This article appeared as "Sustaining Leaders" in the Winter 2025 issue of Independent School.
This fall was a full and often joyous one. At the same time, it felt busier and, in many ways, more complex than ever before.
As I begin my second year as NAIS president, I have been thinking about what sustainability looks like in this particular leadership seat. It can be challenging to juggle my time on the road talking with school leaders to understand the issues of the day while also building and maintaining strategic momentum and direction for the organization. Without careful planning, my work and travel schedule can overtake my whole life; when that happens, I risk losing parts of my life that sustain me and actually make me a better leader.
I know I’m not alone in managing these challenges. Three recent interactions reminded me how my own efforts to craft a sustainable leadership role are mirrored in others’ experiences—and how all our experiences are reflective of leadership in this moment in time.
At the Mid-South Independent School Business Officers (MISBO) conference, Scott Wilson, ISM consultant and former head of Baylor School (TN), and Dallas Joseph, longtime chief financial officer at Baylor, held a fireside chat about the relationship between heads and CFOs. Among their many resonant insights was a story about tactical decisions that can become strategic mistakes. That phrase made me reflect on those particularly busy times when there is an easy decision to make that may save time or agitation in the moment but that ultimately might not help (and may even hinder) longer-term strategic goals. The phrase and the insight that we really do need to lean on leaders within our team to help us see and act on the wider aperture have stuck with me.
The second leadership nugget came while chatting with Nishant Mehta, founder and president of MehtaCognition and former head of school at The Children’s School (GA), about managing particularly intense windows of work and travel. Sometimes there’s so much happening, and we are moving so quickly from one thing to the next, he said, that every decision, small or large, can feel the same. When that happens, he wisely takes the time to step back to gain a bit of equilibrium across his work. As Scott and Dallas would say, he has built in his own tool to avoid making a tactical decision that will become a strategic mistake.
My third “aha” moment came during an NAIS New View EDU podcast roundtable conversation I was having with three executive directors from education leadership programs across the country: Nicole Furlonge from the Klingenstein Center at Teachers College, Carrie Grimes from Vanderbilt’s Peabody College, and Steve Piltch from the School Leadership Program at Penn Graduate School of Education. At one point, our discussion centered on the notion that leadership today is a new kind of marathon, requiring a different kind of preparation, focus, and intentionality—and a different kind of endurance.
In 2025, amid a polarized climate and the pace at which the modern era requires us to move, so many situations are—or could be, or could feel like—crises. And there’s very little downtime between each one. The urgency of any and all of these situations requires leaders to lean into several different abilities and capacities. We must listen and provide space and dignity to those with whom we may not agree; be willing to truly distribute leadership so that one person is not overwhelmed by the weight of the whole; design our own time and space to be able to meet these moments thoughtfully; and be disciplined to actually take a beat. It can be easy to disregard this “mindful beat” as a wellness fad; however, that beat, whether it’s 10 minutes or 45, can be what unlocks the ability to refocus, listen more deeply, make a more effective decision, and be a better leader.
Just as the capacities it takes to sustain leadership have evolved over time, so too have the elements of school sustainability.
School Sustainability: Past and Present
In 2005, when I was serving as general counsel at NAIS, then-president Pat Bassett proposed language around the emerging idea of “sustainability” in the independent school context. We laid out five focus areas of independent school sustainability: demographic, environmental, global, financial, and programmatic, all of which work in tandem in a school and tie back to mission.
This framing was meant to acknowledge the work schools do to understand their markets, global trends, and other external forces; attend to the human obligations of a school, including stewarding physical spaces responsibly and developing global citizens; and make sound, long-term decisions in their dual existence as businesses and educational institutions. Articulating and fortifying these overlapping elements, we thought, would not only help independent schools thrive into the future but also differentiate them in the educational marketplace.
We don’t talk about these five individual aspects as explicitly as we did 20 years ago. Maybe in part because the term “sustainability” is now so widely used in public discourse. Still, it’s helpful to reexamine the distinct and overlapping components of these foundational elements of school sustainability in the context of today’s external realities.
In 2025, it only takes a glance at the latest news headlines to see the external forces that challenge school sustainability—turmoil and uncertainty related to the presidential election, polarization and global conflicts, demographic shifts, worsening environmental threats, and technological advances—to name but a few. Here, as in our responses to all these challenges, what sustains our schools may also give us an opportunity to differentiate. In fact, many of these challenges are areas where independent schools are uniquely poised to lead in the wider educational sphere.
And while these “new” external factors are critical, there are, of course, other urgent sustainability questions that independent schools have long worked to address, such as: How do we attract the best teachers and grow new programs while also keeping costs (and tuition) in check? How do we partner with parents while also maintaining autonomy to make curricular decisions that are best for students?
Facing these new and ongoing interconnected challenges requires school leaders to embrace many of the capacities articulated by my insightful colleagues, including more intentional short- and long-term decision-making; shared leadership; and both/and thinking grounded in an understanding of multiple perspectives and the external context of the moment. Easy, right?
Building this capacity in school leaders to manage all the changes they face is a key part of school sustainability. The two go hand in hand, as effective stable leadership is undoubtedly a key part of school health.
Capacity and Community
Just as our podcast guests concluded, as school leaders, you’re in a marathon. Getting perspective can be hard when you’re trying to just keep going. But perspective is a necessity—it will ultimately make you a better leader and colleague and benefit the entire community. So while we all might be exhausted by the miles we’ve covered, it might be heartening to look back and remember the leadership capacity built in recent years.
Almost five years ago, COVID delivered NAIS school leaders their biggest, most existential challenges to date. It is still remarkable to me to think about all that you did, decided, created, stood up for, and communicated to sustain your school operations and communities, even as the situation was changing daily, even hourly.
And in the past year, as serious global conflicts and polarizing events have found their way to our campuses, leaders have again had to absorb huge challenges and struggled to know the best way to communicate and keep communities together. Here, too, I’ve seen your collective leadership capacity grow.
From where I sit, what has been particularly meaningful are the examples in our NAIS community of leaders supporting and bolstering each other through these times. Maybe being able to see our struggles mirrored in others—and sharing support and strategies in response—is the ultimate key to sustaining leaders and sustaining schools.
New Year, Fresh Ideas
I’m looking forward to a lot of things in the year ahead, and at the top of the list is settling in with these books to inspire some fresh thinking (and recipes).
- Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell
- Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
- Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
- Martha: The Cookbook by Martha Stewart
- Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
I’m especially looking forward to seeing many of you at our upcoming national conferences. CASE-NAIS Independent Schools Conference is January 26–28 in Washington, DC, and Thrive: The NAIS Annual Conference is February 26–28 in Nashville.
