After commencement, I sat with the leadership team for our final meeting. There was still work to do before the (second) moving van pulled out and we followed with yowling cats and panting dogs, but this was our last formal gathering. I asked them to help me tell the story of our school over the past two decades in Post-its. I have run the school with Post-its since I arrived, delighted by the flexibility offered by colorful squares arrayed on a white board or on a wall.
We noted construction projects, renovations that have enhanced our campuses. Our technology director recorded the introduction of Gmail and Google Docs. The pandemic, of course, took up most of 2020. But we also remembered the two children whose deaths we mourned.
We scribbled moments seared into memory: a horrible parent who once said to the then-Upper School director, “I don’t know how you sleep at night” and hung up on her; the child we didn’t ever think would manage to get through our school, beaming at commencement; the trip to Ireland led by a former Chair of the English department; the several times our basketball team had made it to States. We stuck a rainbow of Post-its onto the room’s glass windows: highs and lows, both institutional and personal. There we were: our story, our school’s story.
While the school moved forward, we learned each other’s work styles, likes, and dislikes. Who read email late at night? Who were the early morning texters? We knew about one another’s ailing elderly parents and the milestones our children achieved; one on our team could not be with us because of a medical emergency; we noted her absence; we were incomplete without her. This is the privilege of the day in, day out, year after year work of leadership.
We have worked hard to make the implicit explicit, worked hard to support one another when the inevitable tough situations threaten to consume us. We are there for one another with chocolate and memes and a head popping into an office doorway to say, “How are you doing?” This is the part they don’t teach in classes about how to be a school leader — the very best part is about forging a team.
And then.
Tackling the Elephant in the Room
“How are you?” I asked. “How are you feeling about the transition?”
There was silence around our U-shape arrangement of desks.
“Perhaps I’m not the right person to ask,” I added. “I imagine you are excited, maybe a little apprehensive?” Some nods.
Finally, one colleague spoke, “We’ve all worked with you for a long time, Ann. We know you. Of course we are excited to welcome the new Head, but we don’t know her.”
And that’s it, of course. A new leader, unless promoted from within, is a stranger, and the community cannot really know him or her. Relationships — in my opinion, the heart of school leadership — take time. It’s a process, beads on a string, one moment followed by another and another until the design, the pattern, emerges. While my relationships with this group, these individuals, won’t end with my retirement, we will no longer be a team. The ways we worked together must shift when the new Head arrives. And they do not yet know her.
“My” team is about to become someone else’s team. Over 21 years, I’ve worked hard to avoid saying “my school,” “my girls,” “my team.” No one belongs to me, neither the institution nor the people. Still, my throat tightened. Transitions force us to reflect, look backward and forward, note what we are leaving and what we are heading toward.
Looking around, I was conscious that this group, assembled as we have so often gathered, has felt like my backstop, my refuge, for many years. They have been my thought-partners and problem solvers; they buoyed me when I was discouraged; they have been seekers of solutions and confidantes. I know their families, their pets, and they, mine. We’ve done our best to lead with compassion and respect and curiosity and care — and a healthy dose of humor.
I brought every member of the leadership team to his or her role — most were appointed after a lengthy process involving many steps and lots of feedback, but that I chose them reassures them that they are valued, valuable. And my time with all of them has dripped away.
They wondered, finally more voluble after one waded into the tricky territory of how they felt, if their new Head will like them, if she will share their vision, how they will communicate the school’s norms to her without sounding rigid or preachy as in, “This is the way we do things here.” I reminded them that they will help her, that she and they will do the work of leading the school together, and that soon, she will not be unfamiliar to them.
Embracing the In-Between Time
Change, I told them, as I had told the Seniors, at graduation the day before, is hard. Sometimes we don’t like it, and it happens anyway.
The Director of Enrollment produced a bottle of champagne and plastic glasses, and though it was not yet noon, we toasted.
“You, who have taken care of so many,” the Associate Head said, raising her class, “can now spend time taking care of yourself.” We sipped. I wondered how easy or hard it will be to stop feeling responsible for this group I love, this school that matters so much to me. The meeting broke up, and since the afternoon was devoted to plans for next year, I walked across the parking lot to our house to resume the endless work of packing.
In this limbo moment, across the country, schools, poised for new leadership, are full of wonderings. Those staying wait to welcome their new leader. The new leaders, I suspect, are full of anticipation, joy, and questions. One school year ends, and the new year, in the final weeks of June, hasn’t quite started yet. It’s a see-saw time, an in-between time. What to do? Breathe, feel all the ways we feel. Honor the transition. Let go, surrender.
