From Self Care to System Care

Leaders who find meaning in their work, have the skills and resources to succeed, build strong teams, and engage in continuous learning—key factors in overall wellbeing—are more resilient, inspired, and motivated. This core belief guides the senior administration team in the River East Transcona School Division (RETSD) as we intentionally design and model structures that strengthen wellbeing in school and system leaders.

As you read this article, we invite you to keep two questions close:

1. In what ways are you reminded of your own leadership practice?
2. In what ways might we have influenced your thinking about how senior leaders support the wellbeing of school and system leaders?

These questions serve the same purpose as our system’s structures: they anchor reflection, generate insight, and connect the parts to the whole

Beyond Quick Wins: The Limits of Individual Acts of Relief

Across the field of education, wellbeing is often associated with acts of relief: a tray of treats in the staff room, a surprise coffee delivery, a gift card, a moment of mindfulness, a public thank‑you. These gestures matter. They provide brief pauses, spark joy, and remind people that they are valued.

But they cannot sustain us.

Sustainable wellbeing requires more than ‑short term comfort; it requires long term capacity. Quick wins help us catch our breath, but they cannot carry us through complexity, pressure, or prolonged challenge unless leaders feel confident in their skills, anchored by shared purpose, and supported by strong teams and effective structures.

This is where senior leadership plays a critical role. We do both:

• We care for the person through meaningful gestures that create moments of joy and recognition.
• And we care for the professional by building the conditions that help people do difficult work well.

This dual responsibility is why our stance as senior leaders matters. Leadership is demanding not only because of the decisions we make, but because our way of being directly influences the wellbeing of others. When we design systems that enable collaboration, shared leadership, and continuous learning, we move wellbeing from the realm of self‑care checklists into the realm of system care.

The remainder of this article explores how the senior administration team in RETSD creates structures—throughline questions, protocols, processes, and alignment strategies—that cultivate wellbeing for school and system leaders across both the educational and non‑educational sides of the organization: leaders who find meaning in their work, have the skills and resources to succeed, build strong teams, and engage in continuous learning.

Throughline Questions: Creating Coherence Across a Learning System

Throughline questions provide coherence across a complex organization where leaders learn in different roles, contexts, and rhythms. They are not slogans or isolated prompts; they are persistent inquiries that guide our thinking, focus our attention, and invite curiosity throughout the year.

For 2024–2025, RETSD adopted two division‑wide throughline questions:

• What leadership dispositions cause equity and excellence to flourish and thrive?
• In what ways do my beliefs, values, and attitudes create joy in myself and in those whom I serve?

These questions serve multiple, reinforcing purposes.

• They focus our attention on what matters most: By centering dispositions, beliefs, and attitudes—not merely strategies—we anchor conversations in the root drivers of leadership practice.
• They integrate learning across settings: These questions frame staff meetings, leadership sessions, coaching, joint professional learning, and individual growth goals. Leaders encounter the same ideas in multiple places, strengthening coherence.
• They normalize curiosity and reduce defensiveness: Because throughline questions are invitational—never accusatory—they open space for examination without judgment.
• They centre the connection between identity and leadership: Dispositions linked to equity, excellence, and joy draw leaders into honest reflection on how they show up for others.

Every interaction we plan—whether a system meeting, a professional learning session, or a reflective activity—connects back to these questions. They are the connective tissue that holds the learning system together.

Structures and Processes: Architecting Conditions for Growth and Well‑Being

If throughline questions act as anchors, structures and processes create the rhythm of collective learning. In RETSD, we convene school and system leaders across both educational and non‑educational departments every second month. Each meeting follows a deliberate structure that balances joy, rigor, reflection, and alignment.

1. Leading with Joy

We open each session by inviting leaders to share a moment of joy from their work.

This ritual:

• opens emotional space in the room,
• centers our second throughline question,
• reminds leaders of the meaning embedded in their daily work.

A sample prompt was: Bring a photo from your school or department that sparked joy for you.

2. Leadership Focus: Digging into the Manitoba School Leadership Framework

Each meeting examines one of the framework’s five focus areas through:

• a text rendering strategy (varied each session),
• a self‑reflection tool (varied each session), and
• a growing thinking frame added to each time we meet.

This structure ensures leaders examine both their practice and their dispositions, deepening their understanding of the provincial framework while building their leadership identity.

3. Investing in Beliefs, Values, and Attitudes

We then explore a structure, process, or framework that strengthens leadership capacity.

In one meeting, for example, a divisional lead teacher and six senior years principals facilitated a meaning‑making conversation about Grade 12 provincial assessment data. Others observed using a collaborative learning cycle. This was powerful for two reasons:

• Leaders witnessed skilled facilitation grounded in curiosity and equity.
• They left with a model they could apply within their own contexts.

4. Personal Reflection Through Journaling

At the end of each meeting, leaders pause to journal about:

• the content explored,
• the explicit and implicit learning (“double agenda”),
• and their evolving sense of themselves as leaders.

This reflection consolidates insight and makes space for individual meaning‑making.

5. Making Senior Leadership Work Visible

During each session, the senior administration team shares how the day’s learning connects to our own work.

For example, we shared the norms of collaboration we use in our weekly meetings, linked them to the Manitoba School Leadership Framework, and showed evidence of how we uphold those norms.

Transparency builds trust—and demonstrates that we hold ourselves to the same expectations as others.

6. Reviewing the Year as a Whole

Before closing, we revisit what we have learned so far and where we are going next. This combats fragmentation, ensuring leaders see each session as part of a larger journey toward coherence and growth.

Together, these structures reduce ambiguity, support collective efficacy, and create predictable conditions in which leaders can think, learn, and collaborate productively.

Protocols: Democratizing Voice, Improving Thinking, and Strengthening Teams

Protocols—structured ways of talking and thinking together—play a central role in RETSD’s approach to leadership and wellbeing. They democratize conversations, give leaders agency, and offer replicable models they can bring back to their schools or departments.

Protocols also contribute to wellbeing in several additional ways:

• They build psychological safety. Clear steps and roles minimize the fear of speaking up and distribute voice equitably.
• They reduce cognitive load. Leaders no longer guess about process—they can focus fully on content.
• They disrupt limiting default conversational patterns. Without structure, conversations often privilege the loudest or most senior voices. Protocols mitigate this.
• They support neurodiverse ways of thinking. Many protocols incorporate writing, turn‑taking, quiet thinking time, and varied modalities.
• They generate transferable routines. Leaders use the same protocols with staff, building coherence across the system.
• They create resilience during challenging conversations. Protocols provide guardrails for navigating conflict or emotionally charged topics, protecting relationships in the process.
• They strengthen team identity. Working consistently with shared structures develops trust, familiarity, and a shared language of collaboration.

Protocols are therefore not just tools for efficiency; they are tools for wellbeing. They create the conditions under which leaders can contribute fully, think deeply, and collaborate effectively.

In the meeting structure described above, we intentionally advantage protocols and facilitated conversations as central learning structures, not peripheral techniques. By embedding them into the rhythm of our bi‑monthly gatherings, we reinforce that structures are not constraints; they are enablers of clarity, trust, and professional wellbeing.

Modeling and Alignment: Making Leadership Learnable

Alignment is achieved when what senior leaders ask of others matches what we do ourselves. In RETSD, this is intentional and visible, because we believe that alignment matters for the wellbeing of the leaders and system we serve:

• It reduces the emotional burden leaders feel when expectations appear one‑sided.
• It builds trust through transparency and consistency.
• It signals fairness, reducing cynicism and anxiety.
• It accelerates learning because leaders see practices modeled authentically.
• It reinforces a culture where everyone learns—no exceptions at the top.

Some examples of how senior leaders have deliberately creating alignment are:

• Our inquiry questions mirror the system’s. Just as school and system leaders craft personal inquiries tied to the throughline questions, senior leaders develop and share their own.
• We also journal—and share our reflections publicly. This demonstrates that reflection is not a task assigned to others but a discipline we practice ourselves.
• We connect decisions to our throughline questions and structures. This reduces mystery and builds coherence across initiatives.

Alignment ties together every component described so far, because throughline questions, meeting structures, and protocols all function more effectively when modeled by senior leaders.

Bringing It All Together: A System That Grows Purpose, Growth, and Well‑Being

The ways in which we described wellbeing do not need to be relegated to an abstract aspiration:

• Meaning in their work, anchored by equity, excellence, and joy.
• Skills and resources that help them do hard work well.
• Strong teams grounded in shared norms and protocols.
• Continuous learning embedded into the rhythm of the year.

Rather, they can become tangible conditions that shape daily experience, creating the foundation for wellbeing that is resilient, not fragile; communal, not isolated; systemic, not sporadic.

So, let’s return to the two questions we offered at the outset:

1. In what ways are you reminded of your leadership practice?
2. In what ways might we have influenced your thinking about how senior leaders support the wellbeing of school and system leaders?

Your responses to these questions matter. They reveal how shared definitions of wellbeing can be enacted through the intentional structures. Because, ultimately, wellbeing is not sustained by isolated moments of kindness, though they bring warmth and connection. Rather, it grows in the disciplined, thoughtful architecture of a system designed for people to flourish. In RETSD, we remain committed to that architecture—building it together so that wellbeing becomes a collective, enduring achievement.

Reference

Manitoba Education and Early Childhood Learning. (2023). Manitoba school leadership framework. Government of Manitoba.