Senior Admin Meeting

Last week the Senior Admin Team - Mitch (Head of School), Mohammad (Business Manager), Diane (Advancement Director), Kathy (ECC Director), Gretchen (Middle School Director) and myself - spent a day and a half in a retreat-style meeting off campus at Gretchen's house.



We began with an activity Mitch designed, choosing one of three lenses to tell a personal story that connects to our current work. I knew the story I wanted to tell almost at once, and it was "connecting the dots" of my childhood feeling of happiness with my adult life (the other options were speaking to Ron Richart's concept of a culture of learning, or the TBS learning outcomes). As the youngest of four kids, I was expected to play a classical instrument - my siblings played oboe, clarinet, and trumpet, and I was taken to the symphony at age 9 and told to pick an instrument I liked. While my siblings cared passionately about their instrument and skill, and put in the requisite practice to gain first chairs in competitive youth groups such as BYSO and MYWE, I was relatively unhappy not just with the French Horn, but with having to spend so much time on an activity about which I lacked passion, and never put in the effort to achieve a high degree of skill or success. When I broke my two front upper teeth in 11th grade during a hockey game, it provided a perfect opportunity for me to shift instruments, and I began playing guitar.

Twenty years later, while my siblings love and appreciate music, they do not play instruments, whereas I play guitar every day. The lesson for me is that, as adults it's ok tell our children that "you will be do some athletic event to stay healthy" or "you will do some performing art", but it's equally as important to listen to them - and to help them find their voice - and be participants in the process, because that is how we can nurture their passions and prepare them for a meaningful life.

The second conversation of the afternoon was a generative discussion based on the results of this spring's family surveys. We looked in depth at areas of the results that spoke to our strengths and challenges, and identified low-hanging fruit we could immediately begin working on to make a difference to our families.

The next morning we again gathered at Gretchen's house, spending the morning in a leadership training with TBS parent Amy Huang of Trimergence. Amy had each of us fill out a self-assessment that measured the absolute and relative importance of logic, emotion, and intuition in our approach to our work, and from there had us identify our "door" on the Enneagram through the Nine Doors framework. We shared the results of our intelligence self-assessments, and dove into the subtleties of how each of us approaches our work, sharing stories and reflections and insights with each other, and thus beginning the process of coalescing our new team. This activity was a wonderful way to get to know Kathy, and the other members of the team in deeper ways, and it resonated closely with the training I have done in depth this year as part of my EQ development.

This conversation continued after lunch, with updates and discussions on practical topics such as the state of enrollment, development, the budget, and various other summer projects. We ended at 5:00 and met our spouses for a "thank you" dinner at Comal Restaurant in Berkeley (the construction of which involved at least three TBS families).