Ep #401: Ownership vs. Responsibility

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 401. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly.

Well, hello my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. So happy to be here with you guys. Welcome to August. We are in it. The kids are coming back, teachers are back. We are in the energy of the new school year. Please join us for EPC. EPC is the place for school leaders. This is the place where we talk the real talk, we walk the real walk, we live, we learn, we laugh, we love, we celebrate, we support. We make things lighter. We make things more joyous. It is an honor to be in the Empowered Principal Collaborative.

I invite you to join us this year. It’s going to be 10 times, 100 times better. Every year gets better and better. And after EP Alive, which you will hear the interview that I held with the members of EP Alive. So members of EPC were invited to attend a live event. That a live event happened in July, and the gals who came to the live event, we hosted a little conversation about it, and that will drop next week. So be on the lookout for next week’s episode.

This week, I wanted to keep it short and sweet. I mentioned that I would be talking about the difference between ownership and responsibility. So people will reach out to me and want coaching. And one of the top concerns that clients will come to me with is, I feel so responsible. Because I’m the school leader, because I have the positional authority, it is my duty, my responsibility to take ownership for how people feel, for what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling, the behaviors that they’re exhibiting, the outcomes that they’re creating, that because I’m the leader, it is my job, it’s my responsibility to take ownership of everybody else’s business, everybody else’s problem, everybody else’s feelings, everybody else’s emotional energy and the outcomes that they are creating or not creating, their satisfaction, their dissatisfaction.

I want to address this briefly, and I do dive much deeper into this concept in EPC. So if you want to learn how to separate responsibility and ownership and separate your emotions and your experience from other people’s emotional experience, meaning teachers, staff members, kids, students, families, your district administrators, if you want to learn how to stand in your empowerment and have a degree of separation between their experience and yours, come on into EPC. But I will outline it for you here on the podcast.

Responsibility means the ability to respond. When a situation occurs, a teacher comes in and complains, you as the leader have a responsibility, an ability to respond. As a leader, it is your job to respond, to have the ability to respond to this person.

Now, what responsibility does not mean is that in your ability to respond to the person’s words, actions, conversation, their emotional energy, responsibility does not necessarily mean that you take ownership of their thoughts, their feelings, their actions, their behaviors, what they want, solving their problem for them, the outcomes that they’ve created for themselves. And because we’re the leader, we will put on this hat and we will say, it’s my responsibility, it’s my obligation to solve this problem, to fix this, to make my teachers happy, to ensure they are feeling supported, that they’re feeling loved, that they’re feeling secure, that they’re feeling safe, that they’re feeling regulated.

And we walk a fine line versus our ability to respond and taking ownership for their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and outcomes. Okay? And because we’re the leader, what we will say is we want to own their problems. If somebody comes to me and complains or they’re unhappy, it doesn’t feel good that they are unhappy and I want to fix it for them so that they can feel good so that I can feel good. Because when they feel good, I feel good. And we intertwine the way we feel based on how other people feel. If teachers are happy, I’m happy. If teachers are unhappy, I’m unhappy. And we own their emotional states, their emotional energy, but we also own their problems. We own their ability to solve that problem for themselves.

So a teacher will come and complain. It’s our responsibility to respond. How do we respond? We listen. We seek to understand. We may validate their feelings, acknowledge their frustration, their disappointment, their exasperation. We may thank them for coming to us because they did shed light on a situation where we do decide we’re going to take ownership of the problem or they do highlight something that is in our ability to control, that we do have the means to take ownership of a situation.

For example, if a, let’s say a teacher comes into your office and says, “Hey, Angela, I’ve got a problem. Your car is blocking my car and I need to get home and pick up my kids by 4:30. Can you move your car?” My responsibility is to listen to them, to hear them, to process them, to acknowledge them, and my ability to respond to that is, oh, in this case, yes, I’m going to take ownership because there is something within my sphere of control that I can do to solve this problem. I can get my keys, walk out to the parking lot, move my car, allow them to go, and problem solved. I took responsibility by listening to their needs, hearing them out, taking ownership of my reaction to their request. I could have been like, “Jeez, what’s the big deal? Just give me five minutes,” or, “Why are you so puffy?” or I could respond in a way that connects me to that teacher or disconnects me to that teacher.

It’s my ability to respond. And my goal is to respond with emotional maturity, emotional literacy, emotional fitness, wellness. I want to be managing my emotional reactions and turn them into emotional responses, that I don’t need to feel attacked or feel that somebody is putting me down or saying that I am a problem or that something is inherently wrong with me, making it some big deal about me versus listening, discerning for myself, is it my job to own this or is this a their job to own situation?

So let’s try another example. A teacher comes in and complains that she has a student who’s chewing gum in her class and the student, when asked, does not spit out the gum. And she comes to you very frustrated that the student is not spitting out the gum. Now, what we tend to want to do is say, “Okay, I’m going to talk to that student. They should be respecting you, they should be listening to you. I’m going to go in and handle that.” Why? It’s the easiest thing to do is to take ownership of their problem. They feel good because they feel heard and you came to the rescue. It’s like they came and tattled on the student and mommy and daddy said, “Okay, I will go and handle it.”

Versus responding to that teacher, “Tell me more. What’s going on for the student? What is it about the gum? Do we have a policy on the gum?” Like talking to the teacher and responding with our ability to respond, reflect, ask questions, connect with that teacher. “Tell me more. What’s coming up for you? Tell me more about the gum. Is this an everyday thing? Do they do it during a certain time of day? Is it after lunch? Is it, you know, maybe they have a girlfriend and boyfriend and they’re freshening their breath before lunch so that they can leave a good impression?” We don’t know what’s happening, or if it’s an elementary student where they’re getting the gum. There’s so many ways that we can allow the teacher to express themselves. We can take responsibility for our ability to respond without necessarily taking ownership of the problem.

So as you’re navigating this school year, ask yourself, when somebody’s coming in, what is my ability to respond to them? Where am I on the emotional scale of zero, I have no energy or tolerance for this, and 10, I’m full tank of gas, ready to go, I’ve got space, I can listen, let’s go. Where are you when someone comes in? Are you near empty where you need to get a refill, take a break, take a walk, get some space? Or do you have the capacity to respond? Do you have the ability to be in response to that teacher?

Find out where you are on the scale. Then, as you’re listening to them, you’re seeking to understand, what you’re listening for is, whose ownership is this? Do we need to explore a little bit more, get some more information to find out where the ownership lies? Is it a co-ownership? Is it something we can facilitate a conversation together with the student perhaps, or with a parent or with a colleague? Or has the teacher not yet taken full ownership and tried all of the things that he or she can do in the ability to respond for themselves?

Our job here as school leaders is to empower our teachers, our staff members to be in ownership, to be in their personal power. We want teachers to feel empowered, to be empowered, to act from empowerment. That means they need the permission to be empowered, they need the courage to be empowered, they need the awareness to be empowered. And it’s our job to mentor and coach them towards empowerment, not to have them rely on us and dependent upon us to solve the problem, to save the day, to wear the cape.

Think about this, contemplate the difference between ownership and responsibility, what is your role, what is their role, and when do you take ownership? Are you noticing you take ownership too much, too little, or just right? Same with responsibility. Do you have the capacity to respond? Do you have the energy? Do you have the patience? Do you have the bandwidth? Or maybe you need to say, “You know what? Right now, I’m running a little low on energy, give me five,” or, “Can we schedule a time to talk about this?” Check in with yourself, do a quick check in, assess your ability to respond, and then when you’re ready, you can respond and make a decision about ownership.

Hope that helps. Have a great week. I’ll talk to you next week. Take good care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.