Fit Prep Flashcards
Most humbling experience
Watching “Raising Bertie”
Leading a change
SpEd
9th grade
Two-schools integration (backup)
Overhauling HSLA Communications
Managing a Team
SpEd
9th
Conflict with Manager
SpEd - Andy about goals and priorities for my team, convincing him to make major investments in instructional changes by understanding his perspective and finding the win-win with bureaucracy-busting first
Lehr’s dad’s book
Initiative/ID Business Need/Ownership
SpEd –> only given goal about bureacuracy busting, ID’d need for instructional changes, led drastic change
History course sequence
Creating Performance Review System
Live Attendance Tracker / Open Campus / Attendance Campaign
Onboarding
Overhauling HSLA Communications
Entrepreneurship / Solving a Problem in a Unique Way
SpEd - not just simple teacher training to address gap, overhauling schedule, three different tiers of support unlike any other school
Two-schools integration
Type of Work I Like to Do Best
SpEd –> working with team on solving ambiguous problem, creating strategic plans that drive impact on the ground (and non-consulting, executing them)
Skills Transferable to Consulting
ID’ing root causes and key drivers, creating aligned strategic solutions, selling stakeholders, managing implementation across stakeholders
SpEd
9th
Two-schools integration
School Expansion Strategy
Time I had to convince someone
SpEd –> Andy, to support major instructional and scheduling changes –> SpEd gap data organized by indivdual and using personal pictures to target his relationship-drive personality.
9th - Joel
Two-Schools Integration
History course sequence
Teamwork
How I work on teams:
- Provide structure for the work, ensure we have clear goals for each meeting, clear action steps/owners/deadlines at the end of each meeting.
- Refiner –> ID flaws in plans and ideas, anticipate surprises and complications because I can think multiple steps ahead from various stakeholders’ perspectives.
- Find flaws in explanation or analysis to make them more airtight
- keep the team postive, build positive momentum, give a ton of gratitude and perspective.
SpEd –> de-emphasize my management role, emphasize my role as a refiner, helpign to create high quality implementation plans from Kayla’s pie-in-the-sky ideas
Two-schools integration
Leading WITHOUT authority
- 9th grade turnaround
- Convincing Andy to support SpEd major initiatives
- Two schools integration - Andy and Lisa
- History course sequence
Difficult People
Joel with checking HW
Working with someone I didn’t like
Joel
Time working on a project in which teammates disagreed
9th Grade –> Joel
9th Grade –> Standardizing best practices –> Knew Sherry couldn’t say “do as I do” so we previewed the meeting with Mona to have her recommend changes that all classes would adopt to increase likelihood other teachers who didn’t like Sherry would vote for them.
Two-schools integration (backup)
Turning around a team culture, Getting cooperation from a tough group
9th
Managing team conflict
9th grade –> Emphasize conflict because of people’s philosophical views (some from seminaries, some from private colleges, some from militaristic schools –> led to wildliy inconsistent experiences for kids, and teachers putting personal preferences over the good of the team –> had to get them to redefine their team as a unified group that made shared sacrifices for students, thorugh standardizing in a way that few would have preferred initially and emphasizing the benefits of their collaboration and ajustment.
Sarah and Lindsey
Persuasion with Data
9th Grade
SpEd
History Course Sequence
School Expansion Strategy
Decision with Incomplete Data
History Course Sequence –> I only had two classes’ tests, didn’t know if there was other data that would refute my argument but there was no way of getting it in the timeframe I needed to make a decision. Andy and I had both just started the job, had to make a time sensitive decision. The limited sample I had was alarming (essays, quantitative data on MC) coupled with the syllabus.
School Expansion Strategy
Biggest Risk
History Course Sequence
Decision that was unpopular
History course sequence –> had to convince teachers who were afraid kids would be bored and misbehave, had to convince students it would be different and better and worthwhile, had to explain to parents the rationale and get their buy-in)
Time I had to obtain hard-to-find info
School Expansion Strategy
School startup playbook –> Had to track down info about what went wrong with tech installation so I could improve the process. The operations director had since the left the network, had to find someone who had his personal contact info, have them pass on a note from me appealing for help in order to help kids.
Process Improvement
Live Attendance Tracker / Open Campus / Attendance Campaign
Performance Review System
Overhauling HSLA Communications
SpEd (backup)
Onboarding
Change Management
Live Attendance Tracker / Open Campus / Attendance Campaign
Overhauling HSLA Communications
SpEd
9th
Seeing a problem as an opportunity
Live Attendance Tracker / Open Campus / Attendance Campaign
Personal Conflict
MaryAnn
Meredith
Lehr with his father’s book
Working with Someone Who Didn’t Like Me
MaryAnn
Meredith
Compromise / Mediating Conflict
Lindsey and Sarah
Ethics
Lehr’s book
Eva and Halloween costumes
If need another one - SpEd
Being hurt for doing what’s right
Lehr’s Book
Andy blaming me for the LT ideas I collected and helped prioritize for leader meetings, or for raising issues I noticed throughout the day our team needed to address.
Ambiguity
Arts and Athletics Team - had to create goals and PD plan with 48 hours notice, didn’t understand their content well enough and didn’t know state of classes other than lack of urgency and accountability –> Had them create 4-year sequences to self-generate meaningful KPIs I could coach them on and could create urgency around
Halloween Costume with Eva and Andy
Weaknesses
Weakness #1: Because I’m risk averse, I have a hard time supporting arguments or initiatives based upon intuition. I push for a more logically reasoned justification or data, but that often means that I prevent breakthroughs or decisions based upon other people’s superior social awareness.
What I’m doing about it:
I go out of my way when I work with new people to be transparent about my weaknesses. I find that in addition to helping build relationships through my vulnerability, this process helps people understand why I’m operating the way I am and they are able to respectfully push back on my when I’m falling into traps, even if they are my direct reports.
I’ve been practicing with my learning team at CBS - saying yes to my teammates’ ideas and getting comfortable in my discomfort, building self-awareness and comfort with the ambiguity.
As a school leader, I would also intentionally start the weak with walkthroughs of classes I managed without having reviewed any quantitative data since Friday. That way I forced myself to do a gut evaluation of how my teachers were doing, to gain insights that would be lost if I just dove into numbers.
Weakness #2: I have a hard time pushing forward with a project if I don’t have all the data I want and if I have not had enough time to understand many different perspectives to feel very confident my decision is right. This slows me down in my personal work and holds my teams back.
Been practicing a lot with my learning team at CBS:
If I’m collaborating with someone on a task, I’ll tell them that I want to set a time limit for how long we spend on a particular aspect of the project to avoid stagnation of my own-creation.
I set timers for myself when I’m 50% of the way done with my time allotted for a task and I ask myself whether I’ll be better off with a more refined product or a finished product, and I adjust course.
Weakness #3: When I enter big social situations in which I don’t know people, I can come off as standoffish unless I’m careful.
At my last job I received feedback that people I worked closely with loved working with me, but that I initially came across as a bit standoffish and hard to get to know. I think there are three reasons for this, that I am working to improve, but it’s an intentional habit-building process:
In that job, I was insecure about my authority as a very young new school leader. I thought I should act in a more formal way than is natural for me, and that read wrong.–> In fact, I’ve since learned that I am far more effective when I work to get to know people and make them feel cared about.
When I enter a large social situation with people I don’t know well, I often find myself deep in thought about the dynamics around me, which reads to others as disengaged. –> Now, I try to dive right into conversation so I can’t get caught deep in thought at the side of the room. I remind myself that I genuinely love learning about people, the work they do, the places they are from, and their passions, and I find someone to go learn about. I’ve practiced this everyday at Business School, building more productive habits, using networking events or the time before class starts to introduce myself to people I don’t know or strengthening a relationship that I’ve started to develop.
Physically, my resting face is closed, which reads to others as cold. I’ve learned that all I need to do is slightly open my face/mouth, and I read as much more approachable and friendly. I intentionally try to correct for this when I’m in social situations.
It hurts me and the people I’m around when people think I’m hard to read or get to know, so I’m working to improve in these areas. I’ve made drastic improvements - I got wonderful feedback from my learning team on this issue through surveys they filled out about me and I’ve successfully networked with each company I’ve interacted with.
Strengths
Strength #1: I have great emotional self-control in stressful environments - I can remain calm, rationale, clearheaded, respectful, and strategic when involved in conflict.
Honed this strength when working in a chaotic classroom in a dysfunctional high school where kids would try to fight in class, would curse at me, try to walk out. I had to maintain my composure, give clear directions and consequences, instruct about complicated concepts in a clear way while correcting distractions. Learned to control my breathing, to challenge my own assumptions and instincts, decide what I want the outcome to be, and make a strategic move to get closer to my desired end result.
For instance, I was leading a turnaround of an underperforming 9th grade teaching team. At one stage, it was critical for all teachers on this team to check every students’ homework every day, by 3pm, so we could hold students accountable before they were dismissed.
The most challenging part came when we discovered that students were improving most quickly when they had rapid feedback about their efforts - they were doing homework in classes in which teachers were checking their assignments for completion each day and praising or giving corrective feedback. They were not doing as much homework in classes in which teachers didn’t check frequently. When teachers didn’t check every day, we also couldn’t track homework completion rates as effectively. As a result, Sherry and I believed it was critical that each teacher commit to checking each homework assignment each day. When I brought this idea up at a team meeting, Joel freaked out and said that would take way too long, he wasn’t willing to work past 4:30 because he had a kid, this was way too much work.
His response was triggering for me. I wanted to assertively respond: “Don’t talk to me so aggressively, who do you think you are? And part of choosing to work in this school is accepting your obligation to do whatever is necessary to help our students succeed, even if it means working until midnight like I do every night.” Of course that would have been ineffective. So…
I took three deep breaths, then I asked myself what’s the most generous interpretation of why he’s acting like this and what does he need, I asked myself what do I want to get out of this interaction, and then I decided on my next move.
I started talking a bit more slowly to calm myself down and to de-escalate the situation. I said, “Joel, you seem upset about this. I understand that you think this requirement is going to add an hour of work for you each day and you are concerned it will interfere with your home life. If I am able to prove to you that it doesn’t have to, will you give it a shot for a week and we can re-evaluate? Let’s meet this afternoon in your classroom and I’ll show you how you can efficiently check homework to support this team without it being a major burden for you.”
That gave me room to think quickly about ways for Joel to meet my requirements as efficiently as possible. I realized he could circulate in the classroom during the first five minutes and check each assignment for completion as kids did a review problem silently, and how we could then give this data to a student leader to enter into a tracker online. The whole process could be done in 5 minutes.
That afternoon, I explained this to him, but he was still skeptical. Therefore, I literally walked around an empty classroom, pretending to talk to students, modeling for him how he could use a checklist on a clipboard with some pre-determined criteria to quickly assess the quality of student’s homework within the first five minutes of class as students did independent work. He was still skeptical, so I went to his classroom that afternoon and physically checked his kids homework with a stopwatch in my hand, and I gave the data to a student to upload for me - in under 5 minutes. Then I observed him, coached, him, and gave him feedback on this process in his next three lessons.
He was sold and so bought in that he agreed to demonstrate this process at the next team meeting so we could get everybody on board. He also became my biggest advocate, later often referencing that day when discussing my strengths as a leader.
Many moments like these helped us transform a team and drive major results for students, leading to a doubling in the # off students who completed 100% of their homework each week.
Strength #2: I am great at taking people’s pie in the sky and half-baked ideas and transforming them into detailed and achievable implementation plans that are grounded in facts and analysis. I identify flaws in plans and analysis that most people miss, I analyze situations from various perspectives, and I anticipate surprises and complications.
For example, one of my teams was trying to radically improve the quality of our instruction and support for students with disabilities, because they were performing about 11% below the rest of the school. Kayla, the special education director, had good picture ideas, such as adding new classes, changing assistant principals’ KPIs and daily routines, and doing whole-staff trainings about how to improve their instruction. I worked closely with her to improve her draft implementation plan. We improved the sequence of interventions, we adjusted the plan based upon the perspectives and concerns we anticipated each stakeholder would have, and we revised the logistical details to avoid overloading teachers or students at certain parts of the day. This plan led to us closing the gap between students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers from 11% to 3%, making us the leader in the network of 40 schools.
Strength #3: Analyzing data to find critical areas of improvement and leading teams to make this improvement.
9th grade turnaround - noticed in my data analysis a need to provide students with a more consistent experience from class to class to improve homework completion rates and to reduce the number of escalated behavioral issues we faced.
Leadership Style
I prioritize trust:
- Intentional efforts to build relationships, usually through 1x1s.
- Radical candor
- Calm responses to pushback to encourage people to raise issues and give me feedback
- Excellent follow through and communication of updates.
- Readily admit my failures and weaknesses to express vulnerability
- 3:1 ratio
Model learning and dedication to excellence - I share what I’m learning, what I’m reading, the self-study I do outside of work, the feedback I get from everyone and how I’m responding, the mistakes I make and what I’m doing differently as a result.
Try my best to reduce power hierarchies and fear to bring the best ideas to light:
- Never sit at the end of the table at meetings I’m leading
- Try to have someone else facilitate the meeting so I can focus on the dynamic in the meeting, making sure I don’t add too much value that would decrease people’s ownership and initiative and that people are communicating in a way that’s productive.
Ask challenging questions to get to the heart of the issue. make sure we consider each stakeholder’s perspective, that we are aware of our heuristics
I give a ton of praise and notes of appreciation throughout the organization.
How I work on Teams
- Model learning and dedication to excellence - I share what I’m learning, what I’m reading, the self-study I do outside of work, the feedback I get from everyone and how I’m responding, the mistakes I make and what I’m doing differently as a result.
- Great at helping a struggling team see the larger perspective and their strengths and wins to build upon as they work to produce more substantial improvement quickly. Great at helping a high achieving team keep pushing the bar and never getting complacent.
- Ask challenging questions to get to the heart of the issue. Make sure we consider each stakeholder’s perspective, that we are aware of our heuristics, that we are thinking three steps ahead about holes in our plan or larger implications of our decisions.
- I have always been the most reliable member of my team, and I push teams to improve process to improve effectiveness. I led our leader team at HSLA to eventually start asking for next steps and sending out meeting minutes without my being there, to start meetings by stating a decision-making process, to set protocols to get the best input, etc. I ensure there’s a clear goal that we are driving at, clarity around the question at hand, and clarity about what success would look like. I notice when people are talking past each other or are misunderstanding each other and I point it out and often clarify both sides’ arguments if necessary.
- I give a ton of praise and notes of appreciation throughout the organization.
- I care a lot about making sure that teams function at high levels. If meeting and decision making protocols don’t exist, I propose them and offer to facilitate so that every voice can be heard and everyone feels comfortable sharing opinions openly, and so that everyone knows how decisions will be made ahead of time. I also am obsessive about making sure that any next step has a clear single owner and due date, so ideas don’t die through diffusion of responsibility.
- I also am very candid and will push people to back up their assumptions, will challenge people’s ideas, and will give a lot of credit for ideas shared that push my thinking or that challenge my own.
Failures
Failure #1: Lesson plan structures with history department first year
I had really learned how to teach at a charter school in Newark called North Star Academy. They were one of the highest performing schools for low income students in the country - they were taking students from poor neighborhoods and getting them all into colleges, many of them on full scholarships. People were literally traveling around the world to visit and learn from our school. North Star did many things right, but one way in which they were unique was they required all teachers to follow specific lesson plan structures that built in best practices for each classroom. For instance, all teachers had to give students independent work to do for the first five minutes of class, so that students would be calm and productive from the time they entered your room and you could check in with students and set the tone for a productive class. Nobody really challenged these best practices at North Star because they were clearly so effective, because all leaders and managers were totally bought into them, and teachers’ evaluations measured implementation of teacher practices like these. As a young teacher, being required to implement these practices just seemed like learning how to teach well, and I was very successful in part by using these strategies.
Therefore, when I became an Assistant Principal at another school, I thought that I should replicate these best practices, both on the teacher side and the management side. I thought that I could successfully require all teachers to use common lesson plan structures and they would be enthusiastic to do so, once they understood how effective they were. I was ready to collect and give feedback on lesson plans, just like my bosses did at North Star.
This approach failed miserably. The culture at my new school was totally different because Andy was opposed to anything didactic and didn’t believe instruction was the key to success - he wanted teachers to spend most of their time building relationships with students and parents and didn’t believe the details of a lesson were the key lever, so he didn’t write lesson plans when he was a teacher and he didn’t believe that teachers had to write lesson plans. As such, he didn’t put any kind of guardrails on instruction and didn’t really support my desire to collect and give feedback on lesson plans. However, I still thought that I should collect and give lesson plan feedback and should require teachers to implement best practices.
A few of my veteran teachers were very annoyed that I had higher requirements for lesson planning than their friends in other departments had, that they had to put more work in, that they had less flexibility in how they designed their lessons. Often they just disregarded the lesson plan structures and didn’t submit their lesson plans to me. I tried to hold them accountable but my principal clearly didn’t have my back. It was really tense for a bit as I saw these teachers really struggle and saw that they were fairly uninspired as a result of my management.
For the remainder of the year and for the entire next year, I totally changed my approach. I focused on setting very clear vision for what excellence looked like in student work samples, or the outputs, and didn’t put much emphasis on evaluating the inputs such as teacher actions or lesson plan design. I used data from student writing samples and exams to get teachers to deeply reflect upon what they were doing effectively and ineffectively and then coached them to improve upon their ineffective behaviors, based upon a shared understanding of the result that we wanted to change. Teachers had much more flexibility to design lessons creatively and to solve problems creatively.
I learned a ton from this failure. 1. It’s so much more effective to influence rather than tell, unless safety is involved. 2. It’s critical to be aligned with your manager and with the organizational culture or everything you try to do with your team will be much harder. 3. My job as a manager is to set vision, coach, motivate, and support, not to tell how to do the job.
Failure #2: Elevator
- This is a story about my failure to gain alignment with my boss and my boss’s boss and my failure to change course when I knew I didn’t have alignment.
One of the five teams I was managing was our operations team, which in part is responsible for maintaining excellence in facilities. This team was overwhelmed with major projects that directly affected our ability to achieve of mission of preparing students for success in college - for instance, they were fighting a major real estate developer who was doing construction during school hours that was so loud that students couldn’t hear their teachers, and they were improving safety systems to make sure we were prepared for emergencies in our building.
They were already above capacity when our CEO, my manager’s manager, decided that it was important that we address an escalator in our building that would break down once every few weeks. We shared a building with five other schools and the elevator was probably 70 years old and was maintained by bureaucrats in the Department of Education who moved slowly on everything and had a shoestring budget. The escalator was not a priority for them, no matter how many times we raised concerns about it, because they had legitimate safety issues in their hundreds of buildings throughout the city. The escalator was an issue for our CEO because she brought potential donors to our school for tours, and she didn’t like that they’d either have to walk up stairs or take an old elevator.
My managers and I agreed that fixing the escalator was a not a legitimate priority, that the city wouldn’t dedicate the necessary resources to fix it (and that it would be ethically questionable to put so much political pressure on them to spend the little money they had on this issue when other schools nearby had legitimate safety issues with their facilities). We agreed to continue pushing the city, but that we wouldn’t spend so much time on it that it would hurt our other priorities that were actually mission-critical. My bosses thought that if we communicated incremental progress to my CEO, that she’d be fine with us and would give us room to do the work we really needed to do for our kids.
I should have realized that my bosses and the CEO were not aligned and that he wasn’t willing to spend the political capital to tell her so directly. Instead, it appeared to her that we were just incompetent and too slow to move, since she didn’t see rapid progress. As a result, she had less faith in us, resulting in us having less space to make the necessary bold decisions we had to make to be successful as a school, with everyone terrified of her wrath each day.
I should have known that we were destined for failure if my bosses were not aligned with their manager, and I should have insisted that we fight for more resources or find a way to deprioritize other projects to free up resources if nobody was willing to tell her directly that her priorities on the issue were off.
In the end, I learned how important it is to gain alignment and buy-in up the hierarchy. It’s better to do many great but not perfect actions efficiently because you have buy-in than it is to struggle to do fewer ideal actions without buy-in. Obviously you should work to gain buy-in, but if I know that my boss is not aligned with her boss, then I need to re-evaluate how to proceed.
Failure #3: Pep Rally –> quick background about NSA culture, my belief in different management style of promoting ownership and giving a lot of autonomy. Made the mistake of not carefully checking pep rally plan that Meredith had owned (new hire but highly acclaimed and brought in to our school as a top performer, very unsure how to manage her against my instincts to be more involved. She failed to oversee her team, I failed to oversee her because I wanted to give autonomy and not feel like a micromanager and I was stretched very thin with many open spots so I couldn’t thought partner with her along the way. Saw the plan the morning of and I had to scramble last second to salvage. I learned that I need to be comfortable laying out on the friend end the criteria for success, giving a lot of flexibility to produce a first draft by a set benchmark date, then feel comfortable making my direct reports own revisions or redoing to ensure the criteria are met.
Why did you study history and psychology undergrad?
History: I was required to take a humanities course and so I chose American history, feeling a sense of obligation to better understand the country I lived in. The class was so different from my high school history experience and it really opened my eyes to how much I could learn by training to think like a historian. Unlike my high school class which simply required us to memorize stories the teacher told and to answer fact-based MC questions, in college I had to analyze dozens of primary sources to corroborate and challenge hypotheses about the past, to consider each document in the context it was written in to understand motivations, biases, and deeper meaning in language. I had to pit documents against each other to gain a fuller picture of what was happening at the time, and I had to weave together fact-based narratives that were persuasive in their carefully-crafted logic and in their precision and concision. I’ve always been deeply interested in understanding people and systems, and history gave me a useful way of learning more while developing critical thinking and communication skills I knew I’d need the rest of my life.
Psychology: I took an intro to psych course my first year, unaware of what psychology really meant, and I was hooked. I thoroughly enjoyed studying and critiquing creative research design and learning why humans think and act the way they do so I could better understand the world around me. I became truly passionate about psychology in my first social psych course when I began to understand how much people respond to their environment, and how the same person can act in totally different ways with small adjustments to their environment without realizing. I saw clearly how I could use intentional environmental and cultural design to get the best out of people, how to recognize and avoid cognitive biases and heuristics that cause people to make preventable mistakes, often tragically. Ever since, I’ve been passionate about organizational design, training, and behavioral economics.
Studies that fascinate me:
What do you do when you know you’re right, but the rest of the group disagrees with you? Do you bow to group pressure? In a series of famous experiments conducted during the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that people would give the wrong answer on a test in order to fit in with the rest of the group.
In Asch’s famous conformity experiments, people were shown a line and then asked to select the line of a matching length from a group of three. Asch also placed confederates in the group who would intentionally select the wrong lines. The results revealed that when other people picked the wrong line, participants were likely to conform and give the same answers as the rest of the group.
While we might like to believe that we would resist group pressure (especially when we know the group is wrong), Asch’s results revealed that people are surprisingly susceptible to conformity. Not only did Asch’s experiment teach us a great deal about the power of conformity, it also inspired a whole host of additional research on how people conform and obey, including Milgram’s infamous obedience experiments.
Books I’ve read:
Drive by Daniel Pink
Nudge - Richard Thaler
Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
What I do outside of work not on my resume:
Spend a lot of time doing informational interviews about pre-schools, interviewing school leaders and senior level leaders in supporting organizations, economists. Work with Appletree to help them determine whether to open in NYC, to craft their approach to potential partnerships, etc. Connect them with economists. I have networked with pre-school leaders, such as James Matison (CBS alum, CEO of Brooklyn Kindergarten Society), Sophia Pappas (head of NYC’s public pre-school system), Art Rolnick (leading economist in country studying effects of pre-K), Rich Sussman (head of early childhood programs for the Hartford Foundation), Michael Levine (Sesame Workshop), Aaron sojourner from bus economic council and professor of econ at Carlson studying effects of Pre-K. Professor Tracy breslin.
Resume Story - Book Club
Resume Story - Book Club
Book club focused on ethics and policy Ethics and the Real World -
“Which is more important, public health or private freedom?”
“Should we modify human genes to cure diseases?” (well-intentioned scientists with ethics will create a tool that they can’t control, will inevitably be used by someone with less noble purposes, such as creating a super-human military, tinkering with genes to get kid to be ivy-league ready…and once that happens, it starts an arms race and everyone else is going to be forced to do it too to keep up).
Life 3.0 - when we have artificial intelligence driving us, how does it decide when it’s about to run into a person what to do - should it hit the person ahead or swerve and hit a different group of people? What if directly ahead is one person that’s 99 years old and to her right is a group of pregnant mothers?
Quest for Cosmic Justice
21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Harrari (Sapiens, Homo Deus)
Winners Take All
Weapons of Math Destruction
Resume Story - Operations Team KPIs at EBCS:
I started on the operations team at a new school, and I’m soaking up everything I see and hear around me. I notice that the main office staff are not working with the level of urgency and initiative that I’d become accustomed to, and that I’d hope for them to display.
In meetings with my boss, their manager, I heard him complain about their lack of initiative and effort as well.
I started to hypothesize about why these staff members, all perfectly nice and smart, were not performing at the levels they needed to. I reviewed all the documents I had been given as I was onboarding, and one of them was a list of tasks they were responsible for, such as “breakfast,” “nurse,” “parent communication,” “enrollment.” I asked one of the team members if there was any other document listing out their role deliverables or any metrics they were expected to meet. They said no. This was in stark contrast to the sophisticated performance metrics dashboard that leaders like us were judged on, with clear targets and monthly progress monitoring.
This led me to hypothesize that one key reason the team lacked initiative and investment was that they had no role clarity and no measurable outcome to motivate them to perform excellently. Two weeks in, I raised this noticing to my boss and said I’d like to interview the team to figure out whether my hyphothesis was accurate, and then I’d like to draft KPIs for the team. He agreed.
I interviewed, and as expected, each team member couldn’t define what excellence looked like in their role, they said they didn’t actually do some of the items that they were assigned on their list, and they didn’t know what was expected of them.
I researched three other school’s operations rubrics, aligned them to the goals that our boss was responsible for, and added new ones to create a set of KPIs for the school.
Resume Story - Donuts
Peter Pan and Moe’s Doughs in Greenpoint
Dough Hut in Long Beach, LI
Donuts before dinner and donuts at our wedding
Resume Story - Live Music
Resume Story - Live Music
Jazz - Robert Glasper
Soul - Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings
Funk - Dumpstaphunk
Rock - My Morning Jacket
Resume Story - NSA Lesson Structure
Resume Story: New NSA Lesson Structure
–> impact: Widely adopted throughout department and across three other schools that came to see me teach and adapted
–> Key point - data driven experimentation and optimization with daily exit ticket data and pilots between my classes with the same content
Resume Story: My favorite topic in history (in case there’s a history buff):
Resume Story: My favorite topic in history (in case there’s a history buff): Diffusion of religions and cultures across long distance trade routes such as the Silk Roads, the Indian Ocean trade networks, and the Trans-Saharan trade routes.
Islam to western Africa from the Middle East by merchants traveling by camel across the dessert trading gold, and by leaders like Mansa Musa looking for better economic connections.
Buddhism from India to China and how the Chinese people initially thought Buddhism was a terrifying cultural invasion that would destroy their country, wouldn’t let Buddhists into the cities.
Islam blending with Hinduism in the art in Cambodia (stories from the Quran on Hindu architecture)
Why should I hire you? What’s my competitive advantage?
Far more management and leadership experience than most other MBA students:
I’ve managed more than 40 people over the years, and in one of my roles managed 13 people including two managers with 12 indirect reports across a wide range of functions and content areas. These staff have been highly diverse in race, gender, and experience.
I’ve been the second in command in a school of 60 staff members and responsible for more than half of the school’s functioning.
I can communicate complex ideas to clients and associates using disparate sources of info
I had to teach teenagers how to read, write, and craft arguments.
As a history teacher I had to synthesize complex causes of global trends and wars
I had to make a compelling case for the special ed turnaround and school overhaul.
I wrote a report for our CEO comparing our charter network with the one I previously worked at, with candid assessments of the many ways our organization was falling short and how we could fix them.
Grit and exceptional work ethic:
I’ve helped start a new high school from the ground up
I’ve worked nearly 100 hours a week as a teacher in a low income community while feeling like a failure most hours of most day
I’ve worked in environments with cultures honoring brutally candid feedback, receiving weekly reminders of my weaknesses and failures with little praise
Most reliable member on any team I’m on. I get the job done, on time, with high levels of communication and proactivity, I anticipate issues and create plans to overcome them, I anticipate people’s unstated or unknown needs and meet them to their delight (giving mike all of the summer school letters, gathering leader team updates for Andy when he was away or overwhelmed, etc.)
I’m really intellectually curious and I love learning, so I pick up on new skills and topics quickly and am able to adapt.
I’m highly coachable because I work with little ego and a deep desire to learn from those around me, I’m highly receptive to feedback and have been consistently praised for my successful implementation of it.
Had to learn how to manage behavior in a classroom, had to learn all the course content (thousands of years of history), had to learn how to teach history effectively, then had to learn how to give effective feedback, how to delegate, how to motivate and inspire.
I seek out resources to learn skills and knowledge I need without any direction, I can develop myself.
I think globally and inclusively.
I’ve intentionally built meaningful relationships with people from very diverse backgrounds in terms of race, gender, religion, socio-economics, region, nationality. I have developed meaningful friendships with Yemeni janitors, homeless mothers seeking their GED, progressive activists, deeply religious conservatives, investment bankers, and families living in trailer parks in rural NC.
It’s clear that so many of my classmates have major blind spots when it comes to understanding how people live outside of white wealthy manhattan (or other international equivalents). For instance, when they were contemplating strategy for Apple’s iphone expansion, they didn’t seem to understand that there are hundreds of millions of Americans who choose Android because they can’t afford iphones and that the annoyance of having to use a messaging service other than imessage is not going to prompt people to buy iphones. They didn’t understand that people living in Manhattan below 96th street might be indifferent to Uber versus yellow taxis, but that Uber and Lyft are the only real sources of cars for hire deep in Brooklyn and the Bronx where my students live.
Finally, many of my male colleagues don’t realize that they frequently cut off women in class, repeat their answers as their own, and in doing so prevent women from contributing and growing to their potential.
From Twink: It’s important to note that these massive successes have only been possible because of Andrew’s proven track record of cross-cultural effectiveness. His professional teams are composed of diverse individuals, and operate in the context of a school population that is 95% Black and mostly low-income. In fact, his two employees who have shown the most growth are both Black, and one identifies as gay. He keeps both the individual employee and the team dynamics in mind. It’s no surprise that his teams show the second highest staff retention rate in our school.
What’s been most interesting from what I’m learning in school:
Business Analytics - Predictive analytics, using tools like K-nearest neighbors to predict whether someone will like a movie or a song based upon the characteristics of the content or the person, like what Netflix and Pandora use to recommend content to keep you engaged.
Strategy class - Learning how to make decisions the leverage your competitive advantage. I.e. Should Disney own hotels and cruise lines? They could easily sign contracts with hotel and cruise companies to pay licensing fees but the Disney brand is about meticulous attention to detail in the customer experience, so they expanded their corporate scope to include owning and managing dozens of properties around the world.
What am I taking next semester (demonstrates interest in the job?)
Power and Influence: To learn how to map power dynamics and politics in organizations, to learn how to gain and exert influence within an organization. [CUT for Bridgewater]
Beyond that, I’m intentionally stretching myself. If I did what was most enjoyable to me or easiest for me, I would take the dozens of management courses I am very excited by. Instead, I am thinking about the skills I will need to make a big impact and I’m taking courses that will make me more well-rounded and more capable of deriving actionable insights from large data sets - Business Analytics 2, Applied Regression Analysis. Econometrics for Modern Business, and a coding course in SQL to be able to access databases.
Additionally, Operations Strategy, Leader’s Voice, Napoleon’s Glance, which is about strategic intuition.
What do you get excited about? What turns you on?
Ethical dilemmas –> would be thrilled to spend an hour each day with a great beer or coffee arguing over questions such as:
“Which is more important, public health or private freedom?”
“Should we modify human genes to cure diseases?” (well-intentioned scientists with ethics will create a tool that they can’t control, will inevitably be used by someone with less noble purposes, such as creating a super-human military, tinkering with genes to get kid to be ivy-league ready…and once that happens, it starts an arms race and everyone else is going to be forced to do it too to keep up).
Tell me something unique about yourself
Wrote our wedding contract and ceremony, wrote and officiated friend’s wedding.
I have had meaningful relationships with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, giving me a very unique perspective on the world: Janitors in rural NC that are single mothers, Yemeni immigrant custodians, teachers in rural NC that are horribly racist, Singaporean millenials, first generation students from the rust belt, west african teenagers.
Tell me about a time you used quantitative skills, data modeling skills
I’ve done my most sophisticated quantitative work at business school, especially in business analytics. In that class we had to design simulations to optimize hotel bookings, we learned how to use excel functions to optimize investment portfolios, we learned how to measure the impact of experimental interventions in charter schools to control for the impact of luck, and we used logistic regressions to optimize spending on medical interventions.
I’m building upon this foundation this coming semester, taking rigorous quantitative electives such as Business Analytics II, Applied Regression Analysis, Econometrics for Modern Business, and Intro to Programming in SQL.
At work, I used a wide variety of data to create our COO’s geographic expansion strategy [see story above]
I also used quantitative analysis to study gaps in student performance to create action plans after each exam.
What was best team you worked on? What made it best?
The history team I managed my last year in an instructional role. Everyone was totally bought in on our mission, everyone trusted each other, everyone pulled their weight, people acted like owners for the entire department stepping in when another teacher was struggling or taking over their classes if someone had to be out. We argued about the best ways to reach our goals, never about whether we should reach our goals or whether we should put in whatever work was necessary to do get there.
They pushed through so much ambiguity with Curriculum Revolution mess, all their work thrown out and constant uncertainty about expectations for them.
Weak spot - couldn’t get them to challenge each other directly enough, they were a bit too afraid of conflict
What are the benefits and obstacles of creating a diverse workforce?
Benefits:
Organizations do their best work when their teams reflect the constituencies they are serving. Diverse teams solve problems more effectively because they have insight from more unique perspectives and are less likely to make mistakes due to avoidable blind spots.
Orgs are competing for the world’s top talent, and this talent is wildly diverse. However, people from underrepresented backgrounds face unique challenges in the work place that often cause them to fail to meet their potential or make them not want to work in a particular organization. For many people, it’s important for to have friends, mentors, and colleagues at work who are similar to them for them to feel included and appreciated.
Challenges
Need to eliminate as much bias as possible in human capital systems, from hiring, to training, to pay, to promotion.
It’s challenging to create an inclusive work environment that will make people from underrepresented backgrounds want to join and stay on the team. People have deeply ingrained conscious and unconscious biases that affect the way they interact with their colleagues, often creating a toxic environment.
Disagreement within our society about how much of a role identity-based bias plays in outcomes, and whether or not as a society we should even strive for equity in outcomes. This makes it hard for some companies to focus on diversity because their shareholders are not uniform in their beliefs and demand immediate returns, and it’s not always easy to quantify the profit benefit in the short term of promoting diversity in your workplace. Especially, since research shows that in certain circumstances, diverse teams are less productive.
My experience:
I’ve spent my entire career in some of the more progressive organizations in the country. I’ve only worked in schools that serve low-income brown and black children and most of my managers have been people of color. In each organization, we did dozens of hours of diversity and inclusion work each year, which I fully supported and contributed to. As a result, I’ve been a bit shocked at business school to realize what the rest of the world is like - I have a lot of classmates who think that D&I work is a waste of time and is a threat to them, people have walked out of our D&I workshops midway, visibly annoyed. It’s really awoken me to the challenge that we face across corporate America. As a result, I’ve been trying to contribute to making Columbia a more inclusive space: 1. I took on a leadership role in a men’s ally group for women in business, and I joined the campus’ diversity and inclusion club to try. We have a ton of work to do.
Imagine put on project outside of core work and strengths, everyone else is more senior. How would I proceed?
[humility, quick to learn]
That sounds like a dream, such a great opportunity to learn.
I would meet with people on the team to gain a deep understanding of:
The project’s goals
The context for the project
The best resources I can use to self-teach any knowledge or skills I need
The team member’s working styles and preferences
What knowledge and skills I have that are applicable to the project, what are the ways in which I can most effectively and most uniquely contribute that might not be immediately obvious
The team members’ expectations for me
The key is to act with humility, recognizing that I need to listen and learn more than I contribute at first, but that I can contribute in specific moments and specific ways from the start. Equally importantly is putting the work in outside of normal hours to get myself up to speed, to ask for frequent feedback and course correct on a daily basis, and to go into each day with a growth goal for myself.
Time when working on an assignment with unclear owner but had to get the project done, what I did
One way I’ve consistently contributed to teams I’m on is by providing structure, clarity, and accountability for work streams. When I was an Assistant Principal I was part of an 8 person leadership team that was designing and building a brand new high school model day by day. It was a highly entrepreneurial and fluid project with daily leadership team meetings at 5:30pm to assess our daily progress, to solve issues that arose that day, to respond to the most up to date data, and to plan what everyone was going to work on that evening before the next day. By 5:30 everyone was exhausted and so people would want to get out of the meetings as soon as possible, so there was a lot of pressure and momentum to quickly rattle through the problems and updates from the day. I immediately saw a huge problem coming - we had identified a dozen ideas for solutions to problems that were raised but nobody had been assigned ownership over the next steps or a deadline by which to complete them. I decided it was critical to pause the meeting, backtrack, and assign owners and deadlines for each task. I did this day after day, with my colleagues often frustrated that the meeting went a few minutes longer, but to great effect for our team. I soon advocated to my boss to be the facilitator and note-taker at our meeting, ensuring that we drafted an shared document to the entire team with meeting notes, next steps with owners and deadlines as we went, and that we wouldn’t move on to the next agenda item until we had clarity on ownership.
Of course there have been times when I wasn’t in the room to proactively solve delegation issues. Sometimes my principal would send out a memo to our leader team with his analysis of school-wide issues and what he thought were aligned solutions. He invariably would leave off owners and deadlines. As soon as I would see these emails, I’d draft a delegation plan taking into account different leader team member’s strengths, workloads, and work streams. I would reply to the email saying that I want to ensure that these action items get done at a high level and I’m concerned about ownership. Can you please reply back to the group with clear owners, and here’s a delegation plan you can adopt wholesale or in part? He would thank me every time and forward my delegation plan back to the team and have them report progress to me.
Of course there were rare occasions when I couldn’t support the team by organizing the work and I just took it on myself. I never let a task go unaddressed to kids detriment just because nobody had assigned me it.
Time I had to adjust my working style to better work with a colleague:
Andy –> I want to be efficient, get my work done so I can meet all my goals. Andy very relationship-driven. So I had to adjust to engage in small chit chat at start of every meeting him, discussing food and workouts. Banana Republic, working out together.
Time honesty was inappropriate:
Bauer complaining to me about Omar’s missed deliverables. I was working with him privately on creating a basic personal org system knowing in confidence he had a major learning disability, couldn’t share that with Bauer.
Successful presentation or speech? How did I prepare? Obstacles?
Daily in class
Weekly in trainings
Launching new communication system whole-staff. Had to sell on why the changes and why the restrictions (no SMS among teams), sell on shared sacrifice for better collective experience at work given the feedback I received in my research. Had to describe each tool and process clearly, when to use what, without boring them. Had to get Hangouts setup on everyone’s computer very quickly.
Policy I conformed with I didn’t agree with:
History curriculum take-over by network with kids reading books they didn’t understand because they had no background knowledge and watching videos every day. Thought it was a horrible use of time, counterproductive given end goals. Pushed principal, he was in the hot seat with his manager and not willing to fight whole-heartedly, asked me to make changes on the margin (ended up backfiring, he never got Eva’s buy-in and she flipped out when she saw a teacher had changed a question from the given curriculum, at my direction). I focused on what I could control, which was improving writing, reading, and discussion in class.
Elevator –> continued to push despite thinking it was a poor use of city $
Project Management / Planning Example:
Regional staff trainings at USI
Start with end goal in mind –> visualized and plan out every detail of event experience from user’s perspective
Plan all the steps needed to take to get there. Sequence them. Create workstreams. See what I can delegate, if possible. Set deadlines for each.
Create benchmarks for what should be done by end of each week.
Signs, food, photocopies, materials from principals, emails to request info 2 weeks ahead of time, follow-ups, time scheduled on calendar to do most critical work at appropriate time, as placeholder.
If managing team, shared calendar and task list, ideally Trello or Google Sheets.
Tell me about a time I didn’t meet a deadline:
I didn’t finish a research paper my senior year of college, got too deep into the weeds of the research and wanting to more deeply understand the content, was never ready to begin writing. Started writing a 15 page paper the day before it was due, didn’t finish.
[learning] –> haven’t made this mistake since, am always the most organized person on my team and if I know I am behind or might be behind I let others know and ask for an extension or help re-prioritizing, do so very conservatively even though I am usually able to meet the initial timeline. Know how missing deadlines affects others’ work
How have you helped others?
Constant part of my work experience –> everything from helping to carry boxes and clean up a room after an event, to staying late to support someone who is working on an important task and will be at the office late on their own, to observing and giving people feedback at their request, to taking on major projects when someone had a rough patch in life and needed more time at home (SAT administration for 250 students across the city and special Saturday sessions for students in the city who needed 1:1 administration)
How have you pushed yourself to grow outside of your comfort zone?
This has been a common theme of my life - hockey in 9th grade, triathalon in the winter in a frat house in college, taking on responsibility for half of the school without knowing having any expertise over most of the departments I was tasked with leading, to the entire business school experience (climbing a bigger mountain - like getting a Wall Street quant getting a PhD in poetry)
How you work individually?
–> School Expansion Strategy
High levels of focus
Map out the steps I need to take, who I need support from, benchmarks I need to hit. Contact people I need support from as early as possible, ideally 4 weeks ahead of time and ask to get time on their calendar.
After every several hours of work I try to find someone with a different perspective to hear a brief summary of my progress and thinking and to suggest questions or flaws in my approach or assumptions or to suggest resources.
Keep my manager on the project updated on an interval we agree upon on the front end.
Why Organization / Human Capital?
I have two reasons: 1. The work’s aligned with my intellectual passion; and 2. I’m motivated by my experiences working in two types of organizations, one of which was wildly more successful as a result of their approach to human capital.
I’ve been intellectually fascinated by organizational and human capital issues since I took my first psychology course as a freshman in college. I quickly decided to add psychology as a second major, and have been studying how to make teams, organizations, and individuals meet their potential ever since. I read all the Harvard Business Review, behavioral economics, and human capital literature I can find. I even advocated to be given projects that allowed me to test my skills and interest in doing human capital work. For instance, I
I designed our high school’s first onboarding program and performance review process.
I overhauled our school’s communication and data storage systems to improve teacher’s ability to communicate across the school more effectively and to access the information they needed to do their job.
I led a merger of two high schools, designing and executing strategies to integrate leadership teams, teaching teams, and communication systems to free up resources for students.
I helped design our school’s org chart to align our management reporting and training structures to meet our strategic goals.
Helped structure the long term growth of the school when we found out we’d be keeping the 8th grade with us. Other APs and Andy had originally advocated for APs by grade level and then department chairs at each grade level (the latter which doesn’t make sense). i advocated (and ultimately succeeded in convincing the team) to adapt an AP by discipline model and to add deans by grade level and to add an AP for Talent because I saw two hours a day not being strategically managed for maximum benefit. I also pushed for the development of an IL system to develop more content-based leadership experience and pipeline for new high school APs.
I’ve worked in two types of schools: A traditional public school as part of Teach For America, and in two high performing public charter schools. On the surface, the schools were similar - they had about 600 teenagers attend, almost all black, almost all poor. They had the same goal of getting students into college. Critically, we didn’t choose our students in any of the schools, and the schools were free for students. However, the outcomes couldn’t have been more different. [Pause] The traditional public school couldn’t get a single student to pass a college-level exam and they had abysmal college acceptance rates. The charter schools had 100% college acceptance rates, high test scores, and our students earned nearly a million dollars in merit-based scholarships.
What truly separated these schools was the quality of their human capital processes and organizational design:
Unlike the traditional public school that failed in nearly each of these ways, the charter schools had developed effective talent acquisition and management programs, great staff training, and industry-leading leadership-development programs. The Chief People Officers had led principals to create wonderful working environments in which teachers were happy to put in 70+ hours per week with low pay, and development programs that pushed teachers and leaders to constantly improve.
It is tragic that millions of people spend most of their life at work, failing to meet their potential, often because their organizations, much like my NC public school, failed to create environments that promoted their best work. In my post-MBA career, I want to help organization’s improve their effectiveness as they grow, morph, and deal with the significant disruption they are facing in a rapidly changing technological and competitive landscape.
