You can listen to the full WorkLife episode anywhere you get your podcasts.
I’ve known Kaya Henderson for years, and I’ve been trying to get her to sit down and tell me this story for a long time. On this week’s episode of the WorkLife podcast from TED, she finally did.
Here’s the setup. When Kaya became Chancellor of DC Public Schools, she inherited a district in a free fall — the lowest-performing urban school district in the United States, 40 consecutive years of enrollment decline, a graduation rate under 50%, and 29 data systems that didn’t talk to each other. They were paying people who were no longer alive and not paying people who were.
6 years later when Kaya stepped down, DCPS was the fastest-improving urban district in the country. Today, a decade after Kaya left her role, graduation rates are up to 75%.
Everyone loves the what, but I wanted the how from Kaya — because she led a system where parents, teachers, unions, politicians, and community leaders all cared deeply and wanted different things. Every decision made one group hopeful and another group furious. Most people would look at a problem like that and call it unsolvable, but luckily, Kaya didn’t.
Here are 3 takeaways from how she completely turned things around:
Takeaways
1. Stop chewing things up and spitting them out for people. Kaya’s core move was refusing to treat her constituents like children. When schools had to close, she didn’t hand the community a decision — she handed them a proposal and then put her team’s data next to the community’s data. Sometimes the community’s data was better — like the time her team’s map showed a half-mile walk “right over the bridge,” and the community pointed out the bridge had been obliterated two years earlier. Every time she co-created with the people closest to the problem, she got a better answer. Her point: people are reasonable. We act like they’re crazy, but they’re only “crazy” because we don’t give them the information.
2. Make it memorable. In order to give her changes their best shot at becoming permanent, Kaya built a five-point plan simple enough that anyone in the district could recite it, because memorability is how change survives past the leader who started it. The teacher evaluation and pay-for-performance system she built and defended is still running almost two decades later. If the thing you built falls apart the day you leave, you didn’t institutionalize it.
3. Lead your way, not the way you’ve seen leadership done. When Kaya initially said no to the chancellorship (50 times, she says), she realized her hesitancy came from not wanting to engage in typical superintendent practices that just didn’t seem useful. A question from David Coleman, the head of the College Board, completely changed her perspective. He asked, “So why would you do it that way? Why wouldn’t you just do it the Kaya Henderson way?”
Kaya refers to this as the most liberating thing anyone ever said to her. You can see it everywhere in how she led: sitting union negotiators in a circle instead of across two tables, opening the negotiation by asking everyone to talk about a kid who made a difference in their life. She calls herself a lover, not a fighter. Kaya led by her own hallmarks, which, in her words, are love, authenticity, believing the best about people, and co-creation. I left wondering what would happen if we all led in this way, guided by our own authentic leadership hallmarks instead of imitating what we’ve seen before.
Here’s a sneak peek at our conversation:
What else?
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