Resilience is not Enough

Increasing attention is being given to combating burnout among school leaders. Sharon Kruse’s Mindful Educational Leadership (2023) advocates for an integrated form of mindfulness—contemplative, cognitive, and organizational—that supports clarity, empathy, and purposeful action. Kruse explains that contemplative mindfulness reminds leaders “to be aware” (p. 6), cognitive mindfulness enables them to “see the world through the eyes of others” (p. 8), and organizational mindfulness focuses on how organizations take in and use information in ways that minimize negative impact (p. 9). Together, these forms of mindfulness offer leaders important tools for sense-making and ethical decision-making in complex environments.

While mindfulness may help leaders navigate daily challenges, an important question remains: is it enough to mitigate the cumulative stress produced by work intensification? Every time I learn that another school leader is on health leave, it reinforces the reality that the role itself—rather than the individual occupying it—requires comprehensive support and intentional redesign.

During a question-and-answer session with Dr. Kruse, she underscored the importance of setting limits and working collaboratively: principals cannot do the work for others, but they are responsible for helping staff think through how work can be accomplished while identifying and accessing appropriate supports. In practice, however, severe and sustained staffing shortages have increasingly positioned both support staff and school leaders as the sole available resource, requiring them to step out of their formal roles and into others in order to maintain safe, caring, and orderly schools.

In 2019, the World Health Organization formally clarified its position on burnout, defining it as an occupational phenomenon rather than an individual deficit or work–life balance issue. This framing shifts responsibility away from individual leaders and toward organizations, systems, and policy structures, pointing to a critical realization: current approaches to supporting school leaders are insufficient. Caring for leaders therefore requires adequate resourcing and sustainable role redesign, rather than continued reliance on individual resilience to compensate for structural shortfalls. Importantly, the presence of episodic or fragmented leadership support programs alone does not ensure meaningful impact; the intention, measurable effects, and sustained implementation of such initiatives must be evidence-based and demonstrably responsive to the lived conditions of school leadership.

If successful conditions exist within any educational system, understanding how they have been intentionally designed, implemented, and evaluated warrants closer examination. Investigating such contexts may offer important insights into how systems can move beyond symbolic provision toward collective responsibility for leader well-being.