Word: Inheritance

Sentence:

We do not choose everything we inherit, but we do choose what we carry forward.

Passage:

When I walked into my first principalship, there had been four principals in four years.

Each leader had created their own version of the school. For good or bad, each had left something behind. Systems. Traditions. Relationships. Wounds. Ideas that worked and ideas that did not. My job was not simply to arrive with a new vision and erase everything that had come before me. My job was to understand what I had inherited.

There is a temptation when you take over something to reset it. Start fresh. Put your stamp on it. Show people quickly that things are going to be different. But organizations rarely need to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.

Sometimes seeds have already been planted and just need to be watered. Sometimes something has outgrown the place where it was planted and needs to be repotted. And sometimes something that is no longer working still deserves to be understood, because at some point a person or a team created it trying to solve a real problem.

I tried to remember that. Even the things I wanted to change had a story.

Learning and unlearning are deeply connected. Before asking people to let go of something, I needed to understand why they had held onto it in the first place.

I had also inherited more than systems and programs. I had inherited a history.

Sullivan high school was founded in a community shaped by Jewish immigrant and refugee families. Decades later, students were once again arriving from all over the world. More than forty languages were spoken inside our building. Young people were walking through our doors after leaving countries, communities, and sometimes families behind. The past and present were meeting in the same hallways.

I began to understand that my responsibility was not to create an entirely new Sullivan. It was to listen closely enough to understand what Sullivan had been at its best and figure out how to carry that forward. At its heart, it had long been a place where people searching for home could find one.

That changed the way I looked at the school. If I went searching for deficits, I could find plenty of them. If I went searching for assets, I could find those too. The same was true of the people. Every student, teacher, family, tradition, and team carried something that could help us become what we were trying to become.

The work was figuring out what deserved to come with us.

The longer I have thought about inheritance, the more I realize this is not just a leadership lesson. It is a life lesson.

We all inherit things long before we ever lead an organization. We inherit family traditions, stories, recipes, faith, humor, work ethic, ways of loving people, and ways of celebrating. We also inherit ways of handling conflict, fear, expectations, pain, and habits that may have traveled through generations without anyone stopping to ask whether they still serve us.

Eventually, we get to decide what happens next.

Growing does not require us to reject everything that came before us. Moving forward is not the same thing as starting over. Sometimes the past actually makes the future more valuable because we understand what it took to get here and what is worth protecting.

There are things worth preserving, things worth growing, and things worth changing. There may also be things we decide should end with us.

That is true in a school, but it is also true in a family, a company, a neighborhood, a community, and within our own lives. Whenever we enter something that existed before us, we become part of a story already being written. We have to decide what we will honor, what we will learn from, what we will change, and what we will eventually pass along to someone else.

We may not get to choose our inheritance.

But we do get to decide what we carry forward.

Your Turn:

What have you inherited that is worth carrying forward, and what might be yours to change?

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