From Contract to Compact to Covenant

I’ve written before about the sort of teacher we are looking for; one for whom the profession is so much more than a job, a way of paying the bills.  Since then I’ve been thinking that this creates a high bar, not just for teachers and students, but also for the institutions of the school.

If we are asking that people bring their full humanity to work, not just a watered-down version of their weekend self, then we need to meet them half-way, and to be more than ‘just’ employers, but also to value them as the rich and complex human beings they are.  That means being as committed to their growth and wellbeing as we expect them to be with our students; it means trying to make school a source of joy and pride, as well as a place to work.  It means trying to be as flexible with them as we try to be with our own children.

Beyond employment: Building a more human school culture

Many modern organisations are trying to do the same thing. Systems scientist Peter Senge quotes educator Ed Simon as asking:

As a society, we seem to have bought into the ancient Greek myth that leisure is good and that work is bad; we are working for the weekend, or even worse, for retirement (it’s right there, isn’t it, in the revealing work-life balance phrase, as if somehow real life can only happen away from work). 

Rethinking the value of work in modern life

As I look at the contracts and policies by which we run the school, I see how over the years they have sought to be more and more specific, to cover every eventuality. There are good legal reasons for that, but I am struck by how impoverished we would be if we stuck strictly to the written words – worked to rule as they say, and how none of the contracts capture the spirit of care, of hope and of ambition for students and colleagues; that is, the really important things.  And as I thought about contracts, I also came across the idea of compacts which are defined in Harvard Business Review as “reciprocal obligations and mutual commitments, both stated and implied, that define their relationship”.

By defining a legal relationship, a contract is by definition concerned with the impersonal, specific, defining measurable and objective elements of a business relationship.  A compact, on the other hand, rests on a relationship and as such relates to intangible, subjective, emotional aspects of humans at work.  It’s the difference between an obligation and commitment; between responsibility and loyalty.  Perhaps we want a bit more of the compact over the contract.

Contract vs Covenant: A new model for school relationships

Daniel Yankelovich takes this one step further and calls for a move from an instrumental (i.e. wage-driven) to a sacred approach (by which he means the sociological, not the religious, sense that sacred things are the ones on which we should not put a price). Businessman Max de Pree builds still more on this when he speaks of a covenant between organization and individual, in contrast to the traditional contract. “Contracts”, says De Pree, “are a small part of a relationship. A complete relationship needs a covenant . . . a covenantal relationship rests on a shared commitment to ideas, to issues, to values, to goals, and to management processes . . . Covenantal relationships reflect unity and grace and poise. They are expressions of the sacred nature of relationships.”

It strikes me that just as we seek to do more for our students than to satisfactorily fulfil our contractual obligations, so too we should be doing the same for our teachers. That doesn’t mean being infinitely flexible, of course, but it does mean doing more than is required. For me, the idea of a covenant captures something important.

References

• Jobs, Careers and Callings
• Are schools more like factories, prisons, gardens or fairgrounds?
• The Price of Profit and the Cost of ROI
• Schools, Universities, ProfitSenge, P (1990) The Fifth Discipline. DoubleDay
• Strebal, P (1996) Why Do Employees Resist Change? Harvard Business Review
• Whelchel, H (2020) He Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins…Or Does He? The Institute for Faith, Work and Economics
  

Written by Nick Alchin

Nick Alchin has spent thirty years in international education, and the question that has animated most of that time is a simple one: what does it actually take for an institution to help people flourish? He has taught in schools in Singapore, Switzerland, Kenya and the UK; served as IB Chief Assessor for Theory of Knowledge; and is a textbook author with a new book – on connecting with teenagers – due later this year. He is currently Head of College at UWCSEA in Singapore, one of the world’s largest international schools. The work he finds most compelling sits at the intersection of culture and leadership: how the environment shapes people, how leaders are shaped by it in return, and what it takes to intervene in that loop deliberately. He coaches and consults with schools and leaders working on those questions – the kind of challenges where moving fast tends to make things worse, and where the gap between diagnosing a problem and actually changing something is wider than it first looks. He is direct, curious, and has spent long enough in classrooms and staffrooms to know that the most interesting problems rarely announce themselves clearly at first.