What happens when we take a learning stance? In 2020, we went to New Orleans to spend a day-in-the-life with Chong-Hao Fu, CEO of Leading Educators, a New Profit alumni organization that works to help school systems nurture excellence in every classroom so all students are ready to thrive in a changing future.
We already knew how committed Chong-Hao was to Leading Educators’s four core values, but when we shadowed him at a convening of educational leaders to look at school data with an eye toward fair access and inclusion, we witnessed firsthand how he personally embodies and expresses those values and how interconnected they are. Each infuses the others with purpose and power.
Prioritize People
Chong-Hao is so committed to the people he works with that he skipped lunch and went straight to check in on his team during their stressful process of moving offices. Strong relationships were immediately apparent, from the way the team greeted each other to Chong-Hao’s in-depth conversations with each of his teammates about work and life. Leading Educators immediately felt more like a family than a group of co-workers. “Yes, results really do matter,” Chong-Hao told us, “but in the work of education, results only come by taking the time to build relationships with people.”
Disrupt Racial Inequity
Chong-Hao looks at the problem of systemic racial inequity as an opportunity—and a very personal one at that. “There are all these interesting identity issues that come up through these lenses of power and oppression,” he said. “They were always there in leadership, but a CEO needs to model them in a different way. For me, it means working through my own healing and understanding in a way that is public.” And that ties into Leading Educators’ value of prioritizing people: “People need to see the messiness while you’re doing that self-work.”
Build on Strengths
As an educator, Chong-Hao—who is a former school principal—centered this value on students. “Where are people situating the problem?” he asked. “Deficit framing describes students as the problem. They are never the problem.” As a CEO, Chong-Hao embodies this value by knowing his own organization’s foundational strength: “We’re a partner organization,” he said. That means being outer-directed toward partners’ strengths “What are our partners already doing well, and how can we add onto that? How can we learn together?” he asked, anticipating Leading Educators’ fourth value…
Learn Continuously
“Research around how to create a learning-focused organization shows that learning happens whenever your work meets a partner,” Chong-Hao said. “When it’s just your own work, you’re in your own echo chamber. But when you see how the work lands in a partnership, that’s where the learning and innovation will happen. That’s why we’re rooted in being on the ground, shoulder-to-shoulder with our partners, and really learning from them.” New Profit is rooted in the same approach, and we couldn’t have said it better.