Certifications
From Big Apple to the Big Easy
NYC may be the city that never sleeps, but New Orleans is the city where everyone finds reasons to celebrate early into the next morning. I grew up in fast-paced, stand-offish, subway-assisted New York, so laissez-faire, deeply relational, hard-to-navigate Post-Katrina New Orleans was a welcomed challenge, as admittedly, I tend to thrive in unfamiliar places.
Plus, I had an important, deeply purposeful job in front of me.
The Making of a Teacher-Leader
I was a math teacher through Teach For America in a neglected school-district in New Orleans’s Upper Ninth Ward. Our buildings had frequent power-outages and opaque plexiglass windows obscuring our view of the outside. Our days were punctuated by failing infrastructure and, despite many sweet kids, by dysregulated emotions and teenage violence.
Yet onward we taught. My colleagues and I had tons of autonomy and freedom to experiment. We kept investment banking hours, teaching all day and planning all night and into the weekend, living by the motto, “fail to plan, plan to fail” — and plan we did. And I was able to deliver on a humble objective: to provide an orderly-ish environment where kids in a tough place could not only learn, but detect their own agency, seizing on innate powers within their reach. We know for a fact these powers were used along paths to college and professional success.
So while the mission may sound ambitious, it had to be — that’s what made it important. And that’s what made it work. Even the smallest impacts pay huge dividends.
Working Under a Chaos-Creator
When the high school eventually shut down, I helped launch a new charter school network as director of human capital, later becoming executive director of operations.
That job became my most formative experience under a poor leader, who caused way more chaos than a building full of marginalized high-schoolers ever could.
Great talent beamed across our organization, but when the top leader doesn’t care about the talent, they certainly won’t be compelled to put it to proper use. As an employee, this was a violation of the agreed upon outcomes we all signed up to work toward. As a lifelong educator and senior leader myself, it was a violation of my creed to care very much about what others have to give, and to create the conditions that embolden them to give it. After four rewarding, yet frustrating years, I needed to grow, so I left.
The Grand, Ambitious Mission
I got my MBA at Columbia Business School then took a role at a global consulting firm. I worked for years advising clients on strategy, human capital, corporate culture, and organizational transformation in the US, China, and Pacific markets, all the while clocking how leadership manifests and successfully sustains itself in different environments.
Now, as an Executive Coach to ambitious professionals navigating these spaces, the same is true of my approach that was true in those classroom days – the competence and talent is there, we just have to move things around to access it.
So how do you raise the spirit, the intention, and the caliber of whatever room you’re in? When you consider questions like this, you not only seal off the void where chaos-creators enter – you go much much further in your own career.
Yes, this is a grand, ambitious mission to put real leaders to work in positions where they can drive positive change.
Leaders Who Start Playing Bold
The clients I work with today look a lot like I did in those early years — capable, driven, and sitting in rooms where they’re not yet making the impact they know they could. Some are navigating organizations where chaos has crept in from the top. Others are ready to grow past a ceiling they can’t quite name. All of them have more to give than their current environment is drawing out.
That’s the through-line from the Upper Ninth Ward to the boardroom: the talent is never the problem. Leadership is about creating the conditions — and having the courage — to do the hard work when nobody else steps up.
