Good businesses and good schools operate the same way. You take care of workers, and you recognize what makes them happy. You examine your products: Are they some- thing that you can be proud of? Schools fail when they don't realize that they're producing something. They're producing graduates -- human beings who can negotiate their lives and who can give back to society. That's a wholesome way to think about work.
Leaders must demand continuous improvement. There must be an outcome every day, and that outcome must be measurable. If we're talking about schools and children, the outcome should be that every day the kids learn something. Every day, their achievement should be higher. You should also look for things that are less measurable but more visible -- better behavior, lifted spirits.
I've said to educators that if many of us were running businesses the way we run schools, we'd be out of business. Would you send your kid to a place where every day he wasn't getting better? School leaders don't talk enough about why their work is important. Why are we doing this, and how do we know whether we're doing it well? We know by noticing what happens to kids. Service work is about noticing -- and a good leader notices all the time.
Creative craziness is what drives innovation. And being creatively crazy means saying, "I don't care what the system wants. I don't care what the system allows. You made me the principal -- or the CEO -- of this place. Now step back." To be creatively crazy, you have to love what you do. But you also have to be smart. You have to look at the rules and figure out why they're there. You have to understand that if those rules don't make any sense, then you need to drop them. You have to be fearless enough to take calculated risks, to take a leap into the void.
Leaders have to be creatively crazy, and they have to encourage craziness. I remember the first time I addressed the staff at Taft. Up until the moment I opened my mouth, I didn't know what I was going to say. Finally, I said, "I'm just going to ask two things of you. First, I want you to plan. And second, I want you to be magic." Then I left the room.
I had no specific idea what I meant by "magic." But teachers started doing amazing things -- creative, wonderful things that they hadn't thought they could do before. There's a latent productivity in people; they're just waiting for someone to remind them of their capacity. I had 175 staff members who were waiting to be told exactly that: "Be magic." And those little words were powerful enough to release people to tap into resources that they'd kept hidden -- and to be creatively crazy on behalf of the children. Last summer, I happened to go back to Taft. One of my old teachers came up to me and said, "Oh, you were so courageous." Those people were just waiting to be given permission. Just waiting.
I'm a peripatetic leader. I believe in walking around and watching people do their work. If your employees don't see you, then even people who are pretty good won't perform as well as they could. You have to get out and congratulate staff. You have to remind them of why we're here.
When I was a principal and I would first meet new teachers, I always let them know how I worked. I told them that I'd be in their classrooms, watching them, and that they shouldn't be jiggled by that. And I did watch them -- especially new teachers. I'd go to classes all the time. After a while, they figured out that this wasn't about "getting them" -- it was about getting them to be better.
That style worked for me because teachers knew that I could teach. I always kept a blackboard in my conference room, so that when I met with teachers, I could go to the board and demonstrate a teaching method that I knew would make a difference. Part of leadership is being able to demonstrate that you have ability -- and that ability is what got you to be the boss.
In 1983, I left Taft to become deputy chancellor in charge of curriculum and instruction. I was naive: I thought I could transfer what I'd accomplished at Taft to the entire New York City school system.
But early on, I saw that 110 Livingston Street [the headquarters of the Board of Education, in Brooklyn] wasn't about what I was about. I knew that I wasn't going to last there very long. I was used to being the boss, and the layers of bureaucracy there made it hard to get a great deal done. There were too many hands, too many offices. And geographically speaking, my office was too far from any of the schools. The farther you get from where the magic happens, the more you lose touch with day-to-day operations. And instead of dealing with people, you start turning out reports.
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