Now Is Not Then: Thoughts For Private School Leaders (Part Two)

How will my school survive?  

A strong community is most important right now, but how can I foster that?

How do I think about the future when it is so uncertain?

Dear Private School Leaders: 

Above are the three primary questions I have been working through with the school leaders I help as a thought partner.

While the names and settings have been changed or represent composites, I hope you will recognize some aspects of your situation in what follows and find a thought or two of value. 

(Part one is here.)

Part Two: A strong community is most important right now, but how can I foster that?

As discussed yesterday, survival is paramount and considering worst-case scenarios your responsibility. It also means recognizing everything is unprecedented and those how you think (and thus your role) must shift.

As a few doctors put it recently in The Atlantic:

‘I think people haven’t understood that this isn’t about the next couple of weeks,’ said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. ‘This is about the next two years.’ . . .. ‘Everyone wants to know when this will end,’ said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. ‘That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?’

A month ago you imagined yourself the visionary looking out from in the crow’s nest or the embodiment of a steady hand on the wheel of your ship. Congratulations, this pandemic means you need to sleep below decks with the crew, your new job description all about morale and community.

“How do we continue?” Everyone must see you only have one answer to that question: “together.”  

As hard as that might be to convey, one advantage of crises is that you can change habits and not get eye rolls.

Elizabeth, for instance, asked the faculty at her college to begin their meeting imagining they were in their normal meeting space, a room of stately portraits and threadbare elegance. “And I know you might think this goofy,” she said, “but today none of us are who we were yesterday and what’s ahead is unknown. Since our future depends on how we work together, I ask you to reach out your hands--they have never been cleaner after all--and imagine you are holding hands with your colleagues.” This meeting was to be about grading policy, where battle across familiar fault lines among faculty and between faculty and administration might have been supercharged by general anxiety. Elizbeth did not manage to quell all the conspiracy theorists or smooth all disagreements, but she did lower the temperature of a potentially heated meeting and make clear that the days ahead would not be like those of the past. This was her version of “All hands on deck.”   

Switching the tenor and temperature of your working culture will not be easy. For sure you want to acknowledge the stress everyone is under, the new roles they have adopted, the fine work they have done. Everyone becoming an online teacher would have been tough at the best of times, let alone when everyone also transitioned overnight from being, say, an expert in seventeenth-century scansion or applied mathematics to a caretaker, nursing the spirit of students, parents, and colleagues. Moreover this baptism into a new kind of work and this conscription into new roles has taken place as everyone struggles with their own pandemic riddled reality: kids at home all day, worry about the health of elderly parents, fear of getting sick oneself. Not to acknowledge the stress everyone feels is to ignore the sea-monsters breaching starboard and aft.   

But perhaps the biggest demon you face will be to think the methodology of yesterday is what today demands. Grading policies, online pedagogy, tenure clocks . . . the temptation will be to manage these through old systems and procedures. Strive instead to make these decisions faster, and ask, for instance, “what’s the grading policy that most builds community?” Because right now everything is a shot in the dark, deliberating over some notion of perfect aim non-sensical. You can admit to anyone looking for reassurance from extensive debate that most policy decisions you make now will be wrong no matter what. That certainty is how you can know you must work differently which, for you, means shifting from managing policy and procedure to becoming the person who has the pulse of the crew. 

Towards this, Elizabeth now has a “State of the school” team whose job it is to contact everyone in the community as a routine to ask: How are you? Is there something you need Liz to know? She drops in on as many different people (students, faculty, staff) as she can to ask them about their status, their concerns, their general well being. No corrections, no demands, suggestions and support at most. She makes curiosity and empathy her guides.    

(Each week, she also asks a different community member to lead a short policy-free gathering for any who cares to join. A few moments in breakout rooms to mix and mingle, to commiserate and lift each other's spirit followed by the whole group listening to a poem or hearing a song by an alum. No agenda, just time to commune. )

With all hands on deck bailing water--and likely bailing indefinitely--everyone needs to see not only that you care about who they are but also what they are doing. 

Yesterday, when days were predictable and you knew how any old tomorrow might feel, even rough seas came with familiar traits you could manage and your crew knew how to navigate. Systems and hierarchy and precedent meant concerns would flow to you, you could delegate operations down through the system. But with every view in this current reality being a new one, all aboard need a second pair of eyes on their tasks and to believe you will respond if they show you what they see. The more your crew knows that what they see matters to you, the more effective you will be.  

For instance: From the New York Times about Mike Dewine of Ohio, the most prescient Governor in the country about the need to shut down and isolate: 

He has given his cell number to so many regular citizens over the years — ‘My wife says I’ve given it to everybody in the state’ — that he got a burst of texts (in some cases with accompanying pictures) that reported people were crammed together in bars and big-box stores, complaining that social distancing wasn’t working.

In other words, the social distancing procedures Dewine enacted were not being practiced. He would not have learned this as well or as quickly from any of his lieutenants. His crew of citizens gave him vital information because they were connected to him.  

To pick a more school-specific example, Jeff, who runs an international school, listened to his head of securities ideas about on-campus social distancing policies which would not jibe with new laws being established in their country. Jeff quickly understood that this would be a board-level consideration. In the past, such things might have worked through committee or only have been seen as problematic after initiation. To expedite and direct, Jeff needs to see the state of his ship from as many perspectives as possible. And that means, as is the case for Elizabeth, putting a new priority on speaking with as many people as often as he can.

Some will resent you for dropping in as much as you might or feel you are looking over them rather than offering reassurance. But these uncharted seas also mean you will be assigning people to previously unforeseen roles. (Captains of war rooms, for example.) Your sense of who can do what is paramount now, especially because “the what” is largely unknown. It will be your job to guess who can best take on those hitherto unseen monsters breaching all around. By prioritizing one-one-ones, small groups, email check-ins, and all the contact with your crew you can muster, you can endeavor to keep them engaged and believing in you even as you increase your ability to tap whomever looks most ready for tomorrow's unpredictable challenges.

And you know what? If you approach it this way, making people your priority might also keep you lighter, offer you some fun. A few months ago it would have been understandable that you would have looked in the mirror to see that leader who increased the endowment, built a new building, graduated Nobel laureates. Those kinds of markers of pride will be less viable now, less important to achieve too. Life is who you have, not what you have, an old truth the virus we all now fight makes inescapable. Enjoy the wonderful people you work with as your reward for having the big job. Share their spirit. Not only might that offer you some comfort and uplift, it is also your best tactic to stay afloat and sail on.  

Survival is the bottom line, community your top priority. And yet, you must also look forward. About that tomorrow.