Last month my daughter, Eliana, turned twenty-one.
She was born during Week Three of my first summer at the Day School Leadership Training Institute (DSLTI), when I was a brand-new Head of School in Cohort 4. Looking back now, it is impossible for me not to see those two stories unfolding together. Her entire life has run parallel to my own journey as a Jewish educational leader.
This summer, I made the familiar walk from hotel to workspace one last time as a DSLTI mentor. Somewhere over those twenty-one years – from nervous fellow to grandfathered alumnus – I realized that I had spent two decades participating in something I had only recently learned to name.
The Commons.
Over the past few years, my colleague Jane Taubenfeld Cohen and I tried to articulate what we believed had always been true about DSLTI. We described the Commons as the shared intellectual, relational, and spiritual space where leadership is formed; not through a single philosophy or framework, but through the interaction of enduring ideas, honest reflection, coaching, and community. We argued that each new cohort inherits the Commons and, in turn, becomes responsible for curating it for those who follow.
The language may be new.
The experience never was.
When I first arrived at DSLTI, I assumed I was there to learn how to become a better Head of School. Like every fellow, I eagerly collected frameworks: Bolman and Deal. Adaptive Leadership. Three Levels of Listening. Team One. Naming It. Storytelling. Leadership Presence. Every summer I left with another notebook full of ideas and another stack of books to read.
Those frameworks mattered.
They still do.
They gave us a shared language for leadership.
But after twenty-one years, I have come to believe that the most enduring lessons of DSLTI were never contained in the binders.
The binders mattered.
The people changed me.
At graduation this summer, I looked around the room and realized that nearly every chapter of my professional life was represented there. Some were my mentors. Some were my cohort. Some were fellows I had later mentored. Some had become colleagues. Some had become dear friends. Every one of them had played a starring role at a different moment in the story of my career.
That led me to say publicly something I had shared many times in private:
Your cohort is always your cohort.
Your mentors are always your mentors.
I have come to believe that this is one of DSLTI’s greatest promises.
Not that you will always agree.
Not that you will always work together.
But that these relationships become part of your leadership. They become the voices you hear when facing difficult decisions. The colleagues you call when the challenge is adaptive rather than technical. The people who know not simply what you have done, but who you were before you knew how to do it.
You know it’s true when a call, email, or WhatsApp from a fellow DSLTI-er automatically moves to the top of your list, not because it is necessarily urgent, but because you’ve learned that these are the people who will help you think, tell you the truth, and understand the weight of the work.
That kind of community cannot be manufactured.
It can only be cultivated.
I have come to think that this is what the Commons really is.
The frameworks gave us a shared language.
The relationships taught us how to speak it.
Ideas became habits because they were practiced together. Leadership frameworks became leadership instincts because they were reinforced in community. One generation quietly handed something to the next – not merely information, but wisdom.
The white paper Jane and I wrote concludes by suggesting that every cohort has the responsibility to curate the Commons. I love that word. We do not inherit leadership unchanged. We receive it, test it, enrich it, and then pass it forward.
If I could contribute one more thing to that Commons, it would not be another framework.
It would simply be this:
Leadership is formed in relationships before it is demonstrated in organizations.
The schools we lead matter enormously. The strategies matter. The governance models matter. The budgets, the crises, the plans, and the metrics all matter.
But long after I have forgotten which summer we first discussed a particular framework, I will remember who was sitting beside me when I finally understood it.
I remember the conversations after sessions.
The walks across the city.
The mentors who refused to answer my questions because they knew a better question to ask.
The fellows who became trusted colleagues.
The privilege of one day discovering that I had quietly crossed an invisible line; that I had become, for someone else, what others had once been for me.
Last month my daughter turned twenty-one.
This summer I completed my final year as a DSLTI mentor.
One story is just beginning.
Another chapter is closing.
And yet neither feels like an ending.
Because the Commons isn’t a place.
It isn’t a curriculum.
It isn’t even a program.
It is what remains after the sessions end, the binders are shelved, and the titles change.
It is the people who continue helping one another become wiser leaders, better colleagues, and truer versions of themselves.
The Commons was entrusted to us.
Now it belongs to those who will continue to shape it.
So here’s my final contribution:
Invest in the relationships as deeply as you invest in the ideas.
Twenty years from now, they will be the part you remember.
And may you never stop walking.