Working with independent schools through the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, we observed that the highly adaptive schools had heads of school who fostered a collective leadership response. These heads brought those closest to the issue, such as health professionals and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) professionals, along with faculty and parents, into the conversation through collaborative efforts. In contrast, struggling schools were characterized by heads who kept the decision-making process within a small circle of administrators and had to be involved in every facet of their school’s response or by heads who abdicated their responsibility to fully participate. In many situations, the decisions were similar, yet the responses to those actions varied greatly, with the collective leadership model resulting in much less pushback and negative reactions. This further illuminates the notion that the effectiveness of the traditional hierarchical model of leadership is fading. We see this most recently in the success of student, parent, and faculty networks in shaping their schools’ responses to hybrid learning environments. On a grander scale, we are witnessing remarkable grassroots efforts that harness the power of social media platforms to influence political and social agendas in our communities, states, and countries. Today, a teenager championing a strong cause can leverage digital platforms to play a leadership role in shaping global social agendas. This heightened level of activism is empowering individuals at all levels to demonstrate leadership. This is a sharp contrast to older notions of leadership as embedded in positions of formal authority, such as the head of school role. Many schools have been slow to adopt a collaborative, or distributed, leadership model, even though this has been practiced at the departmental level for decades. In many ways, individual autonomy in our schools has inhibited a shift in leadership, in part because of the age-old struggle around authority, power, and titles.
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