One of every five school heads between 2021 and 2025 departed the work unexpectedly. In the school year 2022–2023 it was one in four. By this year, only 9.3% of school heads have led their schools 15 years or more1. For many leaders, these are hard times. School heads leave for multiple reasons, but many independent school observers, including Debra Wilson at NAIS, suggest both new and experienced heads consider the support of a coach.
In 2019 the founders of Strategic School Leadership began to seek newly retired, experienced school heads who succeeded at their schools and still desired to serve the independent school world. Now the firm has eight first-rate former school heads, a former vice president at Harvard, and a former college counselor at Roxbury Latin who is also a counselor. We partner with an international firm that specializes in character growth. Clearly, we believe experience and success matter.
Wisdom doesn’t necessarily blossom from experience in the actual arena – we never make that assumption. As a firm we gently question whether a consultant trained in financial services, to choose one example, has the savvy to advise about bringing the different, sometimes dramatic, constituents in a school toward agreed-upon goals. Our consultants have experience doing that. They also teach how crucial a leader’s disposition is – to be optimistic, share the credit, be fair, demonstrate the value of self-reflection.
We suggest to our clients an insightful and thorough evaluation that seeks to discover a person’s habit which, when changed, leads to personal and professional growth. We would never ask a client to do what we weren’t willing to do ourselves, so we too have experienced it. All of us and our clients found the process transformational. In the end, we ask leaders to transform themselves and as a result transform their schools.
1 In a recent NAIS blog post by Margaret Anne Rowe.