This past week was a challenging one that reminded me of the importance of embracing hard feedback.  Costa Rica is in the midst of the most severe wave of COVID-19 cases since the onset of the pandemic.  The national government, in an attempt to control the outbreak, has outlined renewed restrictions that seek to limit contagion without shutting down key elements of the economy.   Last Monday, the public school system got involved, with the Ministry of Education announcing that they would be shifting the academic calendar to allow schools to shut down for 3 weeks during the peak of the COVID wave.  This declaration made it mandatory for public schools to close their doors starting today.  

The decision to shift the calendar and mandate public school closures left private schools in the country in limbo.  In a private meeting that same Monday afternoon, we were informed that private schools would be required to shift entirely to virtual learning during the 3 week public school closure.  We were invited to move forward accordingly, with the understanding that physical school closure was not optional.  

We made the formal announcement the next day that the final three weeks of school would be entirely virtual.  Unlike previous decisions and communications with our school community over the course of our navigation of the COVID pandemic, this communication raised immediate concerns from many members of our school community.  Without a formal announcement from the Ministry of Health and Education that virtual learning was a mandate, why would we announce a move to virtual education?  Furthermore, if the government could shift in-person options in a moment, our families wanted to know what we were doing to ensure that the upcoming school year would be as free of disruptions and limits to in-person learning as possible.  

When feedback comes in a flood like it did this past week, it can be difficult to process and appreciate it.  If you allow yourself to get in a defensive mode, then you can become blind to the fact that the feedback can actually make you better and stronger moving forward.  Of course we had a strong rationale for our decision to close, both fulfilling the need to provide several days’ notice to cancel contracts for in-person services, and to provide our staff and families with enough advance notice to plan accordingly.  Additionally, by the end of the week, we did get an official announcement from the Ministry of Health and Education.  Moving to virtual was the legal expectation, and we had been proactive in our communication about that.  Yet the feedback that had come was still incredibly helpful.  Some of our families felt that as an administration, we weren’t being responsive enough to their needs as parents.  In other cases, there was concern that our communication had been too one-sided and that we weren’t curious enough about how our parents were feeling about any decision to close in-person services.

The result of the feedback was some genuine reflection and planning to act on what we heard.  This included us planning an information and feedback session to talk with our community about our planning for reopening in August.  I also had the chance to personally reach out to some of our families to better understand what they were thinking and feeling about how plans were unfolding.  In the end, I came away with a better sense of the decisions we needed to make as a school that would best meet the needs of our students and families.  It was another reminder that the moment when it is hardest to hear the feedback is often the time when you need it the most.  

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This morning I arrived at school with staff buzzing about an announcement this morning by the Costa Rican Ministry of Education, closing public schools for three weeks and shifting the school year into January (Costa Rica’s educational calendar runs from late February to mid-December).  Of course we’re a private school, and we run on an American system calendar – August through June – so we are awaiting some further clarification from discussions between the Association of Private Schools in the country and the Ministry of Ed.  Hopefully we’ll have some clarity by the end of the day, if not tomorrow morning.  Regardless of the decision and subsequent details, it’s just another reminder of what a true roller coaster hybrid learning has been this year in schools around the world.  

The longer we have been in crisis mode around the world, the deeper is my sadness for our kids.  I’m by nature a very optimistic person, and I also believe that children are incredibly resilient.  Yet still, the thought of kids around the world, not to mention at my school or my own children, who don’t have access to the spaces to play, to interact, to learn and grow brings more than a little heartbreak.  I was commenting just last night to my wife, that our youngest daughter, now two, will likely never participate in what we refer to at our church as “nursery.”  Nursery is a class for 18 month olds to 3 years old where our kids have typically had their first experience with formal learning spaces and interaction.  They have a lesson, play games, color, have snack time, enjoy singing time, and generally begin the important process of socialization.  Our little girl was just 6 weeks shy of entering nursery when we went into lockdown in California.  Now in Costa Rica, it seems there is little chance that nursery will be up and running by early November when she turns 3.  She’ll miss entirely what was for our other children an important rite of passage.

The same can be said on a much larger scale for kids around the world.  While the United States and other wealthy nations are just now seeing shifts towards normalcy, much of the world is facing another 6-12 months (or more) of COVID restrictions and waves of cases.  We’re planning a return to school in August under hybrid learning conditions.  While our return to school hybrid plan will likely include a full day of school on campus, we’ll still have restrictions to how many students can be on campus based on social distancing.  Plus, the past month and it’s COVID wave in Costa Rica has reminded us of the need for constant, daily flexibility in what we can offer.  

The irony, is that after nearly 10 months of virtual learning, our staff and community were more than ready to come back to campus in late January when we opened for hybrid learning.  While most of the schools in the Central America region stayed closed, we felt deeply grateful and lucky to be in Costa Rica, where things were being managed relatively well and schools were being allowed to reopen with certain strict protocols in place.  For nearly 3 months, case rates in the country were low, and we didn’t have a single positive case amongst our students.  Then, after our Spring Break week and Easter, it seems that the wheels came off the bus, and we faced contagion at the nationwide level, and increased cases amongst our school community.  Our COVID leadership team was meeting on a day to day basis, scheduling interviews of potential cases, assigning quarantine measures as necessary, and in two cases, moving entire school departments into temporary virtual mode.  Now we face the opposite set of feelings.  5 months of hybrid learning and simultaneous instruction has everyone ready for a vacation.  

For our parents and community, there have been different needs.  Many parents, especially of our smallest learners, have been desperate to get their kids to class and keep the school open.  We have likewise gone to great lengths to keep our doors open.  Yet there has been a different impact with staff, who unlike our parents and students, don’t have the option to stay home when case rates in the neighborhood or community spike.  Teachers themselves are visibly torn, wanting to be at school for their students, while also concerned at the heightened risk that comes with being outside their homes.  We’ve tried to walk that line and find the appropriate balance, but it has been very difficult at times.

And now, the announcement that public schools are closing for 3 weeks, which happens to coincide exactly with our last 3 weeks of school.  Yes, it’s disrupting.  Yes, it’s challenging to staff and students alike.  Yet the positive side of all of this is that as a school we have learned a tremendous amount of flexibility.  I was commenting to a member of our team how remarkable it is that we have the capacity to accommodate students in-person or virtually on an individual basis, on a week to week or even day to day basis.  Schools have not been traditionally designed to accommodate such personalization.  Of course that flexibility and adaptability has come at a cost.  The learning curve for many teachers has been steep.  Planning and delivering simultaneous instruction to in-person and at-home students can be exhausting.  

Last week as I sat on a call with school heads around the Latin America region, several participants on the call announced how excited their schools were to finally move from virtual to hybrid mode.  Unlike in Costa Rica where we’ve been in hybrid for the entire semester, most private international schools in the region have remained closed to in-person learning.  We’re having the opposite experience, with many families and virtually all staff wishing we could move to virtual mode for a few weeks to wait out the wave of COVID cases in the country.  It seems that wherever you are, when it comes to schools, we’re all still riding the roller coaster.  

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I describe Leadership on the Line as my leadership bible.  Heifetz & Linsky’s (2017) book is one that I love and come back to over and over again.  I first read it as part of my School Leadership program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and I’m currently reading it with my leadership team at Lincoln.  First of all, it’s a fun read.  I love the integration of examples across industries and countries.  Whether we’re talking about political systems in South America, peace negotiations in the Middle East, or private industry in the United States, there are plenty of fascinating leadership scenarios to explore.  I also love how Heifetz and Linsky distill the most important concepts into simple metaphors.  The concepts are “sticky,” and I often find myself referring to them with my own leadership team.  Here are just four of the “stickiest” concepts that seem to be forever imprinted on my brain.  

Adaptive vs. Technical Work: With Technical work, people have problems for which they already have the procedural knowledge and skills necessary to fix things.  It’s just a matter of identifying and implementation the right solution.  Adaptive work is much trickier.  Those are the problems that cannot be solved without adopting new ways of doing the work – new attitudes, new behaviors, new discoveries.  Of course human beings don’t like change, so Adaptive work unleashes all kinds of problems and potential dysfunction.  With Adaptive work, people get uncomfortable, especially when the leader they look to proposes change instead of stability and predictability as the formula for moving forward.  

The Balcony & the Dance Floor: When you are engaged personally and deeply in the work, you sometimes lose your perspective.  Heifetz & Linksy use the metaphor of the balcony and the dance floor to illustrate the importance of not only doing the work (the dance floor), but pulling yourself away from the action often enough to get a bigger perspective of what is happening (the balcony).  On the dance floor, we’re so busy with what is happening in front of us that we just focus on doing the dance.  It isn’t until we get up on the balcony that we can see different patterns, differences amongst the dancers, or notice some people who aren’t dancing at all.  It’s the leadership work of constantly going from participant to observer to back again in order to ensure that our actions take into consideration the full context.  

Accept Responsibility for Your Piece of the Mess: This is another concept – really just a simply question – that I go back to over and over again.  I am constantly asking myself, “what are you doing that is part of the problem?”  It’s a question that can help keep us humble in our leadership roles.  It’s also a question that can prevent us from blaming others, where we attribute fault outside of ourselves and often, misdiagnose problems.

Control the Temperature: Really, the entire chapter about orchestrating productive conflict is one of the most potent chapters of the book.  It’s the idea of strategically controlling the temperature, however, that most sticks with me.  Basically, your organization is like a pot on a stove.  Too much heat and everything boils over and makes a mess you can’t contain.  Too little heat and nothing happens.  No transformation of what’s inside the pot.  In terms of human capacity, too much change and uncertainty and your pass people’s tolerance limits.  Too little change and you don’t reach a threshold for human learning and adaptation.  The idea is to master the tools to both raise the heat and lower the temperature as necessary so that your organization constantly stays within a productive range of stress.  

My dad was the oldest of 7.  The Allen family long held the tradition of rotating through Nana & Grandad’s house on Christmas morning for the annual Allen breakfast.  This annual rite of artery stuffing included grandkids bringing their prized toy from Santa to share and show off with cousins, aunts, and uncles.  About 10 years ago, one of the cousins brought a brand new skate board.  My dad decided he wanted to give it a go.  He jumped on, pushed off with one foot, and immediately crashed straight over backward, hitting his head hard on the pavement.  I was genuinely worried he had seriously hurt himself.  We rushed over as he quickly jumped up and insisted he was fine, perhaps more embarrassed than injured.  Needless to say, I never saw him on a skateboard again.  

In his youth, my dad had served in the United State Navy, and for a time was trained as a search and rescue diver.  He reminded his kids that jumping out of helicopters into the boisterous ocean was just part of the job.  No big deal.

I thought about these two extremes of physicality in my dad’s life while listening to a podcast last week about how we have to deliberately fight to keep our mobility, strength, and confidence as we age.  The podcast guest, Vic Verdier, was a former French commando who held records for mixed gas deep water diving, and who insisted that we have to be deliberate in our efforts to keep our bodies primed for explosive movement, flexibility, and endurance.  He warned listeners about the negative consequences of letting ourselves go.  As he described different techniques and strategies for keeping our edge, he mentioned several times that it would require us to do things that people around us might find silly.  Climbing trees.  Crawling across the ground.  Squatting in front of our computers at work.  

Obviously, Vic’s recommendations were focused on maintaining our physical vitality and stamina.  Those are important elements of staying healthy in the face of leadership challenges.  But I couldn’t help think that there are also direct correlaries to our knowledge work as professionals.  Indeed, Stephen Covey’s famous 7 Habits of Highly Successful People suggests that “sharpening the saw” is one of the seven essential traits of leadership.  By sharpening the saw, he encouraged us to pursue constant renewal, in physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual endeavors.  Sometimes, when we get busy, we start to take those elements for granted.  We get comfortable and stop pushing ourselves to learn new things, challenge our thinking, or develop our spirituality.  We assume those things can either wait until later, or perhaps are no longer priorities that require our effort or attention.  When the moment of challenge or adversity comes when we need to draw on our strength, whether it be physical, emotional, spiritual, or intellectual, we may find that it has faded and we can’t quite seem to power through.  

So, today, I found myself squatting in the garden, or getting up from the floor where I had sat down to do some writing.  Simple things to try to maintain my physical mobility and strength.  Similarly, I’m trying to push my inner development, making sure to always have a good book near my bed, to stay engaged in my spiritual life, or to write in my journal to explore my ever-changing emotional outlook on life.   Keeping our edge is about making time for the little things, no matter how silly we may feel.  

What goes unused slowly fades, whether it be physical strength, emotional connection, or even intellect and memory.  Of course aging is a universal process that nobody can completely escape in the end.  It seems that eventually we will all face a gradual decline in strength and ability.  But, why not fight it as long as you can?