Enlightening The World
CFEL Home
Founding Partners
Faculty & Associates
Speakers
Workshops & Institutes
Executive Coaching
Mentoring
Articles
Newsletter
Consulting
Products
Books
Client Comments
Web Links
Wellness
The Event Horizon: Essays On Our Spiritual Journey
Empowerment Stories
Networking Groups
Paul Houston's Blog: Political pH
Contact Us
Center for Enlightened Leadership
 
THE LENS E-NEWSLETTER/JOURNAL

The Importance of Balancing the Head with the Heart
By TOM VONA

  Tom Vona
  Tom Vona
Senior Associate and Mentor

I have always been strongly influenced by my emotions. It’s never been hard to tell how I felt about any particular issue or situation—and that’s often still true today. But serving as an educational leader demands a substantially different way of working; one cannot afford to let the heart dominate in making decisions. This was a challenge for me when I became first an assistant principal and then a high school principal. Fortunately for my career, I had two very talented and experienced mentors from whom to learn. I learned many lessons from them over the years; one lesson has special relevance to the theme for this issue, Balance of Head and Heart.

While my two mentors were different in many ways, when it came to decision-making both were governed more by their heads than their hearts. They tended to take all factors into consideration, listen to all sides, and then make a decision based on the best information available. This is not to say that heart didn’t enter into their decision-making at all—both were warm, caring individuals. And it doesn’t mean that they refused to take personal issues into consideration. But their primary stance in organizational decision-making was consistently focused more on the task to be accomplished rather than on any emotional issues involved.

When I began working as an assistant principal in a grades 7-12 high school, one of my major responsibilities dealt with the discipline of students in grades 11 and 12. Naturally, in my previous job as a teacher in a low-income, high-minority district, I had dealt with disciplinary issues in my classroom for years, usually successfully. Even when I moved to the school where I eventually became assistant principal, I first served as supervisor of social studies; in that position I didn’t have to deal with disciplinary issues at all. But the role of assistant principal, responsible for the oldest students in the school, brought me many surprises. Let me explain.

In short order, I found that the majority of my time was spent dealing with disciplinary issues—most of them involving issues that I had never faced in my own classroom. Moreover, I was involved not only with students but also their parents, higher echelons of the administration, the board of education, and very often the police! To be completely honest, my temperament is not really cut out for many of the situations in which I found myself. In addition, most of my previous decision-making experiences had often been dominated by my heart rather than my head. That mode did not serve me well in my new job.

I learned (pretty quickly too) that the most effective technique—given the students with whom I worked and the kinds of decisions I was called upon to make—was a blend of my head and my heart. My mentor, the building principal, helped me learn how to use my strengths in dealing with upset parents under stressful circumstances, while at the same time grasping the facts at hand and keeping a clear head in dealing with the issue and taking appropriate action. Her guidance, which arose from her head-centered manner of decision-making amid stressful situations, helped me to understand that by using my natural approach in dealing with people, I could more easily persuade them to understand and accept consequences that were originally unacceptable to them.

When I moved to a different district to serve as high school principal, I soon realized that I needed to develop another very important skill set. When I brought an important proposal to the superintendent, he demanded detailed background data from research, as well as facts and statistics compiled by other school districts that would demonstrate how what was being proposed would benefit our students. My enthusiasm about a new endeavor was far from sufficient; the superintendent wanted hard facts and figures. It was very good for me, an individual who could often be ruled more by his emotions than his head, to have a mentor who looked to these cogent issues before making decisions. Working with him helped me learn the great importance of rational data-based decision-making to effective educational leadership. This man was my mentor and colleague for many years. One of the most important lessons he taught me was how to respond when our heart tells us one thing and our head tells us another.

One major decision we made in our school was to change the way we scheduled the school day, moving from the standard day of seven or eight 45-minute periods to a type of block scheduling. I need not burden you with the rationale and implications of this change. More significant here is the decision-making process and the involvement of all stakeholders. We reached the decision over a two- to three-year period after studying all factors, visiting schools that employed this type of scheduling, doing a great deal of research, developing mini-courses to prepare our teachers for new styles of teaching that the longer periods would necessitate, individually interviewing every teacher in the school to get his or her input into the change being proposed, and on and on. Our exhaustively complete decision-making was dictated by the head. The heart played a lesser role in that many individuals had personal reasons for not wanting to abandon the “tried-and-true” way of running the school. In addition, some curricular decisions had some emotional ramifications, we found. In the long run, our change process was a well-thought-out, well-planned decision—one that I would not have been prepared to carry out nearly so effectively in my earlier days as an educational leader.

Finally, I learned one more vitally important lesson in my years as a school administrator: One must be true to oneself. We each have our own unique personality and temperament. Each of us sees things differently. As the Myers-Briggs Assessment demonstrates, we are complex individuals who look at things in very different ways. To be effective leaders, we must be able to look at issues and to make decisions using a variety of approaches—even those with which we are not most comfortable. That includes using a balance of our heads and our hearts when we are involved in making decisions, with our heads acting as senior partner in the process.


Center for Empowered Leadership ®
Email: info@cfel.org
Phone: 1.609.259.7911