Read the full transcript of Episode 67 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features NAIS President Debra P. Wilson sitting down with three education leadership experts from top programs at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Vanderbilt University. Nicole Furlonge, Carrie Grimes, and Steve Piltch are seasoned educators who head programs for education leaders and whose careers developed through deep experience in independent schools. They discuss the importance of listening in developing the leaders of the future, and how to help them grow the skills and capacities to meet the evolving challenges of our times.
Debra Wilson: I am so excited for our episode today, because we are talking about the future of education leadership. And we're doing it with three just incredible people in the field.
We have Nicole Furlonge, who is the executive director of the Klingenstein Center. Nicole's got a great long history in the independent school community, and she's even married to an independent school Head of School. She has been in independent schools for 25 years in so many different roles. She's taught English, she's been a department chair, she's been a director of teaching and learning, she's been a director of diversity, equity and inclusion, and she's even been residential faculty.
Carrie Grimes comes to us from Vanderbilt's Peabody College and she's the director of their independent school leadership master's program. Before she was at Peabody, she was in various schools, including leadership roles in teaching, counseling, and institutional advancement in California, New York and Maryland. So she's covered an amazing amount of geography.
And then Steve Piltch comes to us from Penn. He is the director of the school leadership program at the Penn Graduate School for Education. And he's been there for the past six years. But before that, he was in schools for over 25 years, including head of school at the Shipley School.
He believes really strongly in caring and trusting relationships. Steve and I have spent a lot of time together talking over the years about how those relationships and how well-being really creates culturally responsive and caring communities. And he just brings an amazing amount of experience to the work that he does every single day. And I know this is going to be a lively conversation.
Carrie, Nicole, Steve, I am so excited that we are together today to talk about one of the biggest, I don't know, topics in education: Leadership, leadership for adults. Maybe we'll get a chance to talk about leadership for our students a bit. And just thank all of you for being on with us on New View EDU.
Steve Piltch: Our pleasure to be with you. Thank you.
Carrie Grimes: Thank you.
Nicole Furlonge: Thank you for having us.
Debra Wilson: Excellent. I'm going to start with just a nice softball so that our audience gets a little familiar with each of you. Can you share a little bit about your programs, what makes them unique, and a little bit about your own leadership journey to get to this place? And Nicole, I'm going to start with you.
Nicole Furlonge: Sure. So I am the executive director of the Klingenstein Center. And the Klingenstein Center is four decades old. We started as a project to professionalize independent school education. And I'll start with how I got here. So I spent about 25 years in independent schools, mostly in boarding schools, but also in day schools, teaching English, in boarding schools, running dorms, coaching sports I had not played, and holding different leadership roles.
And then I had this opportunity to throw my hat in the ring for this role as director of the center. And it worked out that I was offered the position and I took it, and was really excited about the chance to do what I was doing in one school across schools. And that is building capacity for everyone from early career teachers all the way through heads of school, for folks who are really looking for opportunities for lifelong, career-long learning, who are agile thinkers, reflective practitioners, and who understand leadership as a practice, not as a title. And so those are the folks that we tend to draw to the Klingenstein Center programs, and we also are involved heavily in research on behalf of independent schools as well. So that's us in a nutshell.
Debra Wilson: That's fabulous. And I already shared in the intro that you're married to a head of school too. So it's not, going to Klingenstein did not get you very far away from the day to day life of schools, too.
Nicole Furlonge: No, most definitely. It's personal as well as personal.
Steve Piltch: Condolences on both counts, Nicole.
Debra Wilson: All right, Steve, how about a little bit of your background and a little bit of an overview from the program at Penn?
Steve Piltch: Yeah. So I have the pleasure at this point to direct the school leadership program at the University of Pennsylvania and the Graduate School of Education. Penn is committed to leadership as an issue at both the master's and doctorate level. Our program happens to be the master's level. Part of what's unique here at UPenn is a little different than the programs for both Nicole and Carrie at, of course, at Columbia and Vanderbilt, is that our program actually brings together both independent school students and public school students. And when I say students, educators. And our educators can be literally anywhere from three to five to seven years of experience to 23 to 25 to 27 years of experience.
If there's something common about them in addition to being wonderfully committed practitioners, it's, they're all interested in looking at the prospect of at least developing and understanding knowledge, the skills associated with affecting growth and change and quality leadership in schools. And it's, it's a really fun place to be.
Personally, I've had the privilege to be a lifelong educator, having early in my career taught both independent and public. At the independent school level—and I smiled when Nicole said coaching sports she had never played—that, you know, the old triple threat phenomenon in independent schools, you coached, you advised, you taught, you lived in a dorm, you did all those things, even if you didn't have great competence at them, you developed it.
But I started my career at a day boarding school at Choate Rosemary Hall, which I had no knowledge of before, and was there for about six to seven years before I went on to begin graduate work and teaching in public schools, then ultimately to become the head of a independent day school, the Shipley School for more than 25 years.
And when I retired from, quote, retired from Shipley, I had the good fortune to be able to become the director of this program and have loved it for the past six years. So it's been an absolute ball. It's just a terrific opportunity to continue to be in education this way.
Debra Wilson: Thank you so much, Steve. And Carrie, how long have you been at Vanderbilt now? I feel, when you and I met, I think I was still at SAIS. I might've been just wrapping up my time there.
Carrie Grimes: That's right. Yeah. So I just finished my third year at Vanderbilt. So I think I'm the junior member of this squad and excited to be with all of you today. Thanks again, Debra, for having us, and Steve and Nicole, it's just always fun to be with you.
So a little bit about our program at Peabody College at Vanderbilt. So we are a master's in education in independent school leadership, and we are sort of affectionately known as the ISL program. Things that are sort of differentiators about our program, we are a 15 month, what we call a blended learning model. And so our students experience both online and in-person learning throughout the course of the degree experience. We see this as sort of a best of all worlds. They have the opportunity to engage in what we think of as career embedded learning. So in a synchronous space with cohort mates during the evening, during the work week, and then returning to the schoolhouse the next day and sort of applying their learning and their ideas in real time, but also coming to Nashville and enjoying our beautiful Peabody campus and affiliating with the university in person and with one another to build community at four residential convenings throughout the course of the 15 months.
So, much like Steve and Nicole's programs, we attract a really broad range of individuals from early career professionals who might be in the classroom, to well-established leaders who may be a head of school, who are early in their tenure in that role. But the common thread for everyone who's in our program is a significant desire or appetite to grow in their leadership and to carve out space for reflective practice, peer-to-peer learning, and building their professional network. And so those are some of the things that distinguish our program.
Debra Wilson: I'm just so glad that you're all in these positions that you are. They're all different programs, but they're all incredibly strong programs, and they provide such a backbone in leadership development for our entire community and I think beyond. I know all of you have had graduates from independent schools who might go to public schools or who might go to entirely different sectors to bring the leadership skills they learned with you into those spaces.
So what are you most passionate about right now in that work you're doing developing leaders? Like what do you see that you're like, wow, didn't see that coming, but that's super exciting.
Nicole Furlonge: So in one word, listening. So, you know, my training is actually in the humanities. So my doctoral degree, my PhD is in English and in literature and sound studies. And so I've always been interested in what it means to be an effective, open audience for each other. That's my guiding question for years. And I've thought about that work and engaged that work in
work with teachers and leaders, in part because I think that we're in a world where we have so much information at our fingertips and on the screen coming at us, shouting at us. And it, I think, becomes really difficult to find opportunities to be effective audiences for each other, to tune into each other, to pay attention to each other.
And that makes the work that we do really complicated, because our work in schools is all about tending to each other. It's about relationship building. It's about connecting so that we can ask students, our peers, even our families and boards to do the hard work of learning on behalf of sustaining and making change in our schools.
And without the ability, without the capacity to listen in a wide variety of ways to our moment, to our past, and to our future, forward for our future, without that capacity, it really makes the messy, joyful, good work of school really challenging to do, even beyond the challenge that's there. So for me, listening, building people's capacity and understanding around listening as a giving audience, as something that you do not because you agree with someone, but because you are giving them the dignity of space to articulate what is on their mind and heart. For me, that is both urgent work, it is important work, but it's also quite joyful work. And so that's what's exciting for me to be able to do that with people at different parts, moments in their careers and not only in the United States, but globally.
Debra Wilson: That's fabulous. I've had the pleasure of listening to Nicole and learning from Nicole about her work around listening. And particularly in 2024, that might be more important now. I mean, it's always been important, but in 2024, that's a skill that really, we all need to have and participate in just to understand more deeply the world and the people around us.
Steve Piltch: Well, it's sort of, if you think, Debra, and Nicole, thank you and all. I think the three of us are in agreement, it's a skill that's missing in this country, or something we need to further develop. You have to be willing to accept difference, which means you have to have been able to listen to it, in order to be able to affect growth. And if you look in a country that is split on so many different issues, at the heart of it is that lack of willingness and perhaps ability to listen and all.
And I think that part of what Nicole alludes to, and certainly is where our program is, and I know Carrie's and Nicole's too, is it all starts and on some levels ends with people. And it's about developing trusting and caring relationships where listening has to be at the heart of course, but then it's about mutual respect and understanding and a commitment to move towards some goal or goals that you're going to be working at together. And that's where you understand that your ability to listen and to participate and contribute is fundamental if you're going to be surrounding yourself with people who are better than you are, which is, I think we all also agree is important in leadership, so that you can actually grow your community around the values and the motivations and the mission with which you are most concerned.
Carrie Grimes: Yeah, and I would add, so to kind of build on what's been said already, one of the groups that I'm really passionate about listening to right now are our early career independent school professionals. This is what's sort of lighting me up. I'm really focused on understanding what motivates these individuals to stay in our schools, and to grow as leaders, and to be part of a pipeline of leadership that will empower our schools to sustain and flourish into the future.
So I'm very passionate about that. I think this is a group of professionals that tends to be…not fully listened to, and therefore we tend to lose individuals to the profession, when we are not aware of what motivates them to persist and to commit to a career in our schools. I see so many young independent school professionals in our program who have this enormous passion and appetite to lead, but they can't always find avenues to exercise that desire to grow and develop.
I'm also really interested in once people are in these roles and leading in schools, particularly people of color and women, I'm interested in listening to them and understanding how they can best feel a sense of support in their leadership. What are the inputs that will empower them to flourish as leaders, as opposed to feeling depleted, or having a truncated tenure as a head of school? We really need to be focused on growing the pipeline and then once people are in place, understanding the best ways we can lift them up in the good work that they're doing.
Debra Wilson: So, Carrie, what have you heard so far? Like, or what have any of you heard so far? Because I'm really, I was giving a talk earlier this week and talking about workforce trends and a bit about AI and the impact on our schools, right? And looking at, we'll post this article in the episode notes. There's a Harvard Business Review article sort of talking about like the nine or 10 future trends for the workforce, right? And one of them was, four-day work weeks will be routine, not radical.
And schools are pretty much on five-day teach weeks, work weeks. Like we don't have a ton of flexibility in our space. And this is something I sort of fundamentally worry about for working parents, for people who are just looking at being in education relative to others. So like, what are you hearing about that, particularly as you have younger generations coming through your program, and you know, what makes them stay? Because education's always been hard. I think education is particularly hard now, particularly when they see flexibility for their peers and they're really thinking a lot. And there's a lot of talk about work-life balance. How do you lead and have a life? So I'm curious what you're all hearing from people within your groups and within your cohorts, either from a leadership perspective or as people deeper within our schools.
Steve Piltch: One of the things we're certain, it's interesting what you just said there, because one of the things we stress really is that if you're going to do your best work as a school leader, of course, the trusting, caring relationships that we've already alluded to, but your well-being, your family's well-being and your institution's well-being have to be at the heart of it. You're going to do your best work when your sense of well-being, your family is healthiest and best, and so on.
So I think it becomes incumbent upon us in our schools to make sure we're making room for that. Not just saying it, but actually providing opportunities for space, providing opportunities for professional development, providing opportunities to deal with, I think, an educational world that's no longer going to return to what was what I'm going to call pre-pandemic. That, since the pandemic, we've seen every year that there's one quote, “crisis” after another. You know, you can talk about Gaza, you can talk about the potential of issues with the election, you can talk about almost everything. It used to be that those things were the exception rather than the rule.
And I, for one, and I'd love to hear Nicole and Carrie on this and you too, Debra, don't believe that's ever going to happen again. I mean, we're going to find different ways to deal with the issues, but I don't believe you're going to go through a year without something happening outside the realm of your school that's going to have direct impact in one way or another. That even if you're able to take what I'm going to call an unbiased perspective on what happens, you're going to have to deal with the well-being of your community around the given issues.
Carrie Grimes: I would say that with regards to early career independent school professionals and what they're looking for, so I'm in the early stages of doing a research study on this. So I don't have the answers yet. I don't have the findings, but I look forward to sharing them when I do.
But what we know from pre-existing research is that individuals who I would say are early 30s and under, so who fall into specific age categories, are looking for things like flexibility in their work life, which you've alluded to, Debra. One of the things I've noticed anecdotally that's been backed up by pre-existing research is that these individuals are also looking for a clear pathway to develop in their leadership and to advance in their careers. And when they're not finding it, they're willing to move around. And so what happens then is there's sort of like a hopscotching around to different organizations, as opposed to building roots at an organization that will then yield fruit for the school.
And then the other thing I've noticed is that some individuals in this category of early career independent school professionals are feeling overtaxed by having a multiplicity of roles. I'm a dorm parent, I'm teaching French, I'm coaching field hockey, I'm on lunch duty, and they don't have space for well-being. Some of my folks are working 19 hours. I mean, it's something that they're not, they have a low tolerance for, understandably. And so those are some of the things I've noticed in my conversations with people and in the preexisting research, but I'm excited to find out more.
Nicole Furlonge: Yeah, I want to add to that, Carrie, your research, but also your earlier comment about leadership with early career teachers. We have a longstanding institute in the summer, the Klingenstein Summer Institute for Early Career Teachers, that we've run for about 47 years. And what's really interesting about the throughlines of that from those alum, but particularly in the last five years, is that we're hearing some of what you've already articulated.
But we're also hearing, you know, after that experience, the desire to either stay in schools because the early career teacher now understands that their role itself is a leadership role. And I think that that's really key in terms of building early career efficacy, an early career, not so much a pathway to headship or, you know, whatever the role is that they envision themselves taking on or impact that they want to have in schools, but more a sense of efficacy that they are a part of the builders of the community, of the work, of the impact, of the mission-forward work that their particular school wants to have.
We're hearing, also, a lot of tension between the, you know, we are looking for agile, innovative folks who come through schools in a variety of different ways. So we have folks in our program who come through the classroom, and we have folks in our programs that come through the operations side of school. And those folks who are at the point of seeking headship are hearing conflicting narratives about what it entails to get to headship. So they'll hit a wall where someone says, but you didn't teach, or you didn't do X. There's always a sort of gap that we identify at those moments. And I wonder, what is our capacity as independent schools to expand our channels to understand how we listen differently for the potential for leadership in our schools? And I think doing that would also address a concern that early career folks have around what their role is in this place that we call school.
The last thing I'll say about that is that, you know, I was really fortunate, I think, in my early career days to be at, to start my career at two small, independent boarding schools, Holderness School and the St. Andrews School in Middletown, Delaware. And I wore all the hats from the beginning and was tired at different days and was glad for those days where we had off in our rotation. But what I got out of those, those spaces, were embedded learning on the ground.
Where I was, it was like I was in an apprenticeship and a lab at the same time where I was testing things and getting feedback regularly. But I also had heads of school and deans of faculty who, and this is the language that's running in my head right now is from Tad Roach, who was my head of school at St. Andrews, who I appreciate deeply and who used to talk all the time about an ethos that we were developing at St. Andrews. And we would have these moments where people were leaving the school to do wonderful things in their next stage of their career. And inevitably someone would say, what went wrong? Why are they leaving? Why are they going somewhere else? And he would always say, the point is not to keep people where they are, but it's to build an ethos that goes with us wherever we go. And so that if we believe in what a particular school is building, we take it with us.
And I love that idea of thinking about not only what we do to keep people in our particular schools, but what we do to cultivate an ethos of care and ethos of professionalism, an ethos of getting proximate to what our moment calls on us to tend to on behalf of students and behalf of the futures that they will lead in, that we are building beyond ourselves, even as we're thinking about how to keep people in our community.
Steve Piltch: In some regards, Nicole, the experience you had is not dissimilar to the one I had as I began in independent school. To this day, I don't think I worked longer, harder, or in more different areas than I did in my first six years. And retrospectively, with the support received within the community, it became the best professional development opportunity I could have had as an early professional. But in the context of the question of leadership of today, it's not surprising that there's ambivalence or angst or whatever, particularly when you see the turnover taking places in independent schools.
And I happen to agree, of course, with Tad, as you know, that it's not about keeping people, it's about having them grow. And in that regard, one of the things we stress really hard and I believe in is, know, sitting with your, your young, you know, educators and having them think about where they want to go down the road, not because there's a specific role that they may or may not be, but ask them, for example, what role could you see yourself in five years or seven years?
What are the skills? What's the knowledge? What are the attributes that will maximize the chance you'll be successful when you get there? And then, as they answer those questions, not that they're absolute, finding a way within the realm of their experience at your school to help develop those skills, those knowledge, those attributes, so that they can feel your support and become that much better as educators and people and all. And so that when they do go, you and they both feel really good about what's happening, and that that growth pattern is one that continues—and which, by the way, is also helpful to your school.
Nicole Furlonge: Both growth and I think, you know, to add to that, I mean, part of what you're describing, Steve, is care as well. We talk often about, you know, centering the care of students in our schools, which is, I still believe, of utmost importance.
Steve Piltch: Can I stop you for one second? We all agree that's the single most important thing in our school. We're talking about leadership, but it's about the children, the students.
Nicole Furlonge: Yes, yes, yes. I mean, leadership impacts that. Teaching impacts that experience for students. But care for students, but also care for the adults in our community. And we know that the health of our adults impacts the health of our students. And so part of the challenge of particularly the upper leadership in schools or even middle tier leadership in schools is building that capacity for us to be, for us, for leaders in schools to be cared for, at the same time that we're creating the conditions under which other constituencies in our schools feel a sense of care, a sense of belonging, a sense that we are all complex beings and our whole selves are being held and understood and embraced in our school communities.
And I think figuring out, that's one of our challenges in this moment, figuring out how to hold all of those needs because we're no longer in a moment where we can say, well, whatever the kids need, we're going to privilege that over and above what everyone else in the building needs.
Steve Piltch: I'm sure Carrie has something to add and I want to hear her, but last comment on that Nicole, or one of many, is there's an irony to this in terms of leadership, is that one of the biggest growths in leadership over the last generation has been about the integration and importance of all the things you just talked about. The social emotional end of it, which by the way, 25 or 30 years ago, though it was important, it really wasn't addressed in the same way that it is as being at the heart of everything that we do. And I know, Carrie, that's part of what you all do, of course, at Vanderbilt, but would love to hear you just a little bit more on the same things.
Carrie Grimes: Yeah, I mean, a lot of this is just making me think about, also making me reflect upon my early days as an independent school practitioner in enrollment management at Mark Day School in San Rafael, California. And it's making me think about this construct of creating an environment in which the individual is participating in the community, whether it's the head of school or a kindergartner, can authentically feel seen within that community.
And as a young professional, I felt seen even when I was, you know, making it up as I went along, right, as a 24-year-old. I felt seen by a head of school who believed in me, David Kirby, and that put a lot of wind beneath my wings in terms of my ability to then believe in myself. And so I think as we're thinking about the architecture of a school, everybody's kind of on equal footing in that regard. We all want to feel seen. We all want to have space for, I guess, the best way we can think of it after talking to lots of heads of school in a recent study I did, is we just want space for quiet, for reflection, for connection, and for understanding.
And so when we combine those things, that is creating, as Nicole said earlier, conditions for positive growth, for a cultivation of a powerful community of trust and safety where people don't want to go elsewhere because they are having that experience with one another. And so that is sort of the tricky business of leading, is that you're trying to cultivate those conditions for others where your students feel seen, your faculty feel seen, but you also need that too. Who's doing that for you when you're the leader? Where are you finding restoration?
Is it through your own networks and communities? That's what I've heard from a lot of leaders, those interpersonal relationships, those text groups, those spaces they can go for sense making and a laugh or support. I think that goes a long way. And so we're thinking about how can we create environments that allow for that to happen?
Debra Wilson: But it's kind of funny, like in 2024, you kind of have to plan your unplanned time, right? Like you have to know when that window is going to get. I mean, I hold space on my calendar just to think more deeply, because if I don't, you know, when you're always at full tilt, I was talking to a colleague this week and he said, you know, when you're going as fast as you possibly can, everything feels the same.
And I learned, I heard another great phrase was you can make a tactical decision and a strategic mistake if you don't have that head space, right? To be collaborating, to really be properly reflective, to really be thinking about, what is the impact of what I'm doing in the moment? So as you're thinking about like, all of this, and I keep thinking of the head of schools listening to this podcast and it's like, OK, like I'm, I got the students, I'm centering the students, you know, I'm working with the parents, and I'm developing leaders. And by the way, when I'm developing leaders, they're going to leave me, and I've got to have an ethos. And like, that waiter’s tray gets pretty full pretty fast.
So like, when you're talking with leaders or when you're working with experienced leaders and Nicole, I love your point of, I think leadership happens in all positions. Like we talk a ton about headship. Not everybody wants to be a head. Honestly, like, we have fabulous leaders at all levels of our school. So like just, where's the give? Like what does that look like? Because this, I think this has always been a lot, but I think in 2024, as we're looking at developing leaders and trying to make it even reasonably sustainable, like where is that give? Like what models are you seeing out there? Nicole, I know you've got a sister-in-law who's experimenting with a new model right now, which I find fascinating.
Nicole Furlonge: Yes, yes. Yeah, she's a co-head of school at Seattle Academy. And I love just watching that and listening in to that, that design of that model of leadership, recognizing again, that schools need deep leadership. And leadership—I think this is part of the answer to, a part of the answer to your question, Debra—is recognizing that leadership, even when you are the singular head of school at your school, is not a solo performance or solo sport, if we want to call on that metaphor. It's actually a collaborative effort. And I think that is a huge shift from the world that I entered some 30 years ago in independent schools to now.
I think the other is recognizing that part of what we're called on when we lead is to be designers. Designers of experiences, but at a fundamental level, what I talk about with students who come to the center and educators who come to the center is that leaders design time. And what's remarkable to me is when I do a listening session with a group, whether it's early career teachers, middle level leaders or heads of school or boards, and we take five minutes to do a session where they're tuning into each other or we take a moment to silently reflect and to listen into ourselves.
People often are surprised at how little time it takes to actually have a reflective practice that then fuels that ability to think strategically, to think tactically, to shift all the gears that we're called on to shift even just a walk down the hall within a 10-minute segment of time in our schools. And so what does it mean for us to take a moment to understand that time is not always running for us, but that time is something that we can slow down and we can rev up? We can design the time that we want to have in schools. And not only that, we can design our relationships in schools, so that whether we're co-leading or we're leading in a deep leadership model, that we understand that we are designing the relationships that we need in order to support the work that we need to do at this moment.
Steve Piltch: In that context, we need to role model that as leaders. In other words, not just talk about it, but do it. And one of the things, and I'm sure Debra, you and I have talked about this many times, but one of the things I happen to think is important is that as a leader, you actually need to take some time during the day to do the very things you're talking about. And the first thing that we all say as leaders, “But we don't have time to do that.”
There's an irony. If you actually take time to care for yourself, if you go for a walk or you read or you do something else, three things happen, or at least they did for me when I learned this. The first thing is, is that while you're doing other things, you're actually thinking about the things you need to be thinking about even though you don't know it. The second thing is you come back to what you're doing. You're much more effective. You're revitalized, you're there. And the third thing, which was better for everybody else is, I was a lot more pleasant, which was a really good byproduct of taking that little bit of time for reflection or for other things. And when we do that, when we get people, I mean, you can't do it once and expect it to happen, but if you really do it over time, it makes a huge difference.
Carrie Grimes: I think I just want to put like a fine point on some of the things that have been talked about, because this is a small change that you can choose to make in your daily practice. It is a small allocation of your time. Debra, you talked about scheduling in time for things, but the research behind this is really powerful, that leaders who carve out intentional time—as little as five minutes a day—will experience more integration and balance in their leadership, better self-regulation in terms of their responsiveness, enhanced self-awareness, improved relationships at work, inner calm and peace.
And so I think it's the idea here of just start small. And setting aside a small amount of time every day for mindfulness can have, in the aggregate, a significant impact not only on your own well-being, whether you're leading in a classroom full of first graders that are bouncing off the walls, or you're in the head's office. And so I think this is something that I really, I hope people will listen to, because the research is really powerful and significant at this point, that even a mild allocation of time for mindfulness will have a significant impact on your well-being and your ability to lead.
Nicole Furlonge: I want to let listeners know that we are mindful of the complexities in which we're asking people to do this. But like I, we talk often in our courses about, you know, systems thinking and visualizing the system and part of the system is the individual, as well as the schema and mental models that we bring into our work. And so tending to the individual is important, even as you're faced with these large systemic cultural and community issues.
I do think one last thing I think in terms of the question of how can leaders do this now? I think one of the challenges that we face is that we tend to avoid the things that are really, we tend to avoid some things. And part of that avoidance is we think about crisis as the thing to either avert, or if it's happening, somehow we've made a mistake, or we need to sort of run from it in order to get ourselves back to the business of school. And the fact is that friction, differences of opinion, differences of viewpoints, all the way to high conflict, are a part of the work that we do because we work in human, we work in spaces where relationship is the coin, right? Like human relationship is what we do.
And so it gets messy, and so it gets hard, and it gets friction filled. And one of the things I've been thinking about in my role is, you know, what are the capacities we need to build to help folks understand that part of the joy of leadership is also leaning into those moments of difficulty? Because when you ignore them, they only get bigger. They only sprout and seed in other ways that then make taking the time to be mindful, extremely difficult, if not impossible at any given moment.
And so part of it is developing those areas, whether it's on your leadership team or in yourself, that are our growth edges, that allow us to attend to the work that we're called to do in these communities that we've designed that are diverse, that are robust, that are generative. How do we become leaders who have what Bowman and Diehl refer to as a political capacity or conflict intelligence, that allows us to both put those difficulties in a container that we can tend to more effectively. So I think that context is really important and to ignore it is, I think, at the peril of all of us.
Steve Piltch: And Nicole, as you know, I mean, that's not a new concept from Bowman and Diehl. What is new is how complex the world is, you know, and how much more complex it's going to become, you know. And we're used to being in a place where, quote, dealing with crisis is a common element in our schools. The irony is if you take the time that you're talking about, that the listening and all the things that Nicole and Carrie have articulated and Debra, that you support 100% of the time. When you come to those crises, there's a better chance that you're going to deal with them in a way that allows things to move forward.
If you respond well, then it gives you the opportunity to actually see the community come together so that they develop more confidence in difficult situations, which when the next crisis comes up is really helpful. And if you respond poorly, it tends to split your community, which we saw a significant amount of, I think, in the last year or two in some of our schools. And so heeding Nicole's suggestion. You should just do a workshop on the listening, in my opinion, Nicole, and the whole piece of the importance of relationship and understanding. And again, taking two steps back to understand the implications of your decisions before you make them and working with people who are better than you are to move it forward.
Debra Wilson: My friends, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. This was exactly what I predicted, a fabulous, insightful, and just thoughtful and fun conversation. So thank you all for being with us on New View EDU.
Nicole Furlonge: Thank you for having us.
Carrie Grimes: Thank you.
Steve Piltch: Thank you for having us.