Breaking Out of Superintendent Stress Traps.

"Sometimes I think I'd be better off if I found another line of work."

The words belong not to a new teacher shocked by initial crises in the classroom or a new principal squeezed between conflicting faculty and administration demands. The lament comes from a seasoned superintendent verging on burnout.

Stress intrigues and plagues superintendents and scholars alike. Within the past three decades an exponential proliferation of articles on the stresses and strains of school administrators has emerged--more than 1,000 since 1966, the majority anecdotal in nature and mythical in content.

By shedding greater light on the sources of stress, it may help superintendents build bridges over the barrier of stress.

First, it's important to explore the nature of stress and dispel the common myths about controlling it. By understanding the four-stage cycle of stress confronting superintendents, practitioners will be able to identify techniques to master the stresses of the superintendency.

Common Fallacies

Misconceptions have long surrounded stress.

* Myth 1: Stress is harmful.

While the popular connotation portrays stress as unpleasant or negative, it can be positive as well. The Chinese, for example, represent stress in their written language with two characters, one signaling danger and the other opportunity.

Stress encompasses both distress (bad or unpleasant events) and eustress (good or pleasant events). Through slurring, the old French and Middle English word "distress" came into common English usage as "stress," with only a negative connotation. Failure is stressful, but so is success.

* Myth 2: Stress should be avoided.

Stress is a natural part of life and helps individuals respond to a threat or rise to a challenge. It cannot and should not be avoided because without stress one could not live.

What we mean by "under stress" is that someone is under excessive stress or distress. An analogous condition is that of running a temperature, meaning above normal. Body temperature itself is essential to life, just as stress is.

Stress cannot be avoided, other than by death. Therefore, superintendents should not constantly seek to avoid stress. It can be the spice of life when handled properly.

* Myth 3: The higher up in the organization, the greater the stress.

Popular belief suggests high-level executives lead the list of heart disease patients. However, a Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. study challenged this assumption when it found that presidents and vice presidents of the 500 largest industrial corporations suffered 40 percent fewer heart attack deaths than middle managers of the same companies. Data also found that middle managers have a higher peptic ulcer rate than chief executive officers.

Results from school administration studies are mixed on who suffers the most stress. Rather than searching for the most afflicted, research has established clear patterns of stress, distinguishing between building administrators and superintendents. For example, superintendents experienced less stress from resolving parent and school conflict than principals but suffered more from pressure dealing with the external environment, such as collective bargaining, dealing with regulatory agencies, and gaining public support for school budgets.

* Myth 4: Stress is a male-dominated phenomenon.

Until the 1980s, the research literature commonly referred to "men under stress." Whether this was gender bias or a grammatical mistake, it no longer prevails, though medical research has established that men suffer higher rates of alcoholism, ulcers, lung cancer, suicide, and heart disease than women.

However, as the number of women in the superintendency increases, so do the incidences of stress and stress-related diseases. Yet when male and female stress profiles are compared, women administrators perceive less stress than their male counterparts.

* Myth 5: Superintendents experience excessive stress.

Recent studies have shown that the level of stress in the superintendency appears to be moderate, not oppressive, contrary to earlier popularized literature. Both popular journals and medical research have blamed work-related stress for the ills of school administrators, from hay fever to heart failure. The underlying message is that hardy superintendents "just keep on ticking." However, all superintendents must realize that performance problems result from both too much and too little stress--from burnout as well as rustout.

* Myth 6: One right way exists to cope with stress.

Despite extensive research, the answer to effective coping remains elusive. The foremost authority on stress, Hans Selye, who was a world-renowned biological scientist, pointed out that despite everything written about stress and coping, no ready-made formula suits everyone.

The Stress Cycle

Rather than avoid stress, superintendents need to control it and use it to their advantage. The Superintendent Stress Cycle provides a broad perspective and clear understanding of stress and introduces a framework for action. The cycle has four stages.

Stage 1: Stress Traps

Superintendents can begin to control stress by examining the demands of their current situation. What stress traps exist for superintendents? Meetings, expectations of board members, staff conflicts, budgetary issues, and rules and regulations all represent potential pressures.

While a single telephone interruption may not cause much difficulty, couple the interruption with unexpected and unwanted drop-in visitors, antagonistic board members, or a backlog of paperwork, and a superintendent is likely to find some prime, personal stress traps.

The key to stress reduction rests with identifying those stress traps. It may help to understand the more common stress traps of superintendents. The accompanying table (see page 36) compares the 10 leading stressful issues confronting superintendents, first collected in 1976 and then almost two decades later. While times have changed, what plagues superintendents remains relatively constant--gaining public approval for school budgets, complying with regulations, and being over-involved in collective bargaining.

Stage 2: Perceived Stress

While demands on the superintendent cannot always be lessened, our perception, attitude, and approach are under our control and are the deciding factors in whether or not we get trapped in the stress.

Nervous, tense, and upright feelings usually are attributed to outside conditions rather than looking within ourselves. Superintendents and principals alike typically blame community expectations, state funding, school boards, or other demanding clientele. In actuality, much of the stress experienced by superintendents is self-imposed. In fact, individual personalities play an important role in determining how stressful conditions become.

Stress traps by themselves represent objective demands that only become stress traps when one subjectively perceives them to be troublesome.

Consider the following definition of stress: "The anticipation (which could be real or imaginary) of your inability (the degree to which you feel prepared to perform the role of superintendent) to respond adequately to a perceived demand (stress traps, whether they exist or not), accompanied by your anticipation (either real or imaginary) of negative consequences for an inadequate response."

This definition is based on the perception of one's ability to meet the challenges of the superintendency. Thus, it is how one approaches his or her job and life that causes most stress. Perception plays the major role in an individual's resilience to or acceptance of stress on the job.

Here are some ways perceptually to cut into the stress traps.

* Plan some personal time each day.

Don't operate from a crisis position. Schedule your day to encourage a more positive attitude. Build in a little idleness each day.

Each morning arrive at the office a little early to set the stage for the day before the onslaught of interruptions, demands, and conflicts. Make sure you take a midday break and have lunch with a colleague or engage in vigorous exercise to cut the 8 to 5 stress cycle. Although this may sound unrealistic, leave the office a half hour late in the evening in order to plan the next day and possibly avoid rush-hour traffic.

* Compartmentalize work and non-work activities.

One of the most difficult tasks for superintendents to perform is separating professional and personal activities. Compartmentalize your professional work from non-work personal activities to have higher quality, guilt-free evenings and weekends.

* Do one task at a time.

A typical superintendent eats, walks, works, and talks all at the same time, engaging in polyphasic behavior--doing two or more things simultaneously. You can effectively only do one thing at a time, so select the most important task and do it first.

* Strive to enrich yourself: physically, socially, mentally, emotionally.

A survey of executives found that less than 40 percent have any meaningful activity outside work. Changing your perceptual focus requires activity and interest in more than one single area. Therefore you need to take a holistic approach toward personal enrichment through a combination of physical exercise, social interaction, mental stimulation, and emotional stability.

* Have a retreat away from the office.

Every superintendent should have some place where he or she can be alone. You need to be able to get away, close the door and think without interruption--without school board members and staff making demands on your time and attention.

* Live by your calendar, not your watch.

Of the stress traps faced by superintendents, none is as pervasive as time. Break into your fragmented administrative life by setting time aside daily for organizing and planning. Rather than rushing around by the minute hand of your watch, let your weekly calendar dictate your pace.

The stress of being a superintendent is what you make of it. That can be the difference between coping and collapsing. The secret of success is not avoiding stress traps described in Stage 1 but challenging them with a more positive perceptual response.

Whether you are exhausted or relaxed under constant pressure depends on how you approach the stress of crisis. Your personality, outlook, and perception can work to either resist or intensify your stress. Are you thriving in your position, or is your personality killing you? Only you can tell.

Stage 3: Coping Response

While the general literature on coping is significant in volume and diverse in attention, the exact coping process is elusive. Researchers from the disciplines of medicine, psychiatry, clinical psychology, behavioral sciences, and education have undertaken studies to understand the phenomenon of stress and the coping responses.

Since no one technique will suit everyone, how can superintendents positively respond to stress traps?

The first step, of course, is to develop a more positive perceptual awareness to drive the search for effective coping techniques. When faced with a dilemma, administrators might attempt to conceive a technology to address it. Once enough information about a stress trap is generated, the tendency is to transform it into a prescription and control it.

However, a prescriptive approach is not an appropriate technology for coping. Blueprints for exact techniques are unavailable to superintendents. Coping is an art, not a science. When developing a coping strategy, consider the following propositions as a basis for your response to stress.

* The individual superintendent is the most important variable. No one coping technique is effective for all 15,000 local superintendents in the United States. Therefore, coping techniques must be sensitive to cultural, social, psychological, and environmental differences in individuals.

* Schools cannot change the world around them, and superintendents cannot change all the barriers in education, but they can change how they relate to the challenges they face.

* Superintendents who cope best develop a repertoire of techniques to counteract different stress traps in different situations. Their repertoire of techniques therefore should represent a holistic approach toward coping.

Are there identifiable categories of coping, which, if used holistically, can help superintendents systematically address stress? Research I directed asked 1,855 school administrators this question: "Recognizing that being an administrator is demanding, what ways have you found useful in handling the pressures of your job?"

The majority cited more than one response, identifying in all more than 4,000 coping responses. Content analysis of these responses revealed coping techniques that fell into seven groupings: (1) social support from friends and family; (2) physical exercise; (3) intellectual stimulation from books and seminars; (4) entertainment activities; (5) personal interests such as hobbies; (6) management of one's time and resources; and (7) developing supportive attitudes. While not one of the responses in isolation presents the answer to coping, taken collectively these seven strategies serve as a coping taxonomy from which superintendents can try to reduce their own stress.

Coping with stress is a holistic and polytechnic proposition. It is much like weight loss. If one were to exercise more, but eat more too, the results may not be as beneficial as exercising more while cutting back or stabilizing one's diet.

In much the same way, effective coping consists of building a repertoire of techniques equally balanced in the social, physical, intellectual, entertainment, managerial, personal, and attitudinal categories. Your goal is to reduce your stress by adding some of these techniques to your present repertoire of stress response. It is not the superintendent who masters one technique that copes most effectively and creatively, but the one who possesses the flexibility to call upon any number of techniques from various sources. Each superintendent has his or her own tastes, time schedules, and preferences. Only you can make the final decision.

Stage 4: Consequences

Behind the achievements of many great superintendents lies the factor of stress. Our studies of more than 5,000 educational administrators show how stress interacts with their productivity. A moderate amount of stress helps them reach peak performance, but when stress reaches excessive proportions, their performance significantly declines, resulting in burnout.

You can detect burnout in any one of these stages. First, emotional exhaustion occurs when superintendents' emotional resources become depleted and they feel they no longer are able to give of themselves. At this stage they feel fatigued, frustrated with their job, and emotionally drained from working at school.

The second symptom of burnout, depersonalization, occurs when superintendents feel negative and cynical attitudes about people. A depersonalized superintendent treats staff members as objects and use distancing adjectives or pronouns rather than using their names. They exhibit signs of detachment and feel callous and cynical toward colleagues.

Finally, superintendents with low personal accomplishment, the third stage, evaluate themselves negatively and become dissatisfied with their achievements. Eventually, they believe their actions no longer make a difference and give up trying.

That's the bad news on burnout. But here's the good news. In a recent study of administrative burnout, superintendents experienced significantly lower levels of emotional exhaustion and had higher levels of personal accomplishment than principals and other human service professionals. Overall, superintendents are hardy learners.

Burnout Prevention

No amount of research can provide the solitary answer on how to cope with superintendent stress. However, the following suggestions will help you from entering the stage of burnout.

* Focus on important matters.

The paperwork, meetings, deadlines, and workload represent not the ends of managerial productivity but the means to important goals in education. Don't let the means of your job lead to emotional exhaustion. Practice a few time management principles.

First, identify high pay-off activities--those that are most important, but not necessarily the most urgent. For example, budget, personnel, and school board relations should take precedence over the administrative details of unimportant meetings and answering meaningless correspondence.

Next, reduce your involvement in less meaningful, low pay-off activities. This is the corollary of the first principle. You can find more time for high pay-off duties if you delegate or eliminate your low pay-offs. The key for superintendents is to identify the unimportant, less urgent tasks so they can be ignored or delegated--a difficult assignment for most superintendents since everything they do seems so important.

* Confront conflict positively.

Superintendents most frequent and serious conflicts arise in confronting peers, and on occasion, board members. A few reminders may be helpful in avoiding the depersonalization stage of burnout.

* The power of the superintendency does not rest as much in the position (power of reward and punishment) as it does in the person (influence by referent, expertise, and collegiality). Therefore, use your position power sparingly and build a solid personal power base with your board and leadership team by working with them in an open, honest, and professional manner.

* When caught between the demands of the board and the needs of your staff, explore common interests that transcend and satisfy both parties.

* Work on getting the leadership team involved and having them buy into the solutions. Many times facilitation is more effective than directiveness.

* Lead within your pasture.

While rules and regulations restrict superintendents' flexibility and cause unwanted stress, do not be discouraged by rules alone. They merely represent boundaries around a pasture filled with possible achievements. Understand the boundaries and be creative about how to reach goals and objectives while staying within the limits of the pasture.

In the end, some superintendents do experience excessive stress. After all, they can only put out so many brush fires before eventually burning out. It is at this point that stress becomes a powerful and elusive enemy, playing a major role in a variety of illnesses.

But your stress cycle can be a positive, upward spiral toward wellness if you are able to manage your stress traps, reinforce your resilient personality, and develop a repertoire of positive coping techniques.

Walter Gmelch, former chair of the department of educational leadership and counseling psychology at Washington State University, is the author of Beyond Stress to Effective Management and Thriving on Stress for Success. The author acknowledges the research team of Boyd Swent and Joseph Torelli, both practicing administrators.

Top 10 Superintendent Stress Traps
Walter H. Gmelch
Stress Trap                               1976  1993
Complying with rules and policies           1     2
Gaining public approval for financial
 support                                    2     1
Being involved in collective bargaining     3     3
Completing reports and paperwork on time    4    11
Feeling that meetings take up too much
 time                                       5    10
Making decisions affecting the lives of
 others                                     6     8
Imposing excessively high self-
 expectations                               7     4
Feeling I have too heavy a workload         8     9
Evaluating staff members' performance       9    19
Knowing I can't get information I need     10     5
Feeling progress on my job is not
 what it should be                         11     6
Participating in activities after
 normal business hours                     12     7

A Wellness Prescription for Superintendents

BY OLIVER N. BLAISE JR.

Superintendent, Windsor Central School District, Windsor, New York

I never thought much about my own physical wellbeing until I stepped into a doctor's office 10 years ago. He warned me: "You are 30 lbs. overweight, your blood pressure is elevated, and you work in a high-pressure job. Either change your lifestyle or go on blood pressure medication."

I rationalized that as a middle-aged male, medication sounded routine. That would be the route for me. The doctor agreed, but he wanted me to know of some side effects from the medication before writing me a prescription. "The side effects," he advised, "may consist of fluid retention, weight fluctuations, and periodic impotency." I replied, "What are the lifestyle changes I must make to avoid the medication?" He prescribed a low-fat diet and cardiovascular exercise for at least 20 minutes a day three times a week.

That was enough of a wakeup call for me. I began my new regimen that day. I tried to run for 20 minutes and couldn't, but I could handle a combination of running and walking and that's what I continued to do.

I once heard that if you run regularly for enough days you will reach a point where you like it. After 30 consecutive days of running for 20 minutes, I did not like it. I began to run for 30 minutes and still did not like it. On my 91st day of running, I found myself in the office at 1 p.m. looking forward to 4 p.m. so I could go running. I've been hooked ever since.

To date, I've competed in numerous road races and have completed 12 marathons, including the New York City Marathon (3 times) and marathons in London, Montreal, Chicago, and Burlington, Vt., among others. (It's a great way to see a city!)

I still have a tough time with my diet and struggle constantly with weight, but my blood pressure remains good and my overall fitness and wellness are excellent. I have learned a lot in the last 10 years and have tried to help fellow superintendents manage their own wellness.

As school superintendents, we are expected not only to lead complex organizations but also to model appropriate behaviors. If we ask our staff members and students to pursue healthy lifestyles, shouldn't we address our own physical and mental wellness?

Common Questions

As chair of the New York State Council of School Superintendents' Wellness Committee for the past six years, I often am asked by colleagues how to begin a program of wellness, how to stay with it, and where to find help?

How do you begin?

Getting started is both the easiest and the toughest part of any wellness initiative. To begin, you need a thorough physical exam, including your cardiovascular system. If the results indicate you are able to begin an exercise program, you must determine what you would like to do.

I recommend starting with a program for cardiovascular fitness. You may choose later to add toning or muscle development.

What activities support cardiovascular fitness?

Running, vigorous walking, biking, hiking, swimming, and other activities provide for an elevated heartbeat over a sustained period of time. Ideally, you should aim for a minimum of 20 minutes of activity at least three times per week.

Once started, you probably will ask yourself: Will my body hurt? What clothing do I need? What shoes do I need? Where can I get information about exercise? Is it worthwhile to join a health club? Should I buy training equipment for my home?

These questions deserve your attention. Information is available from health journals, health clubs, YMCAs, friends who are into fitness, your state association's professional assistance program (if one exists), and various other sources. Develop a knowledge base about exercise, fitness, and wellness.

How do you stay with it?

Staying with a regimen may be tougher than beginning. The way to continue with any activity is to have it become part of the culture. Seek out individuals who have a similar interest. If you have taken up running, join a local running club, look for other runners wherever you might be, begin to read magazines about running, etc. Let the actions of others reinforce your behavior. Very few of us are solitary. We need the support of others. In short order you will find yourself providing information for other people who want to get involved in the same activity.

If you find yourself getting bored with the activity you have selected, don't be fearful of venturing into other activities. In fact, most serious fitness buffs use what is termed "cross training." This means taking part in an alternative activity to provide a higher level of fitness, something I recommend to help sustain your interest in your wellness effort.

Besides exercise, what components make up a good wellness program?

Any good wellness program also must focus on diet and nutrition as part of the plan. Questions that will need to be answered are: What foods should be sought out and what ought to be avoided? What's good to drink? What's bad to drink? Are sports drinks important to take in when exercising? Should I begin an exercise program and an improved diet program together? Should I watch calories or use some other indicator of food intake? How many times per day should I eat? What diet is the best one to go on to lose weight (if that's an objective)?

These questions, and others, should be researched as you begin your wellness efforts. This information is available from most of the organizations cited above for fitness, as well as from local nutrition groups.

The last component of your wellness program is rest. Improved diet and increased physical activity are vital, but your physical well-being will not improve without adequate amounts of rest to give your body an opportunity to respond to this newfound vigor.

Again, a variety of questions need to be answered: How much should I sleep? Is there such a thing as too much sleep? Can I rest without sleeping? Will rest contribute to my fitness? Should I exercise every day, or should I rest between sessions? Does it matter what time of the day I exercise?

Statewide Promotion

Help is available from a variety of sources when it comes to developing a wellness program. A state association of school administrators can be an ideal and logical place for such a resource.

Our Wellness Committee in New York state promotes mental, physical, and spiritual health through several initiatives. We conduct a 5-kilometer walk/run at our organization's fall conference each year which, despite its 7 a.m. start, has attracted 100 superintendents the past couple years.

Our committee also provides fully paid scholarships for superintendents to attend the New York State Advocacy for School Health's week-long wellness program to learn about wellness initiatives and how to extend these to staff and students.

Committee members also provide on-call availability to superintendent colleagues. Recent telephone inquiries have ranged widely; we have offered advice on running shoes, personal counselling services, and an understanding ear to a colleague with thoughts about suicide.

We are considering a professional assistance program for superintendents, much like those available to lawyers, doctors, and other professionals.