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Evolution Stories
Evolution Stories is a biweekly podcast that delves deep into the heart and soul of change leadership and school transformation.
Evolution Stories
Hope as Infrastructure: Leading Through Crisis and Co-created Change with Dr. Nada Collins
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Before a school can pursue transformation, it has to secure its foundation. Dr. Nada Collins calls it Maslow's hierarchy for institutions: until the buses run on time and people feel safe, change leadership doesn't have a floor to stand on. That insight drove her design work redesigning physical classroom spaces to enable collaborative, data-driven instruction. Then COVID hit.
What emerged from that crisis wasn't what Dr. Collins planned. Facing an overwhelmed healthcare system, she reached out looking for hospital beds. What came back was a community health foundation built with parent physicians, delivering weekly check-ins, supplies, and native-language safety education to the school's lowest-paid employees. She didn't design it. She trusted the people she asked for help, and they built something bigger.
The lesson she carries from that: co-creation isn't a strategy you plan for. It's what happens when you stop holding everything alone and let the people around you lead.
Welcome to Evolution Stories by Middle States. This interview series is devoted to teaching you how to lead change in education. We're here because facilitating change in schools has never been harder or more important. So this is your place to learn from those who are leading the way. So a little unusual background for this, but Nada Collins was very kind to join the podcast. Nada is the head of school at the Lincoln School in Buenos Aires. Prior to that, she spent 23 years in international schools in Africa and Asia and Latin America. And her doctoral degree is in educational psychology, which means that in the early part of her career, she really sort of started out working with school counseling and student support services, which is an interesting pathway to and through school leadership. So we're gonna hear all about Nada's change leadership journey and probably hear a little bit about that education background in just a moment. So Nada, welcome to Evolution Stories. Thank you. So I always like to know the origin story for someone when it comes to how they learned about themselves that they wanted to change things in schools. How did how did you know that you wanted to lead change in schools as opposed to sort of more or less keeping things status quo or keeping the trains running on time?
SPEAKER_01That's a good analogy, keeping the rain trains running on time because both have to be done. Um I started off in a in a in a small school, uh 75 kids, pre-K to 12, um, one other administrator, and I was able to dabble in a lot and have a lot of different experiences. But even from then, my next school is probably uh, I think I doubled in size to 150 and then 300 and then 600. So, you know, I progressively moved to larger schools. And in some of my some aspects of my journey, like, you know, the the logistics and the organization, they overwhelm you, they take precedent. Like you, you have you pose this as a dichotomy between keeping the trains running on time and doing change leadership. But, you know, I guess in a Maslow's hierarchy kind of world, it would be great to focus on the visionary if those trains were running on time. And so I feel that one of the the actually the pivotal moment, and and while I may not love this answer, it's the reality, is when I moved into a school where I had my first assistant principal, right? Because I became a principal early, very early in my career, and I was a principal in all these different settings. And when I moved into a school where I had an assistant principal, I felt the transformation. I was no longer thinking about how many times can we run out of forks in a cafeteria? The solution to this is really, really, really easy. Yeah. But I'm the principal and I'm getting a phone call saying we're out of forks in the cafeteria. My secretary's not getting the call, the maintenance, you know, it's coming into the principal that we're out of forks, the microwave needs to be repaired, the, you know, whatever those things are, that the logistics and you, you know, I've been in some settings where I'm like, I've gone to the same bathroom three days in a row and I know other people must know this light bulb's out. Yeah. I can't be the only one noticing it. And I've completed the work order and I'm still, you know, and so those things take up a lot of time and energy. And you can't, you can't put them on hold to do change leadership. So it's, it's uh while I learned a ton in small schools, I think having some level of resource is essential to be able to take that step back and focus on big change. Yeah. I was just having a conversation with somebody the other day about um, they were asking me to take on a specific project, a task with a board that I'm a part of. And as I was thinking through that task, I'm like, okay, I know what my skill sets are and this visionary big thinking stuff and the coordination and the communication, and I need someone to help me make sure the trains are running on time, right? Like, who are we gonna put on this task force that's gonna balance what I know I can bring to the table? Because we need each other's skill sets.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You you you used a really interesting reference, and I want you to unpack it a little bit. You said, like, you know, in a Maslow's hierarchy world, and then you compared, or not compared, but sort of suggested that you know the trains running on time is in some ways part of the Maslow's hierarchy for the institution. Just sort of unpack that a little bit.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I think that at the very basic level, when parents drop their kids off at school, our main job is their safety, right? They're taking this kid that they've had full responsibility for. I was, I'm gonna go back to go forward. I was thinking about when my first child was born. Um, you you know, over through my years as a leader, I've heard many parents sit down with a teacher and say, But do you have kids? Do you really understand what it's like?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Do you have kids? And throughout my career, before I had children, I was still working with kids, I was still working in leadership. What changed for me when I had my own child was not understanding kids better, it was understanding parents better.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01They have this kiddo that up until three, four, five, whenever they walk into the school, they've had full and total custody of this child's emotional, psychological, physical safety. And now they're showing up and turning that trust over to us, right? And at the basic level, like we're making sure we can't make sure they don't break their arm on the playground. We can make sure we respond appropriately when they do. Yeah. Right? So at the very basic level, the things that you know they need access to to get through their day so that they go home physically safe. And I think then your layer with that that is just as important, if not more important, but not always as visible, is their psychological safety. Right. And so, as we are those caretakers and guardians in the day-to-day element, do I want to make sure that their socialized curriculum is transformative and exciting and engaging and hands-on and inquiry-based and creative, where they're really not just learning the concept, but able to make those connections and able to apply them into other settings and and real-world applications. Absolutely. But first I've got to keep them physically, psychologically, emotionally safe. Yeah. I have to return them whole at 3 or 3:30 p.m. Yeah. Um, and to ensure that we're we're we have all the systems set up in place, right? Um, you know, as we were talking about the accreditation process, you look at both sides.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And, you know, many times we don't move on to the second side until we've completed the first, right? Until we've said you've you've you've achieved the basic level of running schools, that the buses literally do run on time and that the finances are at some level accountability. Now we can talk about learning. And so I think that you can't put it on hold. Right. But you can't bring change management in if we're still, if we're still really grappling with that. So when schools um, you know, there's there, there's so many sides of schools and there's so much level of resource. It's such a huge impact when you when you walk into a resource school and you see that the people that you've hired, the people you're paying the most to within an organization, the people you've brought on to be changed, to be the custodians of being of growing the intellectual mindset and the community and the culture, can't, you know, need to have the support that somebody else is looking after forks in the cafeteria and changing the light bulbs in the bathroom.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, it's so interesting. You're you're reminding me of a conversation I had when I was on a board several years ago about the um the head of school and the principal relationship. And the board had a lot of frustration with the principal for not being sufficiently visionary. And I said, Well, it's okay for the principal to be the person who makes sure that there's forks in the cafeteria, and was really and is really like a masterful operational leader.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I said, the problem is that the head of school also is an operational leader. And I said, they can't both be excellent at that one thing, and neither of them have any capacity for the visionary leadership. So it's not that any one leader has to be able to do both things, but certainly the team has to create Maslow's hierarchy for the world. And your balance between.
SPEAKER_01Um because I I I had someone, and even if they weren't the even if they didn't have the operational skill set to anticipate, plan for, manage, and organize, it was at a minimum you could delegate. Yeah. Right? At a minimum you can delegate. Um and uh not go to the bathroom in the dark one more time as you're hoping that somebody else might notice that light bulbs out. Because I and I remember thinking about the list of things that you needed to get done. And so and now I've executed the request to get this done, but I can't cross it off the list yet. Yeah, right.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, and being in an organization where I know once I've executed it, that I can cross it off the list, that's where I became. That's where I became a leader.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's great. Tell us about a change project you were involved in, whether you led it or not, um, that failed or at least didn't go the way that you wanted it to go.
SPEAKER_01It's really funny. I'm gonna tell you that I was, you know, we're in the southern hemisphere, so I was uh on vacation um just a couple of weeks ago, and we were driving in the car, and my sixth grader in the backseat said, Mom, can you tell me about something that you're really proud of in your professional career? A very unexpected question from my 12-year-old, but this is actually the answer that I shared. Okay. Um, but I didn't I didn't share the the failure part, and uh, and so I went, I'll I'll you know, kind of share the whole story. But um I was working in a school and uh it was a school that already had a strong culture of collaboration, um, a strong culture of community, um, a high value of autonomy, right? Um I'm a systems, I'm a systems leader, right? I like the idea of us having a clear trajectory and plan and coordination, and that we fulfill that viable contract of, you know, as a child shows up, whether they're in 4A, B, or C, that they're gonna have a common experience. Um, that autonomy was and and independence is is in conflict. It can be imbalance, right? Um, both are valuable. One is not more valuable than the other, but they they do sometimes, I think, create a dichotomous uh tension. Um we did an internal transformation of the physical spaces. We we did a a physical redesign, and and in that time, actually in several different spaces, in our maker space, in our classroom spaces, um, we did we did low budget versions first, right? If we're gonna spend five thousand dollars, one thousand dollars on what would this look like? We can always spend more, right? We can but let's how can we shift culture? How can we shift a mindset, right? Exactly. Create the baby steps towards it. And so uh we had four classrooms with a central pod. So grade level in the elementary school, which is where the role I had at the time um would have four classrooms with a central pod. In some cases, uh over the years, those pods had expanded all the way into um almost a hallway, right? The pods that it had not expanded, but decreased almost into a hallway. So you could have really big classrooms and maximize those classrooms. Yeah. Uh in some grade levels, that pod had gotten huge. The classrooms actually gotten smaller. In some classrooms, they took the walls down between classrooms on certain sides, so they could have lots of opportunity for collaboration, but lots of autonomy. Right. Right. And um the transformation project we did with internal design was to really uh shift that concept of um the divided classrooms, the isolation, the teaching and isolation. Um we put in a lot of flexible spaces. We uh kind of really hit hard on the idea of ownership of spaces. Um and we did different things even then, you know, like initially we looked at purposes. This room will be for this purpose, that room will be for that purpose. The classes can move around in different spaces based on that. We didn't love that, right? But we also then tried these two are gonna work this way. This, you know, so that was our low, our prototype, our low budget versions of trying to figure out what would make the most sense. Um, we physically transformed over the course of many years. And we started off with uh we said, who wants to step forward and be a part of this? Which grade level is ready for this? And if you're not ready, that's okay. But now you know what we're doing, you know where we're going, and you have a year to figure out whether or not that's gonna be a direction you can go. I mean, you have 20 plus years of working a certain way, right? It's a huge change. It's a huge change. I don't I don't get a desk anymore, right? I don't have a classroom space anymore. Um, I'm sharing this amongst my team. Kids are crossing over more, right? And it was incredible. So we started with our first couple of grade levels. And what we found is if you have a child, let's say a second grader who is um is working on finger spaces, right? Leaving space between words. And you've taught this by second grade. This is not still part of our core reinforcement. The most you can do is what I call drive-by instruction. Hey, don't forget your finger space, right? No, remember, you kind of catch this one and catch that one as you go through. Now we can use the data, share it, and pull those two kids from that class, the three ones from that class, the one over here, and give them all targeted, focused instruction on where we see that they need. So we're using student data. It was changing space to change learning. We're using student data to group students based on really targeted reinforcement without it necessarily needing to be a short-term intervention, a long-term intervention, a referral to support services, was just about meeting the needs that we could see with frequent data, which means you had to keep data that was visible to all your team members, including your EAL and your learning support, that they had to be able to document. So if I pull those five kids together and they're working with this teacher while the rest are broken up in other ways, they have to have shared documentation so they can share those conversations about student learning. Um, it was incredibly, incredibly powerful. And halfway through our project, uh COVID hit. Oh. Right. And so while we had, while we had focused on creating these common spaces, we broke kids up not just based on levels and skills, but on interest, right? We're gonna do this project and you guys want to do it with videos, but you want to do it with writing, and we're gonna give you the chance to break yourselves up. We're gonna regroup you based on interest, based on and in you know, an elementary kid, they get one teacher usually, right? And sometimes that works, but it doesn't always work. It can't always work for every kid. So now I've got two or three or four or five trusted adults that I can move between. And I know that when I go to this content area with this person, that I've got a community rather than a single teacher. Um COVID kit, we were on A and B days, we were not in school on a regular basis, and space was used very differently. And we're literally only through half of the grade level transformations, right? And so we had a choice at that point. Do we continue to make those renovations on the schedule, but use the spaces in a way that as you're trying to integrate and create something wholly different than you've done before for most educators, right? And I I know that this is not it, it's certainly uh a different direction, but it's not, you know, we've been there before and other times historically. Many other schools have maken these leaps. You know, we were hiring, I would call it, I would say, when I hired a new teacher, I'd say this is an extreme sport collaboration, right? It's a more intensive collaboration than you've ever done before because you can't now go do your lesson planning on your couch at eight o'clock at night in your jammies. You've got to kind of collaborate and coordinate if you're sharing to this extent. Um, but COVID just it just put it on its on its tail for a minute, right? Um for a minute or permanently? No, it it did come back, but it took a long time because we had to retrain and rehire and we hadn't integrated. But it it was it took much longer than it should have, right? Um, it wasn't just that now that this restrictions are lifted, we can go back to because what we went back to most readily and most quickly was I'm gonna just claim this little corner, and that's where I'm gonna teach my kids.
SPEAKER_00You know what's so interesting about this? Um, I I didn't know there's research on this, um, and I learned about it from uh Michael Horne's book from Reopen to Reinvent. Yeah. And he's been a guest on the podcast twice, actually. Um and in the somewhere near the beginning of that book, he talks about the pandemic as this crisis moment where you know schools had to get very creative with how they made sure that there was continuity of learning. But um after the pandemic had, at least the immediate threat of the pandemic had subsided, this thing called threat rigidity kicked in, where um there's actually like a a swing back to almost a kind of more rigid version of what came before, uh, which is why I asked you if it was a permanent shift or if it was temporary.
SPEAKER_01And I think part of that, we still we were still all looking over our shoulders, waiting for COVID to come back. Like I think it took a couple of years after I'm not gonna say COVID was gone, but after the level of intensity of threat had subsided, it did take time for people. Um, there was still high levels of anxiety and discomfort, but it was also um a sense of of control and ownership that felt really important that seemed separate from health issues or from hygiene issues or from COVID issues, right?
SPEAKER_00So when you look so I I want you to explore that idea a little bit more. When you look back on this experience, putting aside the parts that you can't control about the pandemic, um, and thinking about this as a change product project, is there anything you would have done differently with those folks who wanted to like reclaim their space and sort of go back to the way that they had been doing things before?
SPEAKER_01You mean would there anything I would have done differently at the time that we were reopening, kind of re-integrating? Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00Or on the other hand, and I I ask this earnestly, um, is was it that was that just a necessary phase to live through where there would there had to be this sort of re-retrenching?
SPEAKER_01Part of it was we're just still in the infancy phase. Yes, right? We hadn't even converted the uh all the grade levels. And we and one strategy we were using was we did we did some embedding coaching strategies. Um, we made sure that any consultant who walked on our campus knew and understood pedagogically where we were headed and could integrate that into their work, right? So even if their messaging was over here, they had to understand what we believed would be really powerful. Taking that that expression that's used so often, all teachers are responsible for all kids, right? Like that we use so often and really activating it and creating that shared sense of alignment. It it hurts, right? Collaboration is not easy, it's hard. People are very happy to align as long as you're aligning to what not ready to compromise. Um, what would we have done coming back? I think that we it was, it was uh maybe it was a bit necessary, Christian, because it was it, we had just started to kind of break down the risk taking, right? We'd we'd just started to create environments where there was a greater level of of trust that this could be valuable, right? I think about a teacher I worked with, and it was a similar initiative, not exactly this, but she was very hesitant, very hesitant. She's like, I don't want to do this change, I don't want to do this change, I don't want to do this change. I've been teaching for 20 years. This is not the way to do this. And the day that it that we had launched, um, it was it was student, student-involved conferences, student-led conferences, but a little bit of a twist. You know, she just felt like so inappropriate. And she came and grabbed me at lunch on the first day of student conference and said, I've been doing it wrong for 20 years. Oh, wow. Right? Like you have to do it.
SPEAKER_00Like it was you have to do it. Not an intellectual proposition.
SPEAKER_01I could not get her there through conversation, right? Through practice, through she watched it happen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And she's like, I I get it. I get it. And so asking people to be professionally prepared with training, that they feel that this is a good idea and they agree with you, and they say, Yes, we are ready, can't happen comprehensively. You can't fight everybody, right? But you you sometimes have to say, I know this is hard. I'm gonna hold your hand. This is what we're gonna do. It's gonna be okay. We will reflect, but I'm asking you to do something that you may believe I'm making a mistake, but this is where we are going as an organization. Yeah. And that there are always options. There's nobody has ever been employed in any school I've worked at without options, right?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01You may not always feel like you have options, but we're all here by choice. Right, right.
SPEAKER_00We're all here by choice. Right. I you know, I think this is such an important lesson. Um, and I'll just Speak from personal experience, the metaphor that comes to mind when I failed in trying to launch a change project and then encountered some sort of obstacle external to what I could control. It was not the pandemic in the cases I'm thinking of, but um it's almost like you're trying to boil water and the water's not gonna boil until it's hot enough, right? Like there's a there's a certain minimum threshold of energy that has to be applied to the water before it's gonna change. And it's almost like you're heating the water, you're heating the water, you're getting close, it's like maybe even starting to simmer a little bit, and then suddenly like the heat flips off and the water gets cold again. Yeah, and then you just gotta heat it back up again. Like that yeah, it's like it's you just kind of have to go through that. And I guess the choice for the change leader is well, am I gonna put the heat back on or am I just gonna let it let the water continue to cool because it's just too hard to Yeah, and and and everything was hard then, right?
SPEAKER_01Like we felt beaten down, educate educators in general felt beaten down and depleted, and it was that's a really great analogy, right? Like sometimes we do have to restart.
SPEAKER_00And I think the the the feeling of being beaten down, I think that's the psychological underpinning of threat rigidity. It's like people are just like, I just want the familiar thing, the comfortable thing. I want to go back to that because I know that and it's safe.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's when we saw we saw colleagues leaving education.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, right, exactly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we saw people who, you know, who felt like this wasn't this was no longer something that they could do. Right. Right? Yeah. Um, but to to say we're gonna jump back in on on this this journey when and there was still the very real, you know, the all all countries experienced, we all have our stories of how we experienced um COVID. And some people talk about really intense lockdowns, and some people talk about, you know, strong restrictions. A couple of people I've met along the way say no, it didn't really have a big impact in our country for whatever reason, right? But in this particular context, the health threats were very, very, very real, right? Um, we lost people in our community, yeah, right? We lost employees, we lost parents. To air towards protection and preservation was hard to argue with.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_01Right? And we're setting up vigils and lighting candles for people that had been employed in the school for a number of years, and parents and and and and family members of you know, many, many of our employees. So it was it was uh a situation where the resources to respond were not there, right? From the country. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00How about the opposite? How about a change project you led where it did succeed, maybe even in ways that you hadn't anticipated?
SPEAKER_01You know, Christian, I think because I'm like in this moment of conversation with you, I I had something else in mind, but I want to maybe go a different direction and then and then we'll we'll see. I was working in that context that I'm describing to you, right? In a in a country that was very, very heavily hit um through uh through COVID at the time. A lot of people were really scared and trying to get out of the country. Um, and then we had people who couldn't leave the country, people who were local, right? Um and we were trying to renew visas so people could leave and be able to come back in the country because the prior year, when COVID had been uh more of a theoretical threat in the country rather than as intensely a real threat, um, people hadn't been able to get visas. And so as an organization, you know, the schools said, Oh, well, you got to be in the country, this is where your job is. And so nobody wanted to leave without securing the visa because consulate shut down for months and months, and we were all dealing with kind of this piece of it and being able to convince this the board or your your your legislature in that country or whatever it is that you could open up did require having people there to teach, right? Um, and so going through that stage, you know, we we as an organization, I remember we were we had started off as working really closely with the the health office at that time. We were reporting out, we were saying, okay, well, there's we went through the same journeys and learning that everyone else did, right? We started off by saying, oh, there was a guard at gate, you know, two who tested positive. Okay, so now everyone's like, well, what time and what guard and at what gate two? And then we, okay, okay, we've learned that's we're not gonna report that level of detail. We're gonna report that we had two positive cases on campus this week, right? But then it just got really intense. And we stopped reporting. We stopped saying that people were in the hospital because we couldn't, I I as as a as an educational leader felt and who was taking the leadership role with this level of communication, felt that I couldn't, I couldn't share it with um with anybody, right? Myself and my wellness coordinator. I was breaking into the health office at two in the morning and sending oxygen tanks across the city. Wow. I I remember calling one of my parents in the school, and I I said to her, hey, I really need to get a hospital for this employee. And I knew that she was on a board of a hospital. She was on actually on the board of nine hospitals in the city. And she said, I can't get a hospital bed for my mother.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_01I can't help you. And I remember like I was in a war zone, right? Because I'm I'm managing the the international hires who want visas and who are super anxious, but I also felt like I had my patients for their scenarios and their stress was so low, right? And then supporting our local community, right? Um that with an overtaxed infrastructure and no support, right? And so um, and thinking that it was my job to hold on to it and not share it, because if I told other people, if I told my principals how bad this was, my principals wouldn't be able to support their teams. Um and I remember being on a on a call, a Zoom call, actually, with a group of educational leaders when you know something had flipped it for me, and I was I just thought, like, I don't know how to support this anymore. I don't I don't know what to do. Um and we ended up creating a foundation. I talked to some of our parents that were physicians in the community, and I said, help me understand. Like, I I don't know, I don't know what to do. I need to find a way, I want a network of parents who help us get hospital beds, right? Like that's what I thought I would create. And these parents said, that's too late, Ada. What you need to do is to find a network to educate people before they get sick. That's where you need to put your energy to. It's like you can't focus on helping people who are already sick. It's too late, right? Um, and this is a place where people lived in very close quarters and communities, and um and so we started doing weekly check-ins for our entire local community, and we fundraised because you know, people who had privilege also felt helpless. So we were trying to import oxygen into the country as a school, right? Um so we created a foundation, we um collected funds, we were able to send out to uh each of our like our lowest paid employees was really who we targeted, right? Our local higher maintenance staff and and um security staff. We we sent out um boxes to them with pulse oxidators and thermometers and sanitizer and masks, and we taught them how to isolate in a one-room home. You know, one one room, one bathroom. Yeah, but a number of people are living in that quarters. How do you isolate in that space if somebody has symptoms? We taught them and we did we did it in native language, right? We worked with them to how to support their neighbors, how to support within their their community, what they needed to do to keep safe. And in those check-ins, we checked on symptoms, we checked on any sort of early warning signs, early detection. We didn't change the medical um, I don't, I don't believe that that work changed the medical outcome for a huge number of people. I think it was certainly very helpful, but the change that that brought was it it gave just a sense of hope and purpose. And more so than like the pulse oximeters, right? More so than the check-ins, which were incredibly valuable and valued, was the sense that we had something that we could like ungrit your teeth a little bit. Yeah, right, and say we're we're making a change in something, we're responding to a situation. This is not educational leadership in in that same sense.
SPEAKER_00I shifted a little bit, but it was No, it it's a great lesson.
SPEAKER_01It really, it was very powerful.
SPEAKER_00It's funny, I I I I you know, I don't think either of us anticipated talking about this as a theme, but uh, what I hear you what I hear you putting your finger on is the the essential nature of locus of control. That having locus of control and exercising agency, even if it's for an outcome that you certainly can't guarantee in the case of you know the the health outcomes for for folks living in these these one room homes with multiple people, but doing something is psychologically more hygienic than doing nothing. Yeah, right? And that's what locus of control is about.
SPEAKER_01Right. And it gave it gave people something to anchor on to. Yeah. Right? It gave a sense of like we're doing something, yeah, right? Because there were some nationalities that couldn't leave the country as easily, right? Because their country wasn't organizing flights out, their country wasn't, um, they maybe they couldn't get their visas because it was it, so you know, I stayed, I stayed through that time in in uh the country to support people who weren't able to travel, but there was a there was a privilege to our life and to be able to have a way to support and engage and to make an impact, it gave hope.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And it gave people something to rally around.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_01And I didn't, I didn't, I I didn't anticipate that, right? I I I reached out because I said I need someone to help me find beds, and and that's what I was looking to do. Yeah. Um, but it gave, it gave our so now everyone's getting involved in leading these weekly sessions, and they they would have these, you know, especially all of my native language speakers were a significant part of that conversation. And for me as a leader, I remember um I used to say it was kind of a a quote that people would associate with me, you know, thank you for putting our students first. And after that, I was like, no, that's not what I should say. I shouldn't thank people for putting the students first. I should thank them for putting themselves first, right? We know the analogy of the mask from the, you know, right, that whole sense. And it felt such a positive statement. It didn't feel like I was saying something that I, you know, but realizing how important it was to stand up around the value of you can help others when you're you're well positioned to. Yeah. So I think it's different in the sense that, you know, you asked me for a success that didn't fail, and it was kind of a failure that that we found a way to be successful with. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, but it came from being in, you know, I've I really did, I I listen, I think about heads of schools or leaders that I've spoken to over the years who have who have led in times of high crisis in Warzone, and I felt like that was the connection I felt at that time. Yeah. Um I mentioned to you earlier I wasn't telling anyone on the team about how bad things got, and I realized that was my mistake too. Because if I'm not sharing with them my vulnerability, if I'm not modeling that I'm this is hard for me, how are they gonna model that for the teachers? How are the teachers gonna model that for the students? Yeah, how are we gonna make it safe for people to say this is really hard if we don't model that from the top?
SPEAKER_00On on that dimension of the of the issue, is it that you felt like it's too dangerous for me to say something, or was it more like I know I should say something, I just don't know what to say? Like I need a sentence stem to start this sort of thing.
SPEAKER_01It was it was communicating the reality of how bad things were, how many people because I I mentioned you we lost a couple in the community, but there was a lot of extended family that was lost. It was um, you know, at one point myself and the the health coordinator, we said, okay, look, we can't keep supporting mother-in-law and cousins. Um, we've got to just focus on our employees. That didn't work at all, right? We didn't change a thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean everybody's left. Right.
SPEAKER_01And it was, and it was just, you know, it was we were still trying to offer medical advice and try and connect and find, you know, all the different all the different ways that we could try and and assist. And so I think it came from I can't, I I don't know that I can keep updating our community on how hit they are because it wasn't so public, right? Like you go to your office every day and you see, you know, your colleague and you know that her mom's not been well or her her brother's, you know, you know, undergoing treatment, and you check in and you no one was seeing each other, right? And so these things were all happening without communication.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Except to you.
SPEAKER_01You except you knew everything. Myself and that, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And demoralizing, probably. And helpless, right?
SPEAKER_01Which is why I think that's the piece that it really rallied. It rallied even some of the, you know, some of our partners that are here at this conference who were here, you know, in in support of um of their own organizations that happened to be partners with the school at the time, just came through in really powerful and amazing ways, right? Like somebody we're working with on an HR project started really working intensively, took over our reference checks, took over our documentation because we lost people from the HR office, right? Another partner with another organization started donating funds to help support us. So it actually broadened our network. I think we weren't the only people who needed a sense of hope in that time. Yeah. And that connection was really strong.
SPEAKER_00You know what I love about this story, um, as painful as the reality of it was, is that like diagnostically, everything you described maps perfectly onto it's funny, I interviewed Dan Pink for Evolution Stories, you know, a few weeks ago, and we were talking about his book Drive, and the the change project around educating and supplying created in the people that were helping you a sense of purpose, a sense of autonomy, like I can or agency, I can contribute to this thing. Mastery in terms of like having putting the mask on, you know, like how do you isolate? It's like developing some baseline um literacy around the work. And then the fourth dimension is community. It's like uh like being community connected within the school, but also you just described people outside the school becoming community connected to you. So it's a really beautiful example of that. Yeah, yeah. And it's not always easy when you're going through it to be thinking, okay, like, am I hitting all these four notes? But but we can look at it afterwards and say, that's probably why it succeeded.
SPEAKER_01And I think it's and what I think is really for my own journey, what I what really resonates for me about that is it grew in that way because I trusted the people I asked to help. That wasn't my intention. It wasn't what I thought I was gonna build, right? But because I put a group of four people, they were all parents, right, at that time in my and my health team, and because I put them together, it that's what you know, that's what helped me being able to hear and listen to the ideas that we generated as a group. Um, you know, it it we it was that was what grew into something. And I think for me as a change leader, it wasn't my design. It wasn't my plan. There was no intentionality around that. Um it was co-created in a high stress situation. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And yeah, I mean, it's I understand what you're saying. Like you didn't create it, but as it emerged, you embraced it. We did. Right. So that that was that was a vital.
SPEAKER_01And and the purpose that I really celebrate that it served was not its primary purpose, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01U in this conversation. Right. It at that time I celebrated the purpose of the servant, right? But in this conversation, the purpose that I really celebrated it served is that it gave us hope, it gave us something to hook on to.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. That's beautiful. Great. Thank you so much. This is a great conversation.
SPEAKER_01It was so cool. Yeah. No, I really enjoyed talking to you and and kind of hearing a little bit about the the you know the ways that you're moving these conversations forward. And I am grateful to be part of it.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Thank you so much. All right.
