, accusations that proved unfounded, accusations that did not, decisions made with insufficient information, and decisions that were correct but nevertheless damaged relationships.

Some of those memories remain unusually accessible.

Years later, we can sometimes remember exactly where we were sitting when we made the decision.

This is where ordinary reflection can gradually become something closer to chronic vigilance. An experienced administrator learns to anticipate consequences several moves ahead, which is one of the great advantages of experience. Yet the same capacity can have a psychological cost. We begin rehearsing not only what might happen, but how people might react if it does.

Before sending the email, we can already imagine the response. Before making the decision, we can already anticipate the meeting that will follow it. Before clipping the wire, we remember the last explosion. Experience makes us better at recognizing bombs.

It can also make us increasingly convinced that everything might be one.

This may help explain why some long-term administrators become jaded.

Cynicism is easy to condemn as a character problem, but I suspect that in many veteran leaders it begins as a form of psychological adaptation.

After enough conflict, skepticism can feel safer than trust. Emotional distance can feel more sustainable than continued investment. If caring deeply about every situation repeatedly produces distress, one predictable response is to care less.

The shift is rarely dramatic.

Another angry email arrives, and instead of wondering what is behind it, we think, Here we go again.

Another employee comes into the office with a concern, and before hearing the details we recognize a familiar pattern. and before we know it- this person, made in the image of God, who hasn't been through this before... isn't really heard.

Another parent insists that the situation is completely different from every previous situation, while years of experience suggest that it probably is not.

Sometimes that recognition is wisdom. Pattern recognition is one of the legitimate benefits of experience. But sometimes it is scar tissue masquerading as wisdom.

That distinction deserves our attention.

A healthy veteran administrator should be more difficult to manipulate than a novice, less easily destabilized by criticism, and more capable of recognizing recurring patterns of organizational behavior. But becoming less naïve should not require becoming less humane.

The challenge is to develop discernment without suspicion, resilience without emotional detachment, and compassion without fragility.

That is considerably harder than simply developing a thicker skin.

The Moral Residue of Necessary Decisions

There is another phenomenon that deserves attention: the emotional residue left by decisions that may have been correct but were nevertheless painful.

Not every difficult feeling following a decision is evidence that the decision was wrong.

Sometimes discomfort is telling us something important. Perhaps we acted too quickly, spoke too harshly, relied on incomplete information, protected the institution at someone's unnecessary expense, or allowed our own frustration to influence our judgment. Healthy leadership requires enough humility to examine those possibilities seriously.

But there are other occasions when the decision survives careful examination and still hurts.

A valued employee may no longer be effective in a particular role. A student consequence may be necessary even when we understand the circumstances that produced the behavior. A financial decision may protect the institution while eliminating something meaningful. A parent's disappointment may be entirely understandable even though granting the parent's request would create an inequity elsewhere.

In situations like these, two things can be true simultaneously:

The decision was responsible, and something valuable was lost.

Experienced administrators need a psychological framework capable of holding both truths.

Otherwise, we tend toward one of two unhealthy conclusions. We either assume that because someone was hurt, we must have done something wrong, or we defend ourselves against that possibility by minimizing the person's pain.

Neither response is particularly mature.

There is a third possibility: we can acknowledge the loss without repudiating the judgment.

We can grieve what the decision cost and still believe it was necessary.

The Danger of Carrying Both Sides of the Decision

Administrators also have to become increasingly precise about the boundaries of responsibility.

Leadership makes us responsible for our preparation, judgment, fairness, communication, use of authority, and willingness to correct mistakes. We should be accountable for whether we listened carefully, whether we applied principles consistently, whether we treated people with dignity, and whether our decisions can withstand honest scrutiny.

We are not, however, fully responsible for another adult's interpretation of those decisions. That distinction sounds obvious until one has spent years in leadership.

A person can sincerely believe that an administrator treated him unfairly while the administrator, after careful examination, remains convinced that the decision was fair. Someone can feel betrayed even when no betrayal occurred. Someone can be angry because a boundary was necessary rather than because the boundary was inappropriate. This is the cruel part of "Invidious".

If we are not careful, administrators begin carrying both sides of these encounters. We carry responsibility for making the decision, and then we also assume responsibility for resolving every emotional response the decision produces.

That is an unsustainable psychological arrangement.

We should listen to criticism. We should remain corrigible. We should apologize when warranted and repair what can be repaired.

But eventually we must allow other adults to own their reactions to our decisions.

Otherwise, administration becomes a form of permanent emotional indebtedness.

This is where I think our usual conversations about administrator self-care are inadequate.

Self-care is often reduced to vacation, exercise, sleep, hobbies, boundaries, and taking occasional time away from work. All of these are important, and chronic neglect of them eventually extracts a price.

But veteran administrators may require something deeper than recovery from fatigue.

We need practices that preserve the quality of the person who is making the decisions.

That means having trusted people outside the immediate emotional system of the problem—people who can tell us both when we are carrying guilt that does not belong to us and when we are rationalizing conduct that needs correction. Leaders need relationships in which their authority is largely irrelevant and where they do not have to manage the emotional temperature of the room.

We also need a disciplined distinction between reflection and rumination.

After a consequential decision, reflection asks useful questions: What did I know? What did I miss? Which principle governed my decision? Was I fair? What would I do differently? Is there anything I need to repair?

Those questions improve judgment.

Rumination asks the same questions repeatedly after they have stopped producing new information.

At some point, healthy leadership requires closure. Not certainty—we rarely get that—but a reasoned acceptance that, given what we knew at the time and the responsibility entrusted to us, we exercised our best judgment.

The case cannot remain permanently open in our heads.

We also need to monitor cynicism as carefully as we monitor exhaustion. When people increasingly appear to us as problems to be managed rather than human beings to be understood, when every complaint begins sounding identical, or when irritation becomes our default response to another person's distress, we should not automatically interpret that as veteran wisdom.

Sometimes it is fatigue asking for attention.

And perhaps most importantly, we need portions of life in which nobody hands us a bomb.

We need friendships, family, faith, recreation, solitude, laughter, physical activity, reading, travel, or whatever allows us to inhabit an identity larger than the administrative role. We need places where nobody requires a decision from us and where our value is not measured by our capacity to stabilize a system.

Those are not luxuries added to leadership after the important work is finished.

Over a long enough career, they may be part of what makes continued good judgment possible.

Remaining 'Christian' After Thousands of Decisions

The question facing a beginning administrator is often, How do I make good decisions?

After enough years, I think another question becomes equally important:

How do I remain a whole person after making thousands of them?

Because the bombs do accumulate.

For Christian administrators, there is another dimension of this work that cannot be separated from the psychological disciplines of healthy leadership: we were never intended to carry its weight entirely by ourselves. Dependence on Christ is more than seeking divine confirmation that we made the correct decision; it is the recognition that our judgment will always be limited, that we will sometimes get the green and yellow wires wrong, and that grace extends even to the person holding the wire cutters.

 Prayer creates a place where responsibility can be taken seriously without becoming an illusion of control, while forgiveness—both receiving it and extending it—keeps the inevitable wounds of leadership from hardening into resentment. The compassion of Christ also reminds us that the difficult employee, angry parent, struggling student, frustrated board member, and exhausted administrator are all more than the particular conflict in which we encounter one another. Just as importantly, Christian leadership was never meant to be practiced in isolation. 

A healthy administrative team can become a kind of sustaining community: people who share the weight of discernment, challenge one another's assumptions, pray together, absorb some of the emotional impact of difficult seasons, and occasionally remind one another that not every bomb belongs to one person. There is something profoundly protective about being able to walk into a trusted team, close the door, speak honestly about the weight of a situation, and know that others will help carry it—not by removing responsibility, but by refusing to let responsibility become isolation. Perhaps one of God's provisions for the long-term health of leaders is precisely this combination of grace above us, compassion within us, and faithful people beside us.

So do the criticisms, the confidential stories we cannot explain publicly, the people we could not satisfy, the situations in which there was no green wire that guaranteed a good outcome, and the occasions when we discovered afterward that yellow might have been better.

If we are not intentional, armor accumulates as well.

Some armor is necessary. Administrators cannot remain psychologically exposed to every criticism and survive indefinitely. But armor has an unfortunate characteristic: it protects us from being wounded by people while simultaneously making it more difficult to feel them.

The task, then, is not to remain unchanged by leadership. That is probably impossible.

Nor is the goal to reach the end of an administrative career having disappointed no one. Meaningful leadership under that standard would be equally impossible.

Perhaps the better measure is whether, after years of holding the wire cutters, we can still approach the next situation with curiosity rather than cynicism; whether we can still distinguish someone's anger from evidence of our wrongdoing; whether we can acknowledge our mistakes without allowing them to define us; whether we can make an unpopular decision without needing to make the disappointed person into an enemy.

And perhaps, after all the crises that did and did not happen, we can still say that we tried to see clearly, listen carefully, act justly, remain open to correction, and preserve the dignity of the people affected by our decisions.

Most people will never know about the bombs that did not explode.

And sadly, sometimes the bombs do go off- but I have also been around long enough that often those crises gain perspective over time. Romans 8:28 is not a flippant verse- it is not casual- God does indeed work miraculous good results in His good providence.

That is probably as it should be.

But those of us who have spent years clipping the wires should acknowledge that the work leaves a mark—and that caring for that mark is not weakness, indulgence, or an escape from leadership.

It is part of the work of remaining capable of leading well.