Journey Towards Anti-Racism Ep8: Conversation with Marc Mannella (EP.61)
Updated
April 25, 2022
In episode eight of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Marc Mannella formerly CEO of KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools and currently a consultant working with clients that range from professional sports teams, to charter schools, to non-profits.
This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”
Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Download the accompanying study guide. And explore the other episodes in this series with guests:
Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG
Ted Castle (Founder & President) & Rooney Castle (Vice President), Rhino Foods
Ron Carucci, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Navalent
David Devan, General Director & President, Opera Philadelphia
Jared Fishman, Founding Executive Director, Justice Innovation Lab
Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21
Kit Hughes, Co-Founder & CEO, Look Listen
John Orr, Executive Director, Art-Reach
David Reuter, Partner, LLR
Sydney Skybetter, Founder, CRCI; Associate Chair & Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Department, Brown University
Want to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films.
Host: Tim Cynova
Guest
MARC MANNELLA is the President of Mannella Consulting Services, specializing in leadership coaching, and optimizing learning environments in schools, non-profits, and sport. Prior to his work consulting, Mannella had a 20-year career in education; first as a science teacher, then as founder and Principal of KIPP Philadelphia Charter School, a college preparatory middle school in North Philadelphia. After five years at KIPP as principal, he led KIPP Philadelphia’s expansion to a five-school network serving nearly 2000 students in grades K-12, overseeing all aspects of school and network operations as KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools’ CEO. He holds a B.A. in Psychology and Biology from the University of Rochester, and an M.Ed. in Education Leadership from National Louis University. Find out more about Marc here.
Host
TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press.
Transcript
Marc Mannella:
So I led a cohort-based learning, a process for emerging leaders in education in Philly here. I asked people in November or something, I was like, "Hey, people are building Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa wishlists on Amazon. So tell me your best leadership book, your favorite book about leadership." And people are writing Good to Great, and all this stuff that you'd sort of expect them to write, except one of my participants wrote Horton Hears a Who. I thought it was a joke, I'm like, "Get the heck out of here. Go ahead, explain, Horton Hears a Who. Lay it on me. I don't get it."
Marc Mannella:
And what she said was, "Think about that book for a second. Horton can hear something, he becomes aware of something nobody else understands, nobody else is aware of. And now he's got a decision to make, do you go on and be popular, make the easy decision to say, 'There's nothing I can do, bro.' Or do you put yourself on the line? Do you put your credibility at risk? Do you put your own personal safety at risk and say, 'No, no, no. Now that I know this thing, I can't unsee it, and the moral thing to do, the right thing to do is to stand up to power and say stop.'"
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. A podcast about, well that. We've paused our regular podcast episodes to produce this 10-part mini series called White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism. While you can listen to the episodes in any order, if you're joining us in the midst of this adventure, I invite you to check out episode 54 of our podcast where my co-host Lauren Ruffin and I introduce the series and frame these conversations. All of the episodes, as well as a whole host of amazing resources on the topic not by white guys can be found on workshouldntsuck.co. In this series, we're talking with a variety of white guys who are personally and professionally engaged in anti-racism work, when asked, they each define the work in slightly different ways.
Tim Cynova:
Some articulate it as anti-racism or anti oppression work, others say they approach it more through a justice lens, others inclusion and belonging, still others equity and impact. Through these conversations we'll explore the moments that led each of them to do this work, including their initial realizations, that this was work for white guys to be doing. We'll discuss, what's been most impactful and resonant to them in the journey, what's been most challenging.
Tim Cynova:
And since this is a podcast about the workplace, we'll discuss how this work shows up in the organizations they lead and the ones they work with. On today's conversation, I'm joined by Marc Mannella. For 15 years Marc was the CEO of KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools, and he's currently an independent consultant working with clients that range from professional sports teams to charter schools, to nonprofits. You can read more about Marc and his bio that's included in the episode description, so in the interest of time, let's get going. Marc, welcome to the podcast.
Marc Mannella:
Thanks so much for having me Tim. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. Me too. So how do you typically introduce yourself and the work that you do?
Marc Mannella:
Yeah. So my name's Marc Mannella and after a 20-year career in education, about a couple years ago I set out to start my own independent consulting practice. In that practice, my work is broken down into two different books. I've got nonprofit schools consulting work, which has a lot to do with organizational dynamics and setting up strong learning environments, and other executive leadership type work, like executive leadership coaching, et cetera. And then I've stumbled into this other piece of work, which is working with professional sports teams and high level athletics organizations, including the Cleveland Guardians, the Brooklyn Nets, the United States Olympics Committee.
Marc Mannella:
And with those clients, I'm really helping them to apply the lessons that we've learned both through Cognos psychology, but also through how schools have over the last 20, 50 years. And applying those into a coaching setting into a sports setting because coaching has a ton of teaching in it. And the lessons that our very best teachers can teach us, about how to help people be able to do new things, is something that can be applied very directly into a sports context. I am split into two different roles and I enjoy them both equally, so I really love the fact that in this moment in my career I get to do both things.
Tim Cynova:
What does that look like from the coaching context? What does it look like when you're applying that learning from the education context?
Marc Mannella:
It's actually really similar to teacher coaching. When I would coach teachers, I would walk into a classroom. We have established that there's content that needs to be taught, but also there's pedagogical approaches that we want to see our teachers take to help our kids learn. I think that when we think about what great teaching should look like, there's lots of different ideas for that. I think there's still this antiquity at some level that the teacher is standing in the front of a room, with straight of desks with kids sitting with their hands folded, paying rapt attention to the teacher. The teacher knows every answer is telling the kids all the things they need to know, the kids are remembering it, and then they go off to be doctors, lawyers, and astronauts, right? That is not what great teaching should look like.
Marc Mannella:
Great teaching needs to engage the learner. Great teaching needs to build on yesterday's lesson and anticipate where they're going to go tomorrow. Great teaching needs to assess what the students can do and then adjust when these 14 can do this thing now, but these six cannot, what do I do as the teacher? Well, now let's shift that and put it to a coaching context. I've got a team full of baseball players, there is an idea about what they should be able to base running wise. And so I can't go into a session with a bunch of players and say, "Today, I'm going to teach you base running," that's way too general. And what are you going to do to teach it? Are you just going to talk to them about base running? Or are you actually going to say, "Okay, today we're going to talk about secondary leads. And we're going to talk about the right timing on taking a secondary lead, we're going to talk about the right distance from the bag, and we're going to talk about how do you adjust that to specific game situations."
Marc Mannella:
That's an objective, that's the same thing that I want my 4th grade math teacher doing. Well, my 4th grade math teacher they're not there to teach division, they're there to teach, "Today, we are going to divide two digit by three digit numbers and we are going to use the X method," or whatever. You have to boil down with some real specificity what it is you're going to teach today. I might coach a teacher how to do that on Tuesday, and then I might be working with a coach on Wednesday, and it's the same thing, there's a huge amount of overlap. Now, look, I'm not a baseball coach. I don't know the answer to any of those questions I just said about secondary leads, but I also was coaching Spanish teachers and I don't speak Spanish. I was coaching calculus teachers and I don't remember a lick of calculus. The fundamentals about what we do as teachers, it stays the same. So I've been able to convince enough people of that in pro sports, that they've hired me to help our coaches in that way.
Tim Cynova:
That's a really cool application of one sector's learning and approach to another's. And it makes me think of the work we're talking about today on this conversation. How can we apply this frame to what we're doing and to organizational design, how we show been community, I guess it's the transitive property of the work.
Marc Mannella:
Absolutely. When I think back to my undergraduate career, I thought I was pre-med. I was getting this biology degree and at some point I realized I didn't want to be pre-med anymore, and this biology degree was not really going to be that useful, and I added a psych second major, and I'm so glad that I did. I think that the fundamental underpinnings that I culled from psychology and the fact that I'm not afraid of the cognitive science literature.
Marc Mannella:
I can dig into Kahneman's Thinking Fast & Slow and it's a slog, but it's not Greek to me, I understand it. And then one of the things that I've been able to do over the years is I've developed an ability to explain relatively complex things, relatively straightforward manner, and how do you apply this theory in real life? And I think that helped me in leadership, I think that helped me as a teacher, because I started my career as a classroom teacher, biology teacher. And I think it now helps me in this second act that I found myself in where I'm explaining these cognitive science principles, cognitive psychology principles to a professional basketball coach. There's a lot of that transitive property that I think is relevant to the work that I do.
Tim Cynova:
You're taking the learnings from your college days and applying those through the different settings, which is I think really exciting to see how it might impact different venues.
Marc Mannella:
It is amazing when you think about the value of a psych degree and just in general, I suppose the value of the humanities and the value of the liberal arts degree, it has so much to do with your ability to understand the world around you, and I think about empathy as this superpower. Your ability to anticipate how is this action that I take, how is this sentence that I say, how is how I'm showing up, how is all of this being read by different people? And I think as you think about your ability to be empathetic and how important that is as a leader, there's so many different applications in so many different ways that'll impact your actions.
Marc Mannella:
I can show up at spring training and I'll already know that there are going to be some baseball coaches that are resistant, because I topped out at high school baseball and I've coached my kids' little league team, but that is not the same thing that these guys do. And so how do I anticipate and assess and adjust what I'm doing to try and be useful, understanding what it is that might be their self-talk or the narrative in their head, and how do I get past that in order to sort of break through and be of use. I think about empathy a lot and trying to understand the impact I'm having on other people.
Tim Cynova:
Talking about how you show up, can you take us through the arc of what led to two white guys sitting down for a podcast to talk about race and racism?
Marc Mannella:
Okay. Where do I begin? I suppose I'll begin at the beginning. Grew up in upstate New York, progressive-ish, not all the way progressive, but a family that at the time voted strongly democrat. My dad was a research scientist, my mom stayed at home, and then after my sibling and I grew up, she started a small business. We were very much raised to be color blind, we didn't call it that because we never talked about it. But we were good white people who believed that black people were just as good as us and could be anything and so could we, and there was no difference. And it was an embarrassingly long time and far away into my career before I understood how that view in and of itself was problematic.
Marc Mannella:
But I think that being raised that way and also being raised in a manner which had a strong social justice underpinning, so we always were fighting for the little guy. And the idea that there is fairness and fairness matters, equality matters, and we should be actively trying to make the world a better place in that image. As you fast forward through my college years and I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do and I graduate. And as I mentioned a moment ago, I'm not pre-med anymore. I was very much attracted to Teach For America because I said to myself, "Look, this is great, I can teach biology. I know this stuff. I liked biology back in high school, so I could teach high school biology." And I could go teach at a suburban school where I grew up or I could go teach in a private school, but really what an opportunity to go teach where they need great teachers to go teach in an inner city or in a rural community.
Marc Mannella:
I ended up being placed in Baltimore, I got in, I ended up being placed in Baltimore, Maryland back in the late '90s. As a 22 year old guy trying to process that experience, it was really just eye opening to me. I had barely driven through the parts of town growing up and in my 22 years prior that I was now going to every day where I was working, where I was trying to become accepted by a community and a member of a community, where everybody was of a different race than me. The school I was placed in was almost a 100% African American, this faculty was almost a 100% African American. And so as a white guy race was all around me, but I still wasn't ready to call it that, to talk about that. You talk about the economic aspect, "Well, that's not because they're black it's because they're poor."
Marc Mannella:
You talk about the cultural aspect, I think that was really when I started to get my first understanding that this is so systemic. Because 23 year old me would go home to upstate new into the suburbs and at Christmas parties would be talking about what I was doing. And there were all kinds of problematic attitudes that my parents friends would have, where they're like, "Wow, you're in Teach For America, that's incredible." And I think they really saw it almost as missionary work, whereas Teach For America very much is trying to not set it up that way. Lots of people and I think in the beginning, myself included didn't understand a different way to think about it. It felt like I'm a have, I go to a have not and I'm going to teach them because I have something that they do not.
Marc Mannella:
I have an education, I have social capital, I have all these things. As I'm trying to process this, the way I started to explain it to my parents' friends was, "There's nothing "wrong" with my kids. Kids are awesome. My kids are beautiful, they're brilliant. They have been criminally under-taught, that's not their fault, it's just not and it's not their parents' fault." As a society we've decided that those kids in West Baltimore don't matter as much as I did, or at least that's what it felt like to 23 year old me, you start to try and make sense of that. And as I continued on in my career, I taught West Baltimore for a couple years. I moved to Philadelphia, I taught North Philadelphia at a different...now I was at a district school in Baltimore, then I went to a charter school in Philadelphia because 25 year old me says, "Wow, the system is what's screwed up." And so maybe a charter school being still a public school that serves all kids, but is not part of this big bureaucratic school district.
Marc Mannella:
Maybe a charter school you can get away from that and we're leaving the system behind, were independent, but I saw the same stuff. It wasn't "better", it was different, there was still a system, even though the system was a principal and assistant principal, two administrators, there were still decisions being made that I could very squarely see were not being made in the best interest of kids. And so now 26, 27 year old me is trying to make sense of that, I got this idea in my head that, "You know what, I could start a school." And if I started a school, it wouldn't be like that.
Marc Mannella:
I found KIPP or KIPP found me, I'm not sure which, and I applied for what they called the Fisher fellowship. The Fisher Fellowship is a one year training that teaches teachers to become principles of charter schools in the community that they're currently working as teachers. So the National KIPP Foundation provided the training, provided technical support, helped me write a charter application, helped me design a curriculum that was aligned to Pennsylvania state standards and all of that. KIPP now has 220, 230 schools across the country, but at the time I opened up the 16th one or something, so this is back in 2002. KIPP had this track record that was proving something very different was possible for kids in inner city and rural communities, what we at the time at KIPP called educationally underserved communities. Trying to get away from a deficit mindset, there's nothing wrong with our community other than the fact that some system has decided not to invest in it.
Marc Mannella:
And so we opened that school and for the next 15 years, I led that school first as principal of our flagship school starting in 2003. Then for 10 years, I led our expansion efforts because our initial school had a pretty good deal of success, and we started getting this massive wait list. So now there's like thousands of kids who want to get into our school, but because we have a cap imposed upon us as part of our charter agreement with the district, basically we have a contract with the district that says, "You can have this many kids." And so now we have thousands of kids who want to get in and so we started adding more schools. So we put new charter applications in to add additional KIPP Philadelphia schools. What started with 90 5th graders in an abandoned community center in North Philadelphia turned into over the 15 years I was there, six schools, K to 12 serving or 2000 kids, we've got over 200 employees.
Marc Mannella:
We're running a $30 million budget, I'm raising about four or $5 million a year to supplement the public revenue that we bring in as a charter school, all to try and provide a different experience for our kids. And our kids found a great deal of success in that. But KIPP had its detractors too, some of them outside of KIPP looking in and we had loyal dissents inside of KIPPP as well. And there was a real tension that we were trying to navigate at KIPP, and I'll speak specifically to KIPP Philadelphia, the school I was running as principal, and then the network I was running as CEO. We were college preparatory schools. We were designed to help our kids. And we actually used the term back in the early 2000s, pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Marc Mannella:
We said that explicitly, we said it to the families we were recruiting, "We're going to provide you with this opportunity. You're going to have fantastic teachers. You're going to have as much resources we can bring. We're going to go on field trips every month. We're going to go on a big end of year field trip at the end, it's going to be a culminating experience for all of your lessons, it's going to be academic in nature." We had a track record from the original flagship schools that we were building in Philadelphia that says, "You are going to be way more likely to go to and through college if you finish with us." But we had this inherent tension and one of my students, one of my first class of students, when four years in when she was an 8th grader about to go off to high school, she asked this very pointed question, Dina.
Marc Mannella:
She asked this question in the middle of a class and she was like, "Mr. Mannella, why do you hate the way we talk?" I said, "What do you mean? I'm not following." She's like, "You're constantly telling us to speak proper grammar. So what are you trying to say about the way that we talk now? What's not proper about it?" I tried to give this over intellectualized response about what at the time we called standard American vernacular English versus African American vernacular English, "And there's nothing wrong with the way that you talk. But if we are trying to prepare you for a world that is going to judge you by things that maybe aren't important, we're basically trying to teach you a cheat code to-"
Marc Mannella:
And I didn't have these words at the time, and even if I did, I'm not sure if I would've said them to an 8th grader or not, I don't know, "... but basically to grow up in a white supremacist world." It's like, "We're trying to set you up to thrive in this world that itself is broken." And so how do you actually do that? I think we were blind to that question in the early years. And then at some point our eyes became opened to that question and we started grappling with it in real terms. I'm still grappling with that question, that's how I got here with another white guy talking about race.
Tim Cynova:
I'm always struck by the phrase pull yourself up at your own bootstraps. My dad was a Lutheran pastor and I distinctly remember a sermon that he had when I was a kid where he pointed out, you actually go down when you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, when you're pulling on your boots you're actually moving down toward your boots, and decided to offer a podcast episode.
Marc Mannella:
And again, I understand now, bootstrap theory is super problematic. I didn't understand that in 2005 and I should have, but I didn't.
Tim Cynova:
We don't know what we don't know sometimes and the learning, and we're part of an affinity group and I've talked to several other guys who are part of the white men for Racial Justice. We were recording this in late January 2022. And last year in 2021 every month we would take a different lens, and look at the racial justice work and one of the months was spent around education. And there was some really fascinating research that came out of it, there was a lot of reflection. I'm curious for you who has spent so much time in education, thinking about this intersection, was there anything new that came out of that time for you? Any ahas that might have helped you reframe or think, "Oh God, 26 year old me, that's what was happening."
Marc Mannella:
Off the top of my head what comes up to me is less out something brand new and more about stuff I had forgotten, I stepped down as the head of KIPP Philadelphia in 2018, so it's been three and a half years now where I've been on my own. And I think I've just forgotten certain things I take certain things for granted that people just understand, Charter schools being one of the big examples. I think that in our group that learning month was kicked off by Sharif El-Mekki a friend of mine, who is a very strong African American leader in the education sector here in Philadelphia. He's dedicated his life and his career now is focused very much on getting more African American teachers in classrooms across the entire state of Pennsylvania and across the entire country and importantly, not just in African American neighborhoods.
Marc Mannella:
There's some crazy statistic about there's 500 school districts in the state of Pennsylvania, and something like 460 of them or something don't have a single African American teacher in the classroom. When you think about Pennsylvania you think about maybe Philly and Pittsburgh, but so much of Pennsylvania is not Philly and Pittsburgh. He's a strong advocate for charter schools, and he made connections to the Freedom School movement that he himself went to Freedom Schools, which was basically what we would think of now as an independent school, but it was very much set up around stressing black empowerment. He then led a charter school for 10 or 15 years or something before getting into this education training work now. And I remember going into a breakout room after that, and one of the people said, "So I'm confused. I thought charter school rules were bad."
Marc Mannella:
And you're reminded that progressive politics and the democratic party have very much taken on the points of view and education that the teachers union has taken on. And since most charter schools are not unionized, there is an oppositional narrative out there, charter school bad, district school good. Because charter school non-union's workforce because charter school takes money away dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. But I just forgot that and I think Betsy DeVos did a lot of damage in that regard, because as Trump's education secretary she strongly touted charter schools.
Marc Mannella:
And I remember at the time being like, "Please stop about charter schools. Stop. You're not helping. You're making this way worse. I'm not interested in your sport. Thanks." But there is like anything, I've been in this sector for so long, I think I've forgotten so much. And one of the things that was opaque to me or I had just forgotten about, I guess, is someone who's not working in education, looking from the outside and how they could hear that narrative charter bad. Like anything, we could have found a different speaker who would be a prominent education voice, African American education voice Philadelphia who would say charter bad, and the answer as always I think is it depends.
Tim Cynova:
One of the things that resonated for me from his presentation and from that discussion was around harm. We talk about this a lot where people don't want to make mistakes, but you actually are already making the mistakes, what happens in the learning is you realize the mistakes you're making or the harm you're inflicting on people of color, that really resonated for me, as well as the data around at what point do you need to start talking about race and racism with kids? And it was that setup where do you start in 5th grade or middle school, or is it earlier in 5th grade? It keeps going back and back earlier and earlier to be like, "Preschool would not be too early to start talking about race and racism."
Marc Mannella:
When do you start talking about math? Don't teach a kindergarten calculus, don't do that. But you should be developing number sense, when do you teach grammar? Well, we're not going to whip out, what is it William Strunk or whatever, but we are going to identify numbers. One of the points I think Sharif made that night was, "White people are the people who are asking themselves, 'When do we teach about race?' People of color are talking about it all the time, it's constant, it is an obligation of a parent of color." It was sort of, I believe, and I don't want to misrepresent what he was saying. But my memory of that conversation is that he was basically saying, "We don't have a choice, we're talking about it." There's a privilege even in asking the question that we have to recognize, we talked about race with our students at KIPP from kindergarten on.
Marc Mannella:
But it was very intentional, just like a math curriculum, it was very intentional around how it was discussed. One of the things that you have to be conscious of is at KIPP, we went on a journey in terms of the demographics of our workforce, the demographics of our teaching core. By the time I left we were about 55% people of color, 45% white. But that was an intentional effort that we embarked upon around maybe 2012, 2013, because we were more 70/30, white, non-white. One of the things that you have to be thinking about in terms of doing harm is how are we setting up our teachers, how are we preparing our teachers to talk about race with our kids? To be clear, everybody needs that training because you want to teach these lessons in a way that everybody can receive it and everybody can learn from it.
Marc Mannella:
Yes, our white teachers may have been less comfortable talking about race, may not have been, no one's a monolith, no demographic group is a monolith. But how do we provide that support and it starts back even previous, how do you convince everybody that it's important? How do you convince people that it matters? I think a lot organizations both that I'm currently with my clients, but also just my friends work for, et cetera, had this reckoning around what happened at George Floyd's murder, what happened in May, June of 2020. Our reckoning at KIPP came much earlier, we had a similar moment around Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson, Missouri, that for us sort of launched the type of action that now I think lots of other organizations are seeing launched in the wake of George Floyd.
Marc Mannella:
And so we've always been a little bit out in front, although we are certainly behind other places that either never needed to have a reckoning because they understood it from the get go or had their reckoning around Trayvon Martin's murder. There are plenty of moments where we could have realized it at KIPP. There's so much there to unpack around how do you teach teachers to teach about race. Certainly we could tie this all into what's happening in Florida and Virginia, and these states that are passing these critical race theory laws, which are basically banning these conversations.
Tim Cynova:
It's reminiscent of a quote while white people are busy learning, black people are dying, and that the world doesn't stop while white people are reading Me And White Supremacy and all. Really great books, but it's a lot of catch that needs to happen for white folks here.
Marc Mannella:
That's right. And as leaders, your obligation to get up to speed now, yesterday is profound. And that is something that I am still learning, but am trying to get better at conveying to clients who still are maybe not thinking about this, or not thinking about it in that way. We're still thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion work, thinking about that as like stuff I have to check the box, so that I can get back to what's important. As a white guy who has access to power in these organizations as I'm brought in as a consultant, trying to find my voice and to be consistent and consistent and persistent and be heard. I come in my hair on fire and I'm going to be dismissed, but I feel that hair on fire urgency around this issue, so how do I show up? Again, that's something I'm constantly trying to be metacognitive about.
Tim Cynova:
I imagine part of it is in how you talk about the work. I know from your one pager about consulting, you did some work around centralized versus decentralized, leadership and decision making. Part of my work is also around sharing leadership, power and decision making. And so it seems like a hot topic right now or is a hot topic right now. And you can talk about that without talking about race and racism and oppression. But in doing that, you're helping reframe and adjust who holds power, who holds decision making, who's involved in a process. I imagine that's somehow how you sneak some of this work into maybe organizations who aren't ready yet.
Marc Mannella:
Yeah. You're making me think about, so I led a cohort based learning process for emerging leaders in education in Philly here. I asked people in November or something, I was like, "Hey, people are building Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa wishlists on Amazon. So tell me your best leadership book, your favorite book about leadership." And people are writing Good to Great, and all the stuff that you'd sort of expect them to write, except one of my participants wrote Horton Hears a Who. And I kind of thought it was a joke, I'm like, "Get the heck out of here. Go ahead, explain, Horton Hears a Who. Lay it on me. I don't get it."
Marc Mannella:
And what she said was, "Think about that book for a second. Horton can hear something, he becomes aware of something nobody else understands, nobody else is aware of. And now he's got a decision to make, do you go on and be popular, make the easy decision to sort of say, 'There's nothing I can do, bro.' Or do you put yourself on the line? Do you put your credibility at risk? Do you put your own personal safety at risk and say, 'No, no, no, now that I know this thing, I can't unsee it. And the moral thing to do, the right thing to do is to stand up to power and say stop.'" She was like, "That's leadership." I was like, "Oh man, you are right. What a great call."
Marc Mannella:
Honestly, that little quote, that moment, I'm thinking about this 10 years later, but that really shifted for me the way I thought about my job in many ways. As the leader, it's your job to listen, as the leader it's your job to make sure that you see unintended consequences of actions. As a leader it's your job to make sure that you are aware and in tune with all stakeholders and how your decisions are impacting them. So as I think about whether it's decentralization, centralization frameworks or decision rights, matrices, or whatever it is that I'm sort of working with a client on, there's big part of that around leadership which comes down to who are you listening to?
Marc Mannella:
Who has a seat at the table? And then from there you can go on to who gets promoted, who has power and what does power mean? Who gets budget allocated to their projects? And then you can start to really start to unpack. And this is the work that we started to do after Michael Brown's murder at KIPP Philadelphia. We looked at our demographics, but we went one step further and again, this was guided very much by work... KIPP naturally brought in folks at Teach For America who were way ahead on this stuff, at least ahead of KIPP, and they explained what they did at TFA. This idea of we're not just looking for the overall percentages of male versus female or white versus non-white or whatever else, however the way you could slice demographics.
Marc Mannella:
But then we go one cut deeper and now we're looking for, okay, so this is all your employees. What about instructional staff versus non-instructional staff? What about leaders versus people who aren't leaders? Do you see gaps? What about inside departments? We figured out we didn't realize we were running four schools at the time and we had something like 14 math teachers, and we didn't realize that we had one African American math teacher and 13 white math teachers. We just didn't realize it and it's like, "Oh-" But if you look at our social studies department, or heck if you look at our janitorial and cafeteria staff, so you can't just say overall employees, that's not enough, you have to go deeper. Another thing we talked about was who's getting promoted because we realized that the leadership ranks, we had a over representation of white leaders in our schools.
Marc Mannella:
Immediately, it comes down to so what, now what? What are we going to do about this? We happened to take really intentional efforts around saying, "Okay, so what are we going to do about that?" And part of it we learned, and again, we learned this from Teach For America was around who has a seat to the table and who gets time with me, who gets time with the principal. In my mind, my door is always open, anybody can come in and talk to me when that door is open. If I'm sitting there, I'll put down what I'm doing and talk to you. If I go into the teacher workroom, I go into the cafeteria, I hang out after school, before school, I want to be present, I want to be visible to my teachers, but the people who take me up on those opportunities tended to be white.
Marc Mannella:
And then if you happen to be in my office, when I'm dealing with something, I would always pull you in, but you're not in my office unless you feel comfortable enough to walk in the door and I had to deal with the hard reality, that people were way more likely to walk in the door if they looked like me. There was something I was doing, there was some signal I was sending. I've had the good fortune of getting to know Dan Coyle a little bit over the years, author of Culture Code and Talent Code, and he talks about belonging cues. And this idea that organizational cultures send signals to certain people that they belong. And you may not be thinking about it and you may not be aware of it, but you are, if you're a leader you're sending signals to people about whether or not they belong.
Marc Mannella:
How as leaders do we become more aware of the signals that we're sending, because I think inclusion it's still often cited in DEI work. But really this comes down to belonging, if you feel like you belong, you're more likely to bring your full self to work, you're more likely to contribute in ways where we get to benefit from the diversity of our team. These are the things that we were thinking about at KIPP. And these are the things that I'm trying to with these experiences that I had, that I'm trying out to help my clients sort of work, and do it in a way where I might feel the hair on fire urgency, but I'm not coming of as so confrontational in their face that they can't hear it, which is hard for me.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. Because you feel that urgency.
Marc Mannella:
I feel the urgency Horton felt.
Tim Cynova:
Currently, in our affinity group we've been working through Layla Saad's, Me And White Supremacy. And in my own journaling, I was reflecting on the first time I taught my leadership and team building course at the new school. To make a long story short, I was given two days before I started teaching that course and I had to build the syllabus in two days. So I pulled 15 books off the bookshelf, I grabbed all the articles that were seminal leadership articles, and it wasn't until the second year when I was teaching that course, when I was going back through the syllabus that I realized every single author was white, and probably 95% of them were men. And it was just like those were the books on my shelf that I had, and then, "All right, so who else do I seek out? What other books are out there besides white guys writing about leadership?"
Marc Mannella:
Yeah. Well, Dr. Seuss was a white guy with his own problematic history, might I add. But no, I think that that's something that I think about a lot too. I'm now going out of my way to read non-white authors like a lot of people I think are. I read this great article recently about science fiction, which I like. And basically the article put forth just this idea that when you think of science fiction, you're probably thinking like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, these folks who've been elevated as the seminal science fiction authors, but they're all white dudes.
Marc Mannella:
And when you read science fiction by someone who's not a white guy by someone who's not American, science fiction is different. What they're writing is different, has a different take because so much of what you right, is so informed by your personal experience and your history. So I've got Octavia Butler on my nightstand right now and I'm super jazzed to read that book, because I have never just gone that route. Just one example of a thousand probably of something I was blind to, but I hear it, and I've thought, "Of course. Sure. I need to read some science fiction by someone who's not an old white dude."
Tim Cynova:
We've covered a lot of exciting ground belonging, inclusion, power dynamics. Often think of as you were talking about taking a look at your organization and who's in what roles, I think of that as the financial balance sheet. You might not like your balance sheet, you might not like your cash position, but that is what it is, and then at least you know, "Where to from here, what can we do about this?"
Marc Mannella:
Yes. 100%. And I think people lose that sense. I think this comes back to white fragility a little bit. This idea of like, "I'm actually afraid to know because it's going to be so bad and then that means I'm bad." At some point you have to be courageous enough to say, "Okay, this is what it is and shame on me if I don't do something to improve it." I was a part of a multiracial group that was thinking about how to tackle issues of white supremacy culture. And we took a trip to Richmond and some of the guys from the affinity group that you and I are now in Tim, we're in that group. We did the Richmond slave trail, we had a local pastor, black pastor tell the story of the first slaves. And we walked the exact path that those people walked and we're trying to put ourselves in their shoes, and think about what that would've felt like and think about what that would've been.
Marc Mannella:
It is this unbelievable experience, emotionally exhausting, you're basically crying the entire time, at least I was. And I remember we carpooled there, and so like now I'm in the car with two black women who I basically just met. We were just silent and then we started listening to music and then the one woman says, "How we all feeling?" And I'm just like, "I just feel this deep guilt and shame. I'm ashamed to be white right now." And what she said to me, I'll never forget. She was like, "Well, that doesn't do any good. Why do you feel shame?" She's like, "I feel shame too, because I'm a human. And that humans could do that to other humans, that's embarrassing, that's unbelievable to me. But you should only feel shame if now that you've thought about this, you don't go do something about it."
Marc Mannella:
I needed that in that moment, I think I probably knew that also and I heard that before, but in that moment it was just so in my face and in my bones, and my whole body was just wrecked from the experience. I was just so grateful that she said that, we've talked a little bit in our group Tim about it is not black people's jobs to teach us. And I will say that when you're fortunate enough to be in a position where someone does listen, listen. I listen to that and I think about that. And again, bring this back to all this CTR stuff, and how these laws are being written about nothing can ever be taught that makes you feel guilt or shame. And I think about, "Man, if you even think that's the point of these lessons about race, then you're so far from understanding what it is that we're trying to convey, and what we're trying to teach."
Marc Mannella:
The point is once you know this, once you see this, once you've become aware of these structures of this white supremacist system that we live in, once you've been unplugged from the matrix, you can't take the blue pill and just go back to sleep. You have to take the red pill and you have to figure out what you're going to do about it. As I think about this now I try to suppress the shame, and now my shame is reserved for when I know something is wrong and I don't do anything.
Tim Cynova:
Marc, that's really powerful. We've come up to our time. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your vulnerability. Thank you so much for your work and guidance on this as a mentor and colleague in this journey together, and thanks for being on the podcast.
Marc Mannella:
My pleasure Tim, thank you for inviting me and thank you for using your platform to shine a light on this a bit. I'm grateful for the opportunity and also grateful for your work. Thank you.
Tim Cynova:
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