Mark McKee
Head of School
Viewpoint School
Calabasas, California
Photo by Tyler Arya
Have you always seen yourself as a school leader?
Oh no. I started teaching in independent schools because I was looking for something that I thought would be meaningful until I figured out what I’d do with my adult life. Like many teachers, I just fell in love with the classroom. So I was something of an accidental educator, and the same thing with leadership. After about 10 years as a full-time teacher, I started becoming engaged and involved in issues outside the classroom. I was interested in what was happening for the students as they went through their day and how the school culture had a powerful impact on that. I found myself leading the summer school or having a role with the school’s technology program to stretch different parts of myself and engage. I never expected I’d be a school head. But as I began to see schools as organizations and became more of a student of organizational behavior, I felt drawn to the headship in a somewhat surprising way.
Why was that surprising?
We’ve all done Myers-Briggs assessments in our leadership trainings, and when I was a classroom teacher, and even a division head, I showed up as an introvert. So I never saw myself in that stereotypical extroverted leadership role. But when I was directing a summer school program, I got to be the head of a program for five weeks. I got to experience that 360-degree view of the headship, and that challenge was intellectually and personally satisfying. I found that I could be that outward-facing leader for those few weeks and then go back to my introverted self.
Experiencing that role gave me the confidence that I formerly lacked to see myself in the head job. So often, particularly with headship, people who have ideas, talent, skills, and vision still cannot see themselves in the role. In the same way that our schools have been encouraging a wider variety and diversity of talented students, we need to encourage talented, motivated, and skilled people to see themselves as a head.
What is your communication style?
It’s been different in my leadership journey. The first school where I was head—Episcopal Day School of St. Matthew (CA)—had fewer than 250 students. As the head, I could stand at the front door of the school and see all of the teachers and students as they arrived for the day. I could walk a couple of halls and be visible to the whole organization.
From that experience, I learned the value of authenticity in communication. Most heads of school think a lot about the written word—how we write, how we speak—and that is very important, but how we show up, our presence, is also important. That leadership presence, and what it means to be present for your school community, is something leaders develop over time.
When I came to Viewpoint, I had to learn what that means for a pre-K through 12th grade community with four divisions on a 40-acre campus. I’m not going to be able to be visible to or touch all parts of my community in a day. I must find other ways to be present to the community, whether through email messages or the way I show up for more formal occasions where I’m speaking.
What advice have you received on your leadership journey?
I came across a construct about how the leader is a secure base for the community in George Kohlrieser’s Care to Dare, and that has been important to me. Leadership, it’s often said, can be lonely. Leaders need to have a secure basis for their own leadership in order to have confidence. The leader provides a secure base for the leadership team, teachers, employees, and ultimately the whole community to show up and be their best. In the other direction, the leader needs a secure base in the board of trustees. Sometimes the head needs to communicate their thinking with the board in a way that doesn’t invite them into decisions. That’s been something that I’ve learned from mentors and from experience.
How do you lead in this time of intense political polarization?
We’ve all been learning the world is VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In some ways, I see that as the definition of leadership now. In our case, we had the Woolsey Fire, which dislocated most of our community and closed school for a week; that was unthinkable at that time. And then we’ve been navigating through COVID-19 and polarization. During the pandemic, when the rules were changing so frequently, we had to identify our values—not just our school’s core values but also our COVID values. When parents wanted to know the rules next week or in two weeks, we could say, “I know you want to know. I want to know, too. But I can tell you this: Whatever the rules are, they’ll be in accordance with these values.” And I think that helped give families some security.
What's your biggest challenge right now?
I answer that question at every board meeting. Right now, the biggest challenge is building the workforce for the future in our independent schools. We need to recruit, retain, incentivize, and develop the very best teachers, staff, and leaders for our schools. That challenge is top of mind for me and for many school leaders. We used to depend upon a pipeline of talented young people. I certainly was a motivated young teacher, but I did not necessarily see myself choosing a career in education. I saw teaching in independent schools as something interesting, and then it became a career and a calling and a real passion.
The levels of debt that students incur in higher education now is going to affect their career choices or even the jobs they want to take right out of college as they finish their education and move forward in the workforce. I worry about our ability to continue to attract teachers in addition to staff and leadership.
What have you been reading that's had an impact?
I recently read Arthur Brooks’ From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, which is about finding the second curve of leadership in life. The other book was Will Storr’s The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It, which I really enjoyed. There’s so much good social science on the intersection of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and psychology, and Storr discusses that.
This summer I also read some fiction. I started as an English teacher, and I don’t read enough fiction now. Kazuo Ishiguro’s book Klara and the Sun was a super-interesting take on artificial intelligence and the ethical questions that we encounter as we look at the future.
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