For most of my professional life, I was the person on the other side of the table.
I was the Head of School receiving the advice. The person being coached. The leader sitting through the presentation, looking at the framework, wondering whether the consultant really understood my school. Sometimes taking furious notes. Sometimes thinking, “That is exactly what we need.” And, if I am being fair, sometimes thinking, “You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.”
Now I am the consultant.
This has been humbling.
It has also made me think differently about what is worth writing about.
When I was a Head of School, blogging came naturally because the school kept providing the curriculum. A classroom visit, a faculty conversation, a new initiative, a parent question, a Jewish holiday, a mistake I had made. There was always something happening that gave me an opportunity to think in public about education and leadership.
Consulting is different.
Confidentiality obviously matters. But there is another challenge. The world is not exactly suffering from a shortage of leadership advice. Spend five minutes on LinkedIn and you can learn that leaders should be authentic, embrace vulnerability, tell compelling stories, lead through change, build strong cultures, empower their teams and, presumably, wake up at 4:30 AM.
I believe most of those things.
I have probably written most of those things.
I am just not sure the world needs me to write them again.
What I am discovering is that moving among schools creates a different kind of learning. After spending most of my career looking deeply at one institution at a time, I now have the privilege of moving between them. And things that look unique from inside one school sometimes begin to rhyme when viewed across several.
Some things also look quite different from this side of the table.
I have learned, for example, that the best organizational system in the world is not particularly useful if it requires technology that a leader has made an intentional religious choice not to carry. “There’s an app for that” turns out not to be much of a consulting strategy. The challenge is not getting the client to fit the solution. It is designing a solution that fits the client.
I have learned that however clear I think I am being, I probably am not. Consultants have a remarkable capacity to take a perfectly understandable idea and turn it into a framework, give the framework three columns, add a few arrows and then wonder why nobody else is excited. I am increasingly suspicious of any language that makes perfect sense to the consultant and requires translation for the people who actually have to use it.
I have learned that putting talented people on an organizational chart and calling them a “leadership team” does not make them one. Neither does putting them in a weekly meeting. Teams require shared work, shared accountability, clarity about who decides what and enough trust to disagree with one another when it matters. Structure can create the conditions for a team. It cannot manufacture one.
And I am learning something about coaching that I am still wrestling with. You can teach a skill. You can model it, practice it, build tools around it and provide feedback. But coaching can create capacity; it cannot manufacture will. At some point, the leader has to choose to do the thing. One of the harder disciplines of coaching may be learning not to work harder at someone’s growth than they are prepared to work themselves.
None of these strikes me as a grand new theory of leadership.
That may be precisely the point.
For years, this blog was a place where I tried to make sense of what I was learning from inside a school. Perhaps this next chapter can be a place to make sense of what I am learning between schools, and from the other side of the table.
Sometimes that may mean discovering a pattern across institutions that look nothing alike. Sometimes it may mean reconsidering something I thought I knew after twenty-plus years in Jewish educational leadership. Sometimes it may simply mean noticing that the elegant answer I carried into a conversation did not survive contact with the actual people in the room.
I expect some familiar themes will continue to show up here. Authenticity still matters. So do ownership, storytelling, learning, culture and change. I haven’t stopped believing the things I believed before.
But perhaps the interesting questions now are less about whether those things are true and more about what happens when they encounter actual institutions, with their histories, personalities, constraints, sacred commitments and wonderfully complicated people.
For most of my career, I wrote about what I could see from inside a school.
Now I get to see what becomes visible between them.
And I’m discovering that the view from here has plenty to teach me.