First Steps

June, 1999. Graduation. Gathered were a joyful and anticipatory hall full of chattering parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. The school had projected approximately fifteen guests per graduate; very few seats were empty.

The school’s instrumental ensemble began a bit from Handel, guests found their seats and looked around congratulating friends. Handel gave way to a processional march. First came the student marshals in their bright sashes, and then the faculty, several in doctoral gowns, most of the remaining in masters’ hoods, all with the bright velvet colors of their disciplines. I followed as headmaster, an old fashioned term meaning both lead teacher and CEO. After the teachers had taken their seats in the reserved front rows, I stood center aisle in my bright red robe with black velvet sleeve slashes, raised my arms and motioned for quiet – then with the traditional open palm that welcomes an old friend, I signaled the imminent entrance of our graduates. Pomp and Circumstance reverberated throughout the auditorium; the proud but self-conscious graduates gowned in blue and white entered to all eyes turned in their direction.

Baker, Beasley, Carter, Feinstein… Zimmerman, they came up on stage. I followed striding over to the podium to welcome the assembled guests and our graduating seniors. Though this event played out uniquely for each graduate, it was for me yet another evening of speakers, awards and diplomas. Students rendered passionately glowing personal experiences, often lauding particular teachers. The Board Chair spoke about the fine education these students had received from such an exceptional faculty. Finally came the heavy artillery, the guest speaker, whose topic was the need in industry and political life for leaders of integrity; she ended observing that this ceremony announced not a conclusion but a commencement to the rest of their lives.

Leadership? How could this topic never have entered the faculty’s curricular conversations nor the strategic plans of the Board of Trustees. After the excitement of the previous two weeks, determining awards, preparing my own remarks, and overseeing the procedures for this event, the chatter of speaker after speaker offered a certain personal lull, during which I mused over where each of these fine young men and women whom I had grown to love would be doing ten years out. Would they be leaders? Would I be proud of their accomplishments?

I focused on each senior; I knew them each so well. John would enter his father’s business. Agatha would fulfill her dream of becoming a vet. Sam would go on to be a fine teacher. Sally had the makings of an eminent lawyer. Each in his or her own way would become a leader; of this I had no doubt. Would they be leaders – yes! My first question proved easy to answer. As vampiristic as it sounds, the world thirsts for fresh, young blood to fulfill leadership positions vacated by those moving up. Life would welcome these well read, well spoken, and well informed graduates; positions of leadership would await their enthusiasm and self confidence. Of this I had no doubt. The depth of our curriculum assured entry level leadership. Though I thought I knew how to prepare young adults for initial leadership, I wondered if we had taught them to be good, successful leaders, particularly over the long haul.

But I worried. Had we taught them to be good leaders? These musings found oral expression in numerous of my conversations over the next couple of days. The more people I spoke with the greater was my realization that we educators neither agreed on what made a good leader, nor did we know what a leadership program should even look like, much less one that would serve out students well into their own evolving life in the upcoming new century. Like many other armchair critics, we all too easily blamed or praised leaders who had mantled great communal responsibilities, but we little understood how they got there. As teachers and institutions we lovingly touted our accomplished alumni as if their success was our doing; but we ignored those alumni who had embraced a life of scoundreling, scandal, or much worse, ignominy. Smart parents neither take credit nor blame for the actions of their grown children; schools rarely follow their example. Interestingly, autobiographies of great men and women frequently comment on the importance of their high school years.

Could we define leadership? Could we figure out what we did to help this leadership develop? When I asked a class of seniors how they thought people got to be leaders, almost every one claimed that leadership was a combination of luck and innate ability. Since seventeen year olds tend to accept cultural assumptions as their own deep thinking, I felt fairly certain that their perspective was the coin of thought held most widely by adults. But the common coin had frequently proved counterfeit when put to the test. Did not parenting have anything to do with leadership success? Starting at least in kindergarten the bar graph of time in school ranked almost as high as the waking time spent with their parents. By high school, in-school-time towered over the few hours that teens still spent with their parents. If life experiences during this important growth period affected one’s future ability to lead, then one ought to be able to hold high schools at least partly accountable for the future success of these would be leaders.

I wondered if high schools had ever thought of leadership training as part of their mission. Having been on the faculty of Rutgers Preparatory School, founded in 1766, I knew that way back, prior to our country’s own independence, the prep school had opened its doors in order to prime the admissions pump for the soon to be minted Rutgers College. Both the college and its preparatory school were developed to train the new world’s first indigenously trained doctors, ministers, teachers, lawyers and politicians, in other words to develop a cadre of home-grown leaders. The mission statements of these Colonial academies emphasized core values, more so than a curriculum in literature, mathematics, and science. Solid leadership presumed right conduct – and conduct could be trained. Leadership could be learned.

Only after the new country had established a sustainable leadership pipeline did the new country, under the guidance of Horace Mann and others, consider it important to develop an educated citizenry. The development of leaders came first.

Every generation needs its own cadre of leaders. Did a viable leadership pipeline still exist? Perhaps the rising tide of universal education had raised all ships – making leadership (pun intended) nothing more than fate, right person in the right place? Over the next decade these unsettling questions led me on a physical and intellectual journey, whose story, told here in no linear fashion, I hope to unfold through the opportunity that this blog presents.

In 2002, after having been a head of three very different schools over 19 years, I again looked for a new school – but this time I wanted to be at a school that considered the training of leaders to be among its top priorities. I interviewed widely at little known and big name private schools. To my amazement, trustee after trustee disavowed any responsibility for leadership development. They seemed to have no interest in taking up this challenge – particularly if raising this question might unsettle or re-adjust the configuration of their “happy” institutions. Trustees keep the school in trust over the long haul; they are by definition conservative minded. When I finally found a small group of community leaders who sought to found a school with leadership development as one of its top three priorities, I was ecstatic – even more so when they hired me to help them.

Now I had to provide some answers, not just play the philosopher and ask questions. I discovered that industry took leadership development seriously as did almost every college and university, especially those outside the northeast. A body of research existed to guide my thinking – and, more importantly, my actions as I helped design the school. Architecting leadership questions into very concrete actions proved to be an exciting but lonely journey. Very, very few high school educators hiked this same trail, and those that did were mountains apart, too distant to know of the others.

Since those early years, more and more high schools have provided leadership programs; I have met a few at national leadership conferences. My observations and experiences may prove helpful to others asking similar questions, and taking a similar journey. Despite meeting very few fellow high school travelers, my quest has been anything but lonely; I have met many, many fine people along my path., several have become lasting friends. Because their own personal stories, frequently intertwine with mine, they will figure in this narrative, only lightly masked by pseudonyms to afford them privacy, and me the efficiency of writing without the time consuming task of securing permissions.