Now Is Not Then: Thoughts For Private School Leaders (In Three Parts)

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: How do I ensure my school and its people survive?

As Laura, the assistant head at a secondary school put it: “Yesterday, my ship had direction. Now I am stuck far from shore and there is zero wind.”  

Correct. Everything is unprecedented. Nothing about the future certain, no map or chart from past ventures of value to you now.  

And what was a demanding job for you just became overwhelming.  

First and foremost comes survival. Just as we can all imagine many businesses, organizations, and associations will not be around six months or a year from now, it is easy too to see why private schools like yours may be forced to close. Students from overseas who pay full tuition? Donors upon whom you could rely? 100% enrollment? Money making programs run on campus or in the summer? The budgetary difficulties and demographic realities you likely faced two months ago now look quaint. Last year’s spreadsheets, whether from admissions, the registrar, the development office, or your business manager may as well be deleted. There is nothing to copy and paste.

Thus . . . How do we ALL stay on this boat, today and tomorrow? That should be the baseline for every decision you make.  

Of course, you do not want to burn the mast as firewood or cut down the sails to make clothing. Still, better to prepare for such extremes rather than presume the wind will return or be reliable when it does. If school opens in September classes will almost certainly be underpopulated, staff disorientated, and facilities ill-suited to new functions. But what if school can not start up again until December? Or September 2021?

Robert, a provost, is taking a war room stance.  For most actions now, this should be the new working reality. He has three groups, one each to consider plans for best case, middling case, and worst-case scenarios. These groups are cross-pollinated with members of every possible team: faculty, staff, facilities, parents, students, board members, etc. And each comes with two “captains” whose job it is to ensure previous grievances and turf battles do not undermine the rooms they lead. These captains can also help one another and offer multiple perspectives when the six of them gather or report on their recommendations. Quite deliberately, Robert has made sure a captain's previous rank in the institution is irrelevant to his tapping them for the position. In privileging “readiness” above seniority or pecking order pay grade, his message is clear: All hands on deck. We all bail water now.   

A “war room” arrangement matters as much for how it incubates new forms of working relationships as it does for whatever plan any particular group comes up with. Perhaps one of your rooms,or all together, will foretell the future accurately or suggest a stellar strategy. But given all the variables and unknowns, no map of where you are headed can chart a perfect course. You will need to tack hard or adopt new sails in six months or a year regardless. At that time, the will, spirit, and muscle your crew develops together now will be the difference.   

In a similar vein, Jennifer, a Head of School knows keeping people on board is not only the right thing to do, it is necessary. If she lets people go en masse any future course change will be impossible. You can get your crew to row for weeks if they see you believe both in them and the sanctity of the ship. If they see you kicking sailors overboard or running for a lifeboat yourself, you’ll soon be drowning together.  

But that thought is not why Jennifer has been crying at home most days. Her essential problem is the board chair who is more demanding than helpful and who himself has been flustered. In fact, he looks overwhelmed in meetings. Jennifer, by comparison, is “holding it together.”

His displays and her calm demonstrate Jennifer is the true leader of her school. (As ever, those looking to you want first and foremost to see someone willing to sail forth, no matter how dark the clouds. Her board chair is, for this moment at least, looking sea sick.)   

And yet, if you are not crying or flustered or feeling panicked when alone, not letting out your fear or grief or anger with a partner or friend or mentor, I’d be concerned about the antenna you are using to lead. You should be feeling the fear. Not living with it or dominated by it, but aware of it, in yourself and those around you. Those dark clouds are real and sailing into them without caution is foolhardy.  

This is to say, yes, cry, just aim to do it in private. Just as meditation, exercise or down-time may have been how you maintained balance in the past, a good three-minute cry now and again could be the necessary emotional relief you need to make holding it together a little easier as you navigate the daily storm.  

With her Director of Development, Jennifer is reminding donors that yesterday, if they helped to educate the mind, now they can sustain a community. They were looking forward to having their name remembered, carved on the side of a building. Now they can become legends for stepping up in a crisis.  

Remind your donors too that this year‘s trip to Aspen or Europe or the beach is money they will not spend and might thus send to you.

Jennifer will also ask specific donors and board members to join in some of her own war room meetings to let them see what she is really up against. While such meetings might not have interested them in the past or been impossible for them to attend because of geography, now they may offer a donor a unique way to help, their virtual presence easy to arrange.

Yesterday you fixed a point on the horizon and sailed toward that. But now is not then. With survival the first and only mission, simply working “better”--more efficiently, leaner--will not be enough. You will have to work differently. More than anything you will have to work together, as a community. 

More on that, as well as more tactics for survival and leadership tomorrow, in part two.

Stay safe.