Behavioral Interview Stories > Key Topics > Flashcards
Key Topics Flashcards
Flexibility
**Google project cancellation
**Tech team messing up attendance software, using opportunity to improve data tracking and open-campus
Backup: Arts and Athletics 4 year sequence
Ambiguity
**Google project cancellation
**Tech team messing up attendance software, using opportunity to improve data tracking and open-campus
Backup: Arts and Athletics 4 year sequence
Turned Problem into Opportunity
- Tech team messing up attendance software, using opportunity to improve data tracking and open-campus
- Arts and Athletics 4 Year Sequence
Initiative
**Special Education: Not just focusing on boss’s goal of bureaucracy busting, developing three tiers of support and whole new school day model as opposed to normal route of just trying to train teachers.
**Identifying need for communication overhaul and overhauling it
Backup: Tech team messing up attendance software, using opportunity to improve data tracking and open-campus
Entrepreneurship
**Special Education: Not just focusing on boss’s goal of bureaucracy busting, developing three tiers of support and whole new school day model as opposed to normal route of just trying to train teachers.
**Identifying need for communication overhaul and overhauling it
Backup: Tech team messing up attendance software, using opportunity to improve data tracking and open-campus
Leadership
**Special Education
*9th Grade Turnaround: neither Sherry nor the 9th grade teachers were my direct reports
Conflict with a Manager
- Special Education –> emphasize Andy’s sharp response when I said bureaucracy-busting was important but also a distraction from need to focus on instructional improvement –> how I put myself in his shoes, understood the pressure he was facing from Eva (her top priority), and that he might have been looking out for me given I had three other new teams as well
- History course sequence before my first day of work
Convincing/Persuasion with Data/Metrics
- Special Education –> SpEd gap data used to convince Andy to overhaul trainings and school day –> cut the data by department, by teacher, by student across their classes, by grade level, compared to historical data and to competitors –> showed that a subset of students needed more time across all core classes, other subset needed additional teacher in the room for a few classes; together this meant overhauling school schedule; and that all students with special needs were doing much better in certain teachers’ classes which indicated a teacher investment and skill issue to address.
- 9th Grade Turnaround –> homework data by student, by teacher, versus historical, versus competitors at other college prep schools; behavioral data by teacher versus the structure of their class routines
- School expansion strategy –> historical application and enrollment data overlaid with test scores overlaid with demographic changes from census and other sociological studies
Difficult People/Teams:
- 9th Grade Turnaround
- -> For difficult individual: Joel
- -> For difficult team: Emphasize conflict because of people’s differing philosophical views, some from seminaries, some from private colleges, some from military schools, each with wildly different expectations for kids. People putting personal preferences over the good of the team, having to get them to redefine their team as a unified group that made shared sacrifices for students, through standardizing in a way that few would have preferred initially and emphasizing the benefits of their collaboration and adjustments. - Two Schools Integration –> Andy and Lisa
Teamwork
How I work on teams:
- Provide structure for the work, ensure we have clear goals for each meeting, clear action steps/owners/deadlines
- Listen for areas of agreement, areas where parties are speaking past each other; find ways to synthesize areas of convergence and divergence to help clarify where we need to go
- Listen for unstated assumptions, illuminate them for the team and propose how to test and how to identify potential risks
- Refiner: ID flaws in plans and ideas, anticipate surprises and complications because I can think multiple steps ahead from various stakeholders’ perspectives
- Take pie in the sky plans, create implementation plans (long term and highly detailed daily or event plans)
- Find flaws in analysis or explanations, help refine them so they are less prone to refutation
- Keep the team positive, build positive momentum, give a ton of gratitude, help the team stay focused on the big picture
- Example from SpEd Story: Kayla had good big picture ideas such as adding new classes, changing AP’s KPIs and daily routines, doing whole staff instructional trainings. 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 stakeholders would have, we revised the logistical details to avoid overloading teachers or students at certain parts of the day.
Special Education –> de-emphasize my management role, emphasize my role as a refiner, helping to create high quality implementation plans from pie-in-the-sky ideas. - Two schools integration
Risks I’ve Taken
- History Course Sequence
- Arts and Athletics 4 Year Sequence –> Taking on these two teams, likely overstretching, taking on a sector I knew nothing about, taking on an underperforming team with no clear goals
Process Improvement
- Identifying need for communication overhaul and overhauling it
- Two schools integration: Leadership team meetings and weekly communication to staff
- Tech team messing up attendance software, using the opportunity to improve data tracking and open-campus
Making Decisions with Incomplete Data
- **School expansion strategy
- *History Course Sequence only one set of exams, no other data
- Backup: Arts and Athletics 4 year sequence need to tailor story to emphasize how little time I had, how I was only able to get enough data to know directionally the path forward before the kickoff meeting
Making Unpopular / Hard Decisions:
- SpEd –> overhauling schedule, getting 12 teachers to take on additional classes
- History course sequence
Time I had to obtain hard-to-find information
- School expansion strategy –> next year’s enrollment data –> built model that projected enrollment based upon previous trends in enrollment, recent test scores, board of education meeting minutes, appearances in the news, etc.
- School startup playbook –> Had to track down info about what went wrong with tech installation so I could improve the process. The operations directors had since 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.
Communication System Overhaul
CONTEXT:
Staff constantly distracted by our communication systems (getting text messages from coworkers while teaching with expectation they respond).
Teachers missing tons of deadlines and deliverables because they didn’t know what their managers expected them to produce.
Teachers didn’t know where to get information needed to do their job.
Similarly, managers frustrated that teachers weren’t reading their emails or completing their tasks.
ACTIONS:
Took initiative to spend summer break designing new communication systems and staff expectations:
1. Gathered data from a wide variety of staff members across multiple teams –> what were biggest sources of frustration, what would they want to be true in an ideal state?
- Analyzed all interview and survey data and identified 3 key priorities (I can go into them if you’re interested).
A. Clear rules about when to use email versus a text-message-like tool based upon how urgently the recipient would have to read the message.
o Teachers needed to be able to focus on their most critical work without constantly being interrupted by text messages from their colleagues, or with fear that they would miss out on critical information if they weren’t constantly checking their email. At the same time, leaders needed their direct reports to read updates fairly frequently as were building the school day to day and plans were constantly changing.
B. 95% of tasks teachers had to create would be put into a single document that was collaboratively created and carefully edited by Thursday of the previous week This was to promote better future-planning and to decrease the number of missed tasks.
o Teachers felt like they were receiving deliverables from all angles at all times of the day. There wasn’t a single list of tasks they had to complete for the various departments that were making requests of them, and people were requesting time-intensive action at the last minute due to poor planning. People were missing deliverables right and left.
C. I would create a data storage system to serve as a hub for all information teachers needed to do their jobs
o Teachers needed a consistent place to find the various documents and trackers their teams and managers were creating and using - they seemed to have a new tracker to fill out every couple of days and couldn’t keep track of them in their email.
- I went to my manager to share my findings, to get his buy-in on the outcomes I was striving for in a new system; I developed several prototypes and got multiple rounds of feedback and iterated.
- I prepared and executed my change management plan, rollout messaging and presentation.
RESULT:
- Some departments reduced their missed deliverable rate from 30% to 5%.
- Qualitatively, so much praise from people saying they were able to focus on important work for the first time.
• If asked about struggle/failure:
o Was rushed over the summer and didn’t understand change management as well as I do now…so I made the mistake of not going above and beyond to get all key influencers’ buy-in. Didn’t get Bauers’ so she secretly started text text chains, undermining the system had to call her out for hurting the effort and her team since comm plan designed to improve her teacher’s experience and availability.
- [If asked] The end product:
- No SMS - use Hangout/Gchat groups for your team as a replacement for group texts and direct messages as replacement for text messages (put the “texting” on the same screen as email since we used Gmail, easy to search, and easy to mute notifications when doing focused work)
- Everyone had to check the Hangouts 3x a day - once before starting work, once at lunch, and once before leaving for the day. All leaders or people delegating work had to put tasks and updates in the appropriate channels, knowing the recipient was not obligated to check except these three times a day (preserve focus, encourage future planning, allow for course corrections every four hours)
- I created the Hub with Google Sites - integrated the task lists (via Trello), Google Calendar, embedded Google Docs, embedded YouTube videos, etc.
- I led task list creation meeting each Tuesday, edited on Wednesday and Thursday.
Additional details: In our first two years, we had a culture in which teachers were expected to check text messages and email all the time; teachers were never focused in class because they'd be on five group text chains that were unregulated and were distracting them all period long, and the culture was such that the last second planning and communication was tolerated and modeled by principal, so teachers were actually required to check each message that came in while they were teaching or on prep periods. Also no regulation of what types of messages should be on which types of communication methods…big proposals going over text message chains, for instance, in between inside jokes that would ping 40 people at once. --> Created guidelines for email, distinguished between how to use trello/gmail/hangouts, banned SMS/imessages, created the HUB website to cut down on the number of places people would have to go to get trackers and reference documents, created rules for our calendar. Went through multiple rounds of ideation and refinement, making the processes more simple and streamlined each time, getting feedback from a wide variety of stakeholders in each round. had to communicate the processes/rules/dos/don'ts on paper, then in a compelling whole-staff presentation, then follow up reminders and feedback, tracked usage and errors, drove the change. Hugely beneficial, teachers and leaders loved it after initial resistance. --> Was particularly challenging because my principal, Andy, was the #1 offender last year and at the start of this year…he at first took it personally when I said that we had to change our process, but I convinced him it was a critical change. Then I had to hold him accountable for modeling perfectly even though it required him changing his processes and working against his preferences.
Google Project Cancellation
CONTEXT:
- Summer internship at Google - 12 weeks, evaluated on the quality of a final product and presentation at the end of the 11th week.
- Hit the ground running on a project about Machine Learning, was loving it.
- 4 weeks in my manager tells me that I am not allowed to work on it anymore–apparently it was top secret, I should have never known about it, and the legal team told me to shred my documents!
- So now I have about 6 weeks left - my manager said he had no ideas for what my project should be.
ACTIONS:
- I interviewed 5 senior leaders all around the world to better understand what challenges they faced and how I might be able to support in a way that would make a big impact.
- I picked the issue that was highest impact and still feasible in the time I had remaining –> this involved improving their market intelligence
- Finally, I spent four weeks gathering and analyzing as much data as I could so I could present a strategy for senior leadership –> this meant quantitative analysis and conducting structured interviews across the department. I worked day and night–I spent all my daytime hours interviewing people and workshopping ideas, and then spent evenings preparing for interviews and analyzing data because that work didn’t require my colleagues to be present.
RESULT:
- At the end of the summer I was able to present a strategy that my manager and his manager loved, that they thought would provide a great roadmap for a key priority for the team.
- They asked me to return full time.
LEARNING:
- While the result was positive, more significantly for me was what I learned from it. I learned that I could function well with ambiguity. I attribute that to my experience working in the most challenging schools in the country and in my experience helping to design a new school to reach vague but ambitious goals.
- Now I’m excited to continue to use this skill set in my future work.
–> Why I didn’t go back to Google -> Want to do a role that will have a positive impact on the environment and greenhouse gas emissions.
Arts and Athletics 4 Year Sequence
CONTEXT
- Promoted to take over management of an underperforming team made up of a dozen arts and athletics teachers and coaches. The previous year they had been widely seen as cultural outliers on our faculty—unlike our academic teachers who were super data-driven and were working 12 hour days and overcoming all types of challenges to get our students prepared for college, this team had very little to show for their efforts—our sports teams weren’t good, our arts performances weren’t good, students weren’t focused in their classes, and the team had a reputation of acting with very low levels of ownership.
- I was responsible for turning this team around and moving the department towards our ultimate vision of providing world-class arts and athletics education. From the time that I was promoted to take on this team, I only had a few days before we’d have our first departmental kickoff meeting—I had to plan the kickoff, I didn’t have much time to set priorities, and I knew nothing about arts or athletics.
ACTIONS:
So I created an issue tree of the potential key factors, systems, and stakeholders that were contributing to the problem and developed hypotheses about what was going wrong.
Next, I gathered quantitative and qualitative data to test my hypotheses.
• I looked at each of their gradebooks from the previous year to see how students were performing and the level of expectations they held for their students.
• Cut data by department, teachers, and grade level.
• I interviewed each teacher to ask what their vision for their class was, how they defined success, how they decided how to spend each class, how they made instructional decisions.
I identified what I thought were the key drivers and the most simple aligned solutions. After gathering feedback from diverse perspectives, considering corner cases, interrogating how my own biases and blindspots might be affecting my thinking, and evaluating 2nd and 3rd order consequences, I ultimately decided:
- I had teachers set very specific goals for student skill development in each of their classes, backwards planning from what we’d want students to be able to do by graduation. For instance, in Basketball 101, the teacher would have to coach students to dribble down the court with their non-dominant hand and their eyes up. In Basketball 201 they would have to be able to make 20/30 free throws.
- I had found in my analysis that teachers lacked a vision for excellence for their subject, they felt zero accountability for student growth, and they only felt accountable for ensuring their class was safe and students weren’t causing trouble. The data revealed that they weren’t grading on mastery as most students had really high grades, even those who were clearly not good at that subject! My goal was to get teachers to set a stake in the ground about what they wanted students to learn in a way that was authentic for their subject matter, ambitious, and measurable. Each week they would feel accountable to their peers and to me for data on their students’ growth and I’d coach them on how to improve given the data.
Finally, I crafted project plans and change management plans that anticipated likely challenges, and then I executed on the ground.
RESULTS: Teachers operated with a whole new sense of ownership, initiative, entrepreneurship, and passion for their work. They were using data to reflect upon their teaching, they would divide the class into subsections to coach them on different skills simultaneously, and were in general acting so much more intentionally.
Basketball team increased their number of wins, the theater and dance performance was noticeably much better, and teachers were given much higher ratings by their students.
LEARNING:
In the process, I learned that when facing ambiguity I need to keep an open mind to possible paths forwards – ask “what can I do?” rather than “what should I do?” to identify creative solutions, then make the best decision I can to move the ball forward.
Attendance System / Tech Team Mess Up
Context:
When I became an operations leader, I inherited an online attendance-taking system that only allowed us to mark each student as “present in the building” once per day. Because the system didn’t allows us to track when students left and returned to the building, my predecessor didn’t allow students to take on midday internships throughout the city. They also couldn’t enter the building early in the morning, even though we wanted them to come to school ASAP to avoid fighting in the streets.
The system was insufficient, but at least it had met its most critical function of taking daily attendance, which is required by law, and replacing it wasn’t a top priority given other demands.
Then, two days before the start of school our central office’s tech team made a mistake and rendered our attendance system inoperable. They guessed it would take three weeks to fix it.
Actions:
- I saw an opportunity to create a better attendance taking tool that would allow us to gather more useful data so we could both allow students to come and so we’d have better information to run campaigns to improve our daily attendance rate.
- I designed, piloted, and refined a new system. I led the change management effort to get staff-wide adoption before the first day of school, and then I used the tool to start and manage various change efforts towards schoolwide priorities.
- I coupled this with creating a duties schedule for early arrival and EOD duties. Together, we were able to check scholars in before attendance officially started, and track who was leaving early for sports or was going to miss afternoon HR because off campus for track - so we knew who was actually in the building, could track anecdotals about why certain kids were late or absent and that we had staff contact families, allowed us to have open campus in the morning and allowed us to target families for improving attendance.
Result:
We used the data tool to improve our average daily attendance from 94% to 97% and our on-time percentage from 89% to 92% and created a much more collegiate school environment where students did midday internships and in which they came to school early to get work done rather than fighting in the street.
Special Education - SpEd Gap Closure
CONTEXT
I helped design and launch a new high school that became one of the highest performing in all of New York state, even though it served mostly low-income students of color.
In our second year I was promoted to manage our special education team, which is responsible for the academic success of students with disabilities.
At the time, students with disabilities’ GPAs were 11% lower than their non-disabled peers—this was a big problem because these students were not on track to be admitted to top colleges, which was our school’s mission. I had set a goal that this gap would be no greater than 6%, so we were way off.
ACTIONS:
So I created an issue tree of the potential key factors, systems, and stakeholders that were contributing to the problem and developed hypotheses about what was going wrong.
Next, I gathered quantitative and qualitative data to test my hypotheses.
• I cut student performance data by grade level, department, student, and teacher, and compared to historicals and any competitor’s data I could get.
• I interviewed teachers, managers, students, psychologists, and the special education team.
• I observed classes and the special education team’s meetings.
I identified what I thought were the key drivers and the most simple aligned solutions. After gathering feedback from diverse perspectives, considering corner cases, interrogating how my own biases and blindspots might be affecting my thinking, and evaluating 2nd and 3rd order consequences, I ultimately decided the following:
- We had to overhaul our schedule and staffing plan.
- There were multiple subsets of students that each needed very different levels of support. Some needed additional instruction in 1 class, some in multiple classes. We didn’t have any time built into the school day for this type of support.
- I had to convince 12 teachers to take on an additional class.
- We had to measure and manage this gap in performance between students with disabilities and their nondisabled peers by teacher and by manager, and I had to lead an effort to invest the entire staff in closing this gap.
- Very few teachers were aware of how much worse students with disabilities were performing in their classes, and their managers never asked them about this gap or held them accountable for closing it. This was because nobody was evaluated on this measure.
• Because many students were performing significantly worse in a handful of teachers’ classes, I wanted to create a training program to upskill these low-performing teachers.
Finally, I crafted project plans and change management plans that anticipated likely challenges, and then I executed on the ground.
RESULTS:
o By the end of the 3rd quarter, we closed the gap in performance from 11% to 3%, far exceeding our goal of 6%. This meant that students with disabilities were performing almost as well as those without and they were on track for success in college.
o These students just got into elite colleges, often on full rides!
o We also improved their performance by 48% from the start of the initiative. In all we had changed the culture of the school in the process and became the highest performing special education team in our network of 40 schools.
LEARNING:
In the process, I learned how to use quantitative and qualitative data to set ambitious and meaningful goals and to lead major change across a larger organization.
Additional Details:
Keep in back pocket for challenge I faced, Conflict with Boss:Had to overhaul the process we used for dealing with NYC bureaucracy to gain funding for students with disabilities at a much faster clip. Had to do this because CEO priority and my manager was feeling a ton of pressure, and because gave us time to do strategic planning while making meaningful progress
The “bureaucratic-busting process” of getting the city to provide additional funding for students with disabilities.
In most schools it takes around 6 months to go through all the paperwork and meetings, and the city often declines to provide funding if you mess up a step or don’t make a strong enough case.
convincing city representatives that an individual student has an actual learning disability and that the city has to meet its legal obligation to provide extra funding to our school so we can better support the student. We do this through gathering the relevant data on the student, filing a lot of paperwork, and then joining parents in meetings with the city to make our argument.
An “instructional support process”, of adjusting our teaching to meet these students’ individual needs.
Often through putting two teachers in a class, adding additional instructional time, and improving teacher’s skills.
Usually through additional teacher-training, putting two teachers in a single class, or adding additional instructional time for small groups of students.
o I met with my principal to review my goals for the year for this one team (I managed three other teams at the same time). When I saw that there was only a very ambitious bureaucracy-busting goal and no instructional improvement goal, I was taken aback, because I believed the instructional goal was more mission-critical at the time.
o The deliverable was to ensure that all students who were eligible would receive additional funding from the city within 45 days, even though in the past it often took 6-12 months.
o
Special Education - Conflict with Manager
AS BACKGROUND:
There are two components to special education:
1. “bureaucracy busting” - the process of getting the city to provide additional funding for students with disabilities by proving students required extra services.
2. “instructional support” - adjusting teaching to meet students’ individual needs, staffing two teachers in a classroom with students that need extra attention, adding additional instructional time, training teachers.
CONTEXT:
I helped design and launch a new high school that became one of the highest performing in all of New York state, even though it served mostly low income students of color.
In our second year I was promoted to manage several different teams, one of which was our special education team. This team is responsible for ensuring that we provide students with disabilities the accommodations they are entitled to by law and, I’d argue, to ensure they they perform nearly as well academically as their non-disabled peers. Before I took over this team we had been failing miserably ON BOTH FRONTS - –students with disabilities were performing, on average 11% worse than their non-disabled peers** AND WE WERE BREAKING THE LAW.
**I met with my principal to review my goals for the year and I saw there was only a very ambitious bureaucracy-busting goal and no instructional improvement goal. I was taken aback because I believed the instructional goal was more mission-critical at the time.
I told my manager I thought the bureaucracy-busting goal was going to be a distraction from the most important work my team should be doing. I wanted to modify it so it would take less of our time to achieve and I wanted to add a really ambitious goal for the instructional support side of the equation.
He harshly bit back at me – that he thought we were doing an ok job of supporting students in the classroom, that I needed to focus on the bureaucracy-busting goal.
ACTIONS:
I was surprised by the content and tone of his response. I took a deep breath and tried to understand his perspective. I asked him if he could explain his rationale and I put myself in his shoes. In all, I was able to figure out that:
A. The CEO, his boss, had been on a crusade to fight the NYC bureaucracy and that the goal he gave me was aligned with one of her priorities for the year.
B. He was feeling a ton of pressure from her, felt like his job was on the line, felt under the microscope.
C. I thought he might have also been trying to protect me from stretching myself too thin given that I had just taken on three new teams to manage and was managing more teams than anyone else in the network, even more than him.
- Therefore I decided to play the longer game. I recognized there was important work to be done on the bureaucracy-busting front in the short and medium term, and that if I was successful at that I would give him a big win for his boss, and even more importantly that I would gain credibility with him and his bosses that I would need to make transformational change on the instructional side.
- I split my time on both fronts. I led my team to be so effective at the bureaucracy-busting that the CEO became our biggest cheerleader. This got her on my side and my principal on my side and so I was able to pitch an ambitious strategic plan and major changes to our school to meet our instructional support goals.
RESULT:
By the end of the 3rd quarter, we closed the gap in performance from 11% to 3%, far exceeding our goal of 6%. This meant that students with disabilities were performing almost as well as those without and they were on track for success in college.
These students just got into elite colleges, often on full rides!
LEARNING:
It’s so important that if you are in a conflict to understand the other person’s perspective, ideally by asking for it directly, and to ensure you are urgently and effectively going after the most important goals for the organization as determined by your more comprehensive understanding of the situation.
9th Grade Turnaround, Joel
CONTEXT:
I helped design and launch a new high school that became one of the highest performing in all of New York state, even though it served mostly low income students of color.
In January of our first year I was promoted to manage a second team. My principal told me that our 9th graders were not on track for graduation or for college admissions because their grades were so low that colleges would immediately throw out their applications. He wanted me to right the ship by [leading the team / managing the team leader, Sherry]
None of the teachers were my direct reports, I had no formal authority in the situation.
ACTIONS:
[If about influence, describe meeting with Sherry to describe my new role, to set out goals for our work together, to build a strong personal relationship with her]
- Research: Analyzed quantitative data about student performance across their classes - cut data by teacher, department, student. Interviewed teachers and students. Observed classes.
–> Identified two key drivers:
A. Many students were completing 0%-25% of their homework each night, so they were lost in class and disengaged.
B. The teachers on the team had very different philosophies about how our school should function and what they should expect students to do, so students were frustrated by the wildly different expectations they faced from class to class and they were pushing back against teachers by acting out. - Met with the team:
A. Shared my findings,
B. Set KPIs - by the end of the quarter we’d eliminate almost al behavioral issues and by the end of the year we’d have 75% of students completing a majority of their homework every night.
C. Led a protocol to generate solutions, to gain buy-in and consensus.
D. Set up a new weekly check-in to evaluate progress, do mini-trainings, and use data to drive next steps. - Led rapid rounds of experimentation, iteration, rapid-learning for the team.
- [Joel] - see end
OUTCOME:
- Doubled number of students completing all of their homework each week
- Increased gradewide GPA significantly
- Drastically reduced the number of behavioral issues we faced – went from 12 students being sent out of class to the dean’s office each day to 1-2 every few days
- If you go online you’ll see videos of these students finding out they got huge scholarships to elite universities in the past few weeks.
JOEL:
- We had discovered that students were improving most quickly when they were given rapid feedback–for instance, if they did their homework they’d see their grade go up and if they didn’t that they felt the consequence that day. I believed it was critical that teachers check each students’ homework each day and enter into the gradebook before dismissal.
- Joel freaked out - very resistant to a proposal the rest of the team got behind. He thought it would take too long, he wasn’t willing to work past 4:30 because he had a kid.
- I had to demonstrate great emotional control to respond in a strategic way – I was emotionally triggered but I didn’t want to shut down communication, feedback, or make him less invested in solving the problem with me.
- 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 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.
Two Schools Integration
CONTEXT:
• I was an operations leader at a charter high school in NYC when another school in our network opened up in the same building as ours. There was a great opportunity to try to integrate our schools as much as possible which would have provided our students with many more resources, including an ability to cross-enroll in 7 teachers’ classes.
• Unfortunately, the two principals of the schools, one of whom was my boss, had opposite priorities, working styles, and preferences.
One believed it was important that her staff have predictability and stability, that they plan ahead. My principal believed the opposite–that if we weren’t making big changes all the time that we were complacent and that stability was the enemy. You can imagine how these competing viewpoints would make it very challenging for teachers to work for both schools a the same time!
The principals clashed furiously behind each other’s backs and became so frustrated with the other schools’ decisions or proposals that they were ready to pull the plug on an integration and just run their schools completely independently. This would have hurt our students because then students wouldn’t have been able to cross-enroll.
I had to save the integration by dealing directly with the people issues one level above me and by designing structures to facilitate cooperation and collaboration across the two schools’ leader teams.
ACTIONS:
• I surfaced the root of the problem to the principals directly - that they had opposite operational priorities and preferences for their school, but a shared mission to drive student achievement. They agreed with my assessment but couldn’t seem to find a way to work more effectively with each other, and would keep coming to me to help resolve issues between them.
• After a week of playing middle man, I created a plan to meet both principal’s needs more proactively. So I proposed and implemented a new process for the two school’s leadership teams to operate in ways that met both principals’ needs. This included adding a highly routinized look-ahead meeting and structured problem-solving session each week.
RESULTS:
• We were able to maintain cross-enrollment, meaning any student who wanted to take an advanced course that was only offered at the other school would be able to enroll. This had a huge impact on their learning, the competitiveness of their college applications, and their engagement at school.
History Course Sequence
CONTEXT:
I had been hired to start as an Assistant Principal at a high school. The school had been open for one year but was such a mess they fired everyone and I was part of a team brought in to reboot the school. I was responsible for our history department.
• Before my start date, I prepared to start strong by analyzing data from the previous year’s performance – in particular, I analyzed one class’s final exams [if story about incomplete data, emphasize that I only had one of three class’s]. I discovered that the 10th graders were so far behind they were not on track to pass an exam that was required for graduation.
• I decided I had to persuade my principal to have the 10th graders redo the course they took the previous year and take the exam a year later than expected. This was risky for several reasons:
1. [If about making decisions without complete data – I only had one class’s final exams out of three classes, no other assignments]
2. I didn’t have a meaningful relationship with my new boss or his boss. The only credibility I had was I was highly successful as a history teacher and a manager of history teachers at my former school.
3. I was implicitly arguing that my boss’s manager, the CEO of the charter school network and a person widely known to be a very challenging person, had made a mistake in her school design or in her management of the previous history department manager.
4. There’s inherent risk in having students sit through the same class twice in terms of their engagement and behavior.
• Despite the risks, I decided that I had to make this strong recommendation because we would be setting the students and their teachers up for failure if I didn’t.
ACTIONS:
[If about conflict, mention that my firsts appeal failed - I thought a quantitative data approach would have been sufficient. When he rejected my proposal I took a step back and tried to figure out what I did wrong, find another approach]
• I presented quantitative analysis of student’ test scores to prove that we’d have to cover two years’ worth of instruction in one year. I alsolaid out my argument carefully with a lot of visual evidence - I annotated students’ essays to who him the difference between what students were currently capable of producing and what they should have been able to produce at this time.
- I named explicitly that I knew that this was a risky move for me and for him because I hadn’t gained credibility within the organization yet, and because for the implication about his boss’s failure. I told him that I was so confident that this was a necessary step for our shared goal of student’s achievement that I was happy to put my neck on the line.
• I then presented him with a plan for what the history curriculum would look like this coming year, if he agreed to my proposal. I made sure to lay out specifically how we’d message to students why we were making them redo what they thought was last year’s content, and the steps we’d take to make the class enjoyable and engaging when they were seeing topics they studied last year. I also drafted a communication plan for parents, who might not be happy about our decision without us explaining it well.
RESULT:
• He bought in and agreed to have the 10th graders redo 9th grade history. Under my leadership of the history teachers, 100% of students passed their graduation exam and they are all in top colleges now such as MIT, many on huge scholarships.
• In this process I learned that it’s important to put personal reputation and comfort on the line to do what’s right for the mission/organization. I also learned from my initial failure how important it is research the audience to figure out their perspective and knowledge-base when making an argument.
School Expansion Strategy
Context:
• I was working in an operations strategy role for one of the largest charter school networks in NY. Our schools faced declining enrollment, yet our Board wanted us to open two new schools in NYC. I was tasked by our COO with figuring out where we should attempt to locate the schools so we’d have 100% enrollment.
Actions I took:
So I created an issue tree of the potential key factors, systems, and stakeholders that were contributing to the under-enrollment and developed hypotheses about what was going wrong and what the implications were for our growth strategy.
• This analysis helped me realize that there were two questions I had to answer:
- In which neighborhoods would there be enough unmet demand to fill a new school?
- Which of the city’s school buildings would likely have available space in the future given current occupancy rates and the performance levels of the existing schools in those buildings?
a. For the question of which neighborhoods had enough demand:
I analyzed census and other demographics data to see if there was a shift in the communities living in our neighborhood.
It became clear that because we were targeting low income students of color, we historically opened schools in the neighborhoods in which they lived, but gentrification had drastically changed the makeup of the neighborhoods surrounding our schools.
I next analyzed 6 data sets to identify how far parents were willing to travel to bring their students to school. I was able to figure out that elementary and middle school parents rarely were willing to travel more than two miles to school.
Together, this meant that there were no longer enough families close to our school buildings that were interested in our schools. We had to open up new schools in neighborhoods that low income families were being pushed to with gentrification, specifically, we had to model demand for our schools in the two mile radius around each potential building we could open up in.
• For the question of which school buildings the network should pursue, I had to use and improve highly flawed data sets and I had to do a lot of tedious extra research.
• The city didn’t have any enrollment data listed by building, just by school, and there are multiple schools in a building. Unfortunately, there is no listing of which schools are in which buildings, so I had to manually figure that out.
Once I pieced together current enrollment data by school, I had make predictions about where there would be available space in the next few years.
To do that I had to:
• Analyze test data to predict which schools the city might close or which schools parents would pull their kids out of.
• Read the minutes from every board of education meeting to figure out which schools had already been told they would move or close, and update my database accordingly.
• Use historical enrollment trends to predict future enrollment because of demographic shifts.
- I then had to analyze my two databases to create recommendations for the COO. I identified a set of 3 neighborhoods and ten potential school buildings.
- I then pressure tested my analysis by asking people with diverse backgrounds to poke holes in my logic, to identify my unstated assumptions, and to identify any blindspots. I also considered 2nd and 3rd order consequences, such as how moving to more distant neighborhoods would affect our managerial effectiveness if they were supporting schools over a wider geographic area, how costs would increase as we had to recruit in new neighborhoods, and how our talent pool of teachers might change as we opened schools further from the neighborhoods they liked to live in.
• Finally, I created a ten-layer Google Map to visually display the quantitative analysis so you could visually see where the demand was in relation to the most promising buildings. I chose to create a map in addition to my written report because I thought it would be most useful for our COO. Because she’d have to go through multiple rounds of negotiations with the city over which space to open a new school in, and because the evidence that we’d use to support our decision would be dynamic year to year.
RESULTS:
I received wonderful feedback from my manager on the project. She agreed with all of my analysis, she thought I had explained the research and rationale very clearly, and she was floored by the utility of the map. She had just asked for a written report but thought the map I had created by my own initiative would be a game changer for her team.
They are still in negotiations with the city.
LEARNING:
• Through this process I learned how to create a strong data-driven argument for a senior leader using incomplete and insufficient data sets. I learned how to take the useful pieces from various data sets, combine them and fill int the blanks, and run analysis to create a clear case for a high risk action. I learned to think through the eye of the user and to go above and beyond to make my product as useful as possible for the end user.
Leadership stories
- *Special Education
* 9th Grade Turnaround: neither Sherry nor the 9th grade teachers were my direct reports
Feedback I’ve received
Feedback I’ve received and how I handled it:
1. Briefly describe that I have chosen to work in very feedback-heavy orgs, that’s how I chose which jobs to take.
2. Have consistently been given top praise and performance feedback in this area – very open, work without ego, quick to learn
3. But hard to get people to give honest feedback, especially upwards, so I forced the issue:
• When my general appeals for constructive feedback didn’t produce useful information, I printed off a list of common mistakes that managers make from “First Break All the Rules” and I had people force-rank them in front of me. I said I know I do several of these and I won’t believe you if you tell me you won’t so for each of these, do I exhibit these frequently, sometimes, always, never, and how much impact do each of these have on you or our team (stack rank?)
o USE THIS ONE: Meredith:
- Adding too much value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion—> with my involvement in systems, I blurred lines of ownership
o Now I ask myself “”What are the benefits and drawbacks of sharing my idea or feedback? If I don’t, will there be a significant avoidable failure? If I do share it, will it drastically change the nature of the person’s work product? If so, is it more personal preference/style or is it objectively better, and how do I know?” Or I only share one of my ideas and offer it as an alternative perspective, not as a “you should do this” especially with people I’m managing”
Mentoring / Coaching
- Mentoring:
AUSTIN
• Reframe challenges as opportunities
• Joyfully exhibiting flexibility in how I describe my work and my challenges from my manager
• Privilege to be doing the work, provide perspective
• Open to answer questions, love to teach
• Express interest in people’s lives, make them feel welcome. Invite out for drinks, dinner
• Understanding people’s motivations, career coaching
• AUSTIN: Underperforming…identified two issues: 1. Attitude, resiliency, flexibility, and his TTM. I first built trust with him, expressed interest in him as a person. Attacked #1 by explicitly reframing challenges as opportunities, joyfully exhibiting flexibility, saying how privileged I felt for being able to do this work. AND Coached him on personal org daily coaching for a month to develop better habits for time and task management and to be more strategic with use of time…start with his underperformance, talk about how I had him articulate his plan for the day and why he chose to do what he was going to tackle/skip, what he thought were the most likely obstacles and surprises he’d face and how he’s planning proactively, and to reflect up on what he learned from his successes and failures yesterday. Led to 21% growth!
