Is Your Employer Entitled to Your Heart? Your Vulnerability?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses workplace boundary issues in education, questioning whether schools have any right to demand emotional vulnerability from their staff.
Key Takeaways
- Employers aren't entitled to your emotions - Schools that demand vulnerability, authenticity, or emotional sharing cross professional boundaries
- Professional performance is enough - Teachers should be kind, effective, and professional — they don't owe their employer their heart
- Boundary issues are pervasive in education - The 'family' culture of many schools blurs the line between professional and personal in unhealthy ways
Transcript
What parts of you is your employer entitled to when they hire you for a job?
If you're an educator, you've probably heard lots of language around, you know, bringing your heart or your whole self or your vulnerability or your transparency.
Like there are a lot of sides to us that are, you know, more like the personal side.
that I'm hearing just a lot of talk about as something that should be available to the work environment, available to the work or discussed, brought up.
We talked a little bit about icebreakers that require an uncomfortable level of sharing and things like that.
And I'm wondering, what is your employer actually buying when they hire you?
What parts of you are they getting?
And a starting point to me seems to be time and skills, right?
You're hired because you have certain skills and you're hired to do a certain job for a certain time period.
You know, there's like a work day, there's a contract year, a number of days per year and things like that.
And beyond that, if an employer is demanding more, we might say, well, like, wait, that's not what you're hiring before.
Like, I'm not going to work overnight.
Like there's no overnight shift in teaching or, you know, it's like there are boundaries and there need to be boundaries.
And I'm wondering if what you see as those boundaries on what parts of you you're expected to bring to that job.
And it's a little bit tricky because this is a job where if your heart's not in it, like if you don't care about kids, if you don't enjoy teaching it, like if your heart's not in it, you're kind of going to do a terrible job, right?
There's no way to kind of leave that out.
But especially when it comes to like vulnerability and transparency and some of those personal things, you know, where...
you might honestly say, I actually don't want to bring my whole self and be vulnerable and transparent because I'm going through some stuff, right?
I'm dealing with some things that are not really relevant to my job, but if I had to like share every aspect of those, I would not be comfortable doing that.
And nobody is paying me enough to, you know, to share those parts of my life.
And I think we, we try to address those things in the name of developing the whole person, you know, and we try to meet the needs of the whole child and, and try to kind of model that at the, you know, at the adult level as well.
But I'm just wondering where you see the boundaries on that.
Because to me, it seems very inappropriate to say, like, you are hired to do this job and teach this curriculum and be here for these hours and perform these duties.
But also you have to tell us everything that's going on in your mind and life and heart and family.
Like, I just feel like that that can get into some really, really weird boundary issues.
And I'm curious how that's come up for you.
So let me know.
Have you been told that you need to bring your authentic self or your vulnerability, your radical candor?
I'm sure there are lots of different phrases.
Help me out with some of these phrases that are used to talk about this.
Do you know what I'm talking about that you're supposed to bring to your work?
Leave a comment.
Let me know.