High Support, High Expectations: An HR Playbook for Schools

High Support, High Expectations: An HR Playbook for Schools

By Catherine Arminio

I recently read Spark the Heart: Engineering Empathy in Your Organization by Dr. Nicole Price. In her book, Dr. Price—an engineer by training—chronicles her leadership journey from apathy to empathy and details how she initially misinterpreted empathy as letting standards slide. In education, many of us believe we lead with empathy. Ask a room of school administrators whether they lead with empathy, and nearly everyone will say yes. But ask whether they've ever let a missed deadline or a difficult conversation slide in the name of empathy, and the room gets noticeably quieter.

Here is the core myth: empathy means lowering the bar. It doesn't. As Dr. Price frames it, empathy functions as a diagnostic tool. Understanding why something happened is how you fix the root cause, not how you excuse poor performance.
Why This Matters in Education
Our workforce is under real pressure: substitute shortages, burnout, and rising demands on teachers, teacher aides, and support staff. It's tempting to soften expectations to protect morale. But when we do, colleagues who carry the extra load start to resent it, and the underlying issue never gets solved.

Where Does Your Culture Land?
Dr. Price illustrates how leadership behaviors fall across two key dimensions: support and expectations.

Punitive: low support, high expectations. People comply out of fear, then leave.
Permissive: high support, low expectations. Everyone's kind, but standards erode.

Neglectful: low on both. Disengagement.
Restorative: high on both. This is the goal. We already have data to support this works with students and we are already doing this work with students. This can work for staff too!

A 3-step conversation you can use this week.
When a staff member misses a commitment, draw on Dr. Price's diagnostic empathy framework with this three-step approach:
Name the impact. "When there were no substitute plans available, the substitute could not help the students learn anything that day."

Get curious about the root cause. "Walk me through what happened. Where did the process break down?"

Restore and prevent. "The standard still stands. What will you do to repair this, and what should we change so it doesn't repeat?"
This approach works alongside formal progressive discipline and contractual obligations without replacing them; it simply makes initial leadership conversations significantly more productive.

Key Takeaways

As Dr. Price highlights in her work, empathy without accountability leads to enabling, while accountability without empathy breeds cruelty. Restorative leadership lives in the space between. Since schools have become proficient with student-centered restorative practices, adopting Dr. Price's methodology helps us bring that same balance to leading staff.

If you are looking to cultivate empathy and high standards in your district, I highly recommend Spark the Heart: Engineering Empathy in Your Organization by Dr. Nicole Price for your next administrative book club.