In a recent episode of Welcome to the Table, I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Keba Rogers, psychologist, educator, and founder of Keba Speaks LLC and Third Avenue Psychological Services, for the second installment of our four-part series on Grace, Growth, and Greatness. Our conversation centered on a quality that many educational leaders understand intellectually but struggle to practice personally: grace.
If you’ve been in education long enough, you’ve witnessed the paradox firsthand. We extend compassion to struggling students, understanding to overwhelmed parents, and patience to colleagues navigating difficult situations. Yet when it comes to ourselves, when we miss a deadline or handle a situation imperfectly, that same grace evaporates. Instead, we’re left with a harsh internal narrative that would never speak to anyone else the way it speaks to us.
Dr. Keba’s insights challenge us to rethink not just how we lead, but how we sustain ourselves in leadership. Because the thing is you cannot build a culture of belonging and growth in your school community while running on empty yourself. Grace isn’t a luxury for educational leaders. It’s the foundation that makes everything else possible.
What Grace Actually Means in Leadership
When Dr. Keba defines grace in leadership, she gets right to the point: “Grace in leadership transforms the authority of a role into connection with the people you’re working with. It turns the power that you have into service.”
This reframing matters more than it might initially seem. Too often in educational settings, leadership becomes about maintaining authority, enforcing policies, or managing upward to boards and trustees. We get, as Dr. Keba put it, “drunk with power,” forgetting that we once promised ourselves we’d lead differently if given the chance.
Grace-centered leadership requires three core capacities:
- Humility in recognizing what you don’t know and being willing to learn from those you lead. This doesn’t mean false modesty or undermining your expertise. It means acknowledging that your role doesn’t give you all the answers.
- Empathy in understanding the lived experiences and challenges of your faculty, staff, students, and families. This goes beyond sympathy. It means genuinely trying to see situations through others’ perspectives before responding.
- Steadiness in maintaining emotional equilibrium even when circumstances are chaotic. Grace isn’t about being passive or permissive. It’s about responding thoughtfully rather than reacting impulsively, especially under pressure.
The distinction Dr. Keba draws here matters: “We are in service to the people that we lead. It’s not the other way around. They’re not in service to us.” This servant leadership model has fallen out of favor in many educational contexts, replaced by more hierarchical management approaches. But schools aren’t corporations, and students aren’t products. The relationships at the heart of education require something different.
Why Educators Struggle to Give Themselves Grace
When I asked Dr. Keba why so many educators readily extend grace to others but withhold it from themselves, her answer was direct: “Because we don’t really believe that we deserve it.”
This hits differently when you sit with it. Think about your closest colleague or friend. When they mess up, really mess up, your instinct is probably compassion. You see their humanity, acknowledge the complexity of their situation, and offer understanding. You extend what Dr. Keba calls “unmerited favor,” grace they haven’t earned but receive anyway because of your relationship with them.
Now think about the last time you made a mistake. What did your internal voice sound like? If you’re like most educators, it probably sounded nothing like the compassion you offer others. Instead, it was critical, harsh, unforgiving. “You should know better. You should do better. How could you?”
This double standard doesn’t emerge from nowhere. Dr. Keba shared her own experience as a Black woman in America, where cultural messages about strength, caregiving, and putting others first became ingrained early: “As long as your little brother’s diapers are changed, as long as the food is on the table, that’s what matters. And so we carry that into our leadership roles.”
Many educators carry similar narratives shaped by gender, race, class, or family expectations. We learned that our needs come last, that rest is something you earn only after everyone else is taken care of, that showing vulnerability is weakness. These messages don’t disappear when we enter leadership positions. They intensify.
The result is what Dr. Keba describes as “working ourselves, not to death, to desperation.” We keep going until we hit a wall, not because we’re bad at self-care, but because we genuinely don’t believe we deserve the same grace we freely give to everyone around us.
The Cost of Graceless Leadership
The absence of grace in educational leadership creates predictable patterns. Dr. Keba identifies “compassion fatigue syndrome” as one primary outcome, though she’s careful to distinguish it from traditional burnout. While burnout stems from doing too much for too long, compassion fatigue is about the emotional weight of caring deeply while feeling unable to make a difference.
“When your caregiving outweighs your capacity,” Dr. Keba explained, “you’re going to hit that moment where you can’t do either. You can’t care for you and you can’t care for others.” This is the administrator who stops returning emails because every message feels overwhelming. The teacher who becomes cynical about student potential because hope feels too risky. The dean who implements increasingly rigid policies because flexibility requires energy they no longer have.
Without grace for ourselves, we also become less effective leaders for others. We stop seeing people and start seeing problems to solve or tasks to complete. Performance becomes more important than people. Crisis response replaces thoughtful planning. The culture shifts from one of growth and learning to one of compliance and self-protection.
What Grace Looks Like in Practice
When we moved from theory to practice in our conversation, Dr. Keba offered something refreshingly concrete. Grace in leadership isn’t about lowering standards or avoiding difficult conversations. It’s about acknowledging reality and working with what actually exists rather than what we wish existed.
“In this moment, I don’t know how to do that, and that’s okay. But who can I ask to help me? What do I need in order to be successful in this?” That’s what grace sounds like in real situations.
Consider a dean struggling with organizational systems. A graceless approach means beating yourself up for not being naturally organized, comparing yourself to colleagues who seem to effortlessly maintain perfect files, and spinning your wheels trying to fix everything alone. A grace-filled approach means acknowledging the struggle, identifying it as a genuine developmental area, and taking concrete steps to improve.
Maybe that means seeking professional development on organizational systems. Maybe it means reaching out to a colleague who excels in this area and learning from their approach. Maybe it means taking that colleague to dinner (since you can’t pay them for consultation) and working through practical strategies together.
The difference isn’t about lowering expectations. It’s about replacing self-criticism with problem-solving. “This is hard for me” becomes “This is hard for me, and here’s what I’m going to do about it.”
Creating Cultures Where Grace Is the Norm
One of the most important distinctions Dr. Keba made was between grace as crisis response and grace as cultural norm. Too often in schools, we only talk about grace when someone is in trouble. We offer a “grace period” on a bill or deadline when circumstances are dire. But that’s reactive, not proactive.
“A graceful leader values people over performance,” Dr. Keba stated clearly. “You recognize that growth, learning, progress, all of that comes from the imperfections of mistakes, discomfort, uncomfortable conversations.”
This requires a fundamental shift in how we think about leadership in educational settings. Instead of viewing mistakes as failures to be avoided, we see them as information about where growth is needed. Instead of viewing difficult conversations as problems to solve, we see them as opportunities to deepen understanding.
Dr. Keba emphasizes looking at “the team that we have in front of us, not the team that we wish they were.” This is harder than it sounds. Every leader has experienced the disappointment of a team member who doesn’t meet expectations or a colleague who consistently struggles in an area you consider basic. The graceful approach isn’t pretending those gaps don’t exist. It’s working with reality rather than resisting it.
When leaders model grace, particularly during pressurized moments, they create permission for everyone else to do the same. “We can do hard things together and still honor each other’s humanity,” Dr. Keba reminded us. “We don’t have to do one or the other.”
The practical impact is significant. “If people feel seen, heard, and valued, people will work to their best for you,” Dr. Keba shared from her 25 years of leading teams. “You don’t ever have to wonder if they are doing all that they can be doing.” This isn’t manipulation or soft management. It’s recognition that people perform best when they’re operating from a foundation of psychological safety and genuine care, not fear or pressure.
The Grace, Growth, and Greatness Connection
Dr. Keba recently trademarked a phrase that captures the essence of her framework: “Extend Grace, Encourage Growth, Expect Greatness.” The sequence matters here. You can’t skip straight to expecting greatness without first extending grace and encouraging growth.
Grace creates the conditions for growth. When we stop beating ourselves up for not being perfect, we create space to actually improve. When we acknowledge gaps without shame, we can address them effectively. Growth happens in that space between where we are and where we’re growing toward, and grace is what makes that space feel safe enough to occupy.
It’s crucial to understand that greatness, in this framework, isn’t synonymous with perfection. “Greatness is the best I can be in this moment of time doing this thing,” Dr. Keba clarified. “I’ve given you my all.” As we grow, our definition of greatness shifts. What represents your best effort today will look different six months from now as your capacity expands.
This is particularly important in educational settings where perfectionism often masquerades as high standards. We confuse excellence with flawlessness, rigor with rigidity. The result is cultures where people are afraid to try new approaches, experiment with innovative practices, or admit when something isn’t working. Grace breaks that pattern by normalizing the learning process we claim to value.
Moving from Recognition to Restoration
This conversation about grace follows naturally from our previous episode about recognizing when your role becomes unsustainable. Recognition is the first step, but recognition without restoration leads to despair. Once you acknowledge that you’re overextended, overwhelmed, or running on empty, what then?
Grace is the answer to that question. It’s the practice that allows you to move from recognition to recovery, from awareness to action. Without grace, recognition just becomes another item on your list of personal failures. With grace, recognition becomes the starting point for meaningful change.
For educational leaders reading this, the invitation is clear: you cannot lead others toward growth and belonging if you’re operating from a place of depletion and self-criticism. The grace you need to extend to yourself isn’t selfish. It’s strategic. It’s the foundation that makes everything else in your role sustainable.
Practical Next Steps
If you’re ready to practice grace in your leadership, start with these concrete steps:
- Notice your internal narrative. For one week, pay attention to how you speak to yourself when you make mistakes, miss deadlines, or handle situations imperfectly. Write down specific phrases. Would you speak to a colleague or student this way?
- Identify one area of struggle. Choose something you consistently criticize yourself about. Instead of asking “Why can’t I do this better?” ask “What support or resources would help me grow in this area?”
- Model grace publicly. The next time you make a mistake in front of your team, practice acknowledging it without excessive apology or self-flagellation. Simply state what happened, what you learned, and how you’ll approach it differently next time.
- Create grace-filled protocols. Review your school’s policies and procedures. Where do you build in grace periods, second chances, or room for human error? Where do you expect perfection? Adjust accordingly.
- Prioritize people over performance. Before your next difficult conversation or decision, ask yourself: “Am I valuing this person’s humanity or just their output?” Let the answer guide your approach.
Grace in educational leadership isn’t soft or permissive. It’s the courageous choice to lead from a place of connection rather than control, service rather than power, and humanity rather than hierarchy. It’s what allows us to sustain ourselves in this demanding work while creating the conditions for others to thrive.
As Dr. Keba reminds us, grace gives us room to breathe, and that space is where growth happens. For all of us working to build school communities where everyone belongs, that’s not just a nice idea. It’s the foundation that makes everything else possible.
