The Leader’s Algorithm: How a Personal Theory of Action Transforms Your Life, Work, and Relationships

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Pablo Muñoz. Pablo is the Managing Director of Muñoz & Company, an educational and leadership consulting organization, a first-generation high school graduate Pablo earned a bachelor's in psychology from Yale University and a master's in educational administration from Columbia University. He has 30 years of experience as a teacher and administrator and was a superintendent for 16 years. He was named one of the George Lucas Educational Foundation's Daring Dozen, a prestigious group working to reshape the future of education.

[00:48] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:50] SPEAKER_00:

Pablo, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Justin, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. We're here today to talk about your new book, The Leader's Algorithm, how a personal theory of action transforms your life, work, and relationships. Let's just jump right in and talk, if we could, about what a personal theory of action is and how that has been a part of your life and career.

[01:13] SPEAKER_01:

That's a fantastic question. We'll break it down a little bit. A theory of action is basically a hypothesis that certain actions, your actions and your team's actions will lead to certain results. So said another way, if I do, or if we do a, B and C, then we will get X, Y, and Z results. Personal theory of action is also a hypothesis, but in this case, it's what you can do personally and through your team to achieve your goals. It's written in a logical chain of if-then statements that lead to your ultimate goal.

[01:59]

And for me, my personal theory of action was my leadership framework and strategy that I used to lead both the Elizabeth and the public and Passaic public schools in New Jersey.

[02:12] SPEAKER_00:

Well, as a former science teacher, I love that framing and that kind of if-then hypothesis thinking. And certainly we've all experienced that in the form of just understanding cause and effect in our own lives. Like if I eat healthy, if I exercise, then I can expect my health to improve, things like that. Talk to us a little bit about how that shows up as a school leader, because as school leaders, it's not so simple as, you know, eat more salad or go to the gym. We're pulled in 10,000 different directions. So how could you possibly even have one personal theory of action?

[02:46] SPEAKER_01:

It's very interesting. When I interview my candidates, my final interview with my candidates for administrative positions before I present them to the board, I always talk about that they're going to be inundated with a lot of noise and that it's critically important to deal with the noise, but always to get back into the classroom and help teachers improve their performance. But let me take a step back and kind of first lay out the larger scope of the title, the leader's algorithm, and tell you what the leader's algorithm is, and then get into your question around a personal theory of action. So the leader's algorithm is basically a simple equation, which says if I write and share a personal theory of action, right, and you don't leave it as a theory, you go to the next stage, which is then I execute it.

[03:36]

and then I hold myself publicly accountable for my actions and my results, then you can transform your life, your work, your schools, your school districts, and your relationships. So that's the leader's algorithm. And the major emphasis is around creating your personal theory of action, writing it, sharing it publicly. To your question around a personal theory of action, It's not just one if-then statement. It's kind of a cascading series of if-then statements. So I start my personal theory of action around what I can personally do.

[04:18]

And then the next level is what my leaders should focus on. Then the next level is how I shape the organization. And then we lay out the guiding principles And so you have these four layers of if statements that get pretty specific, but not granular. They're really strategic statements. They're broad, strategic statements. And then you lay out your then statement, which is your ultimate goal, which is often some paraphrasing or the exact language of your mission statement.

[04:56]

And therefore you are hit with a lot of noise. And without a personal theory of action, you end up going adrift. You get whacked around all day long with day-to-day activities. And as a superintendent of schools, The media could call me, the nine board members, the mayor, the assemblymen, things are happening in schools with, you know, in Passaic I had 15,000 and Elizabeth had 25,000 students. So multiply that usually like that two parents and probably a grandmother or grandfather. I mean, you had a lot of moving parts and a lot of things going on.

[05:30]

And ultimately what you want to do is educate children very well. So having a personal theory of action that's written out that, you know, you take The thoughts that in your head, your experiences over time that you have gained by actually doing the work or from your advocates or your mentors. And in my case, my experience with the Broad Academy. And something that's crucially important, which is book mentors. The books and the case studies that I've read over time from authors that you don't get to meet, but they really are your biggest mentors because, especially in my case in the urban settings, you don't always have the role models around leadership and focused on teaching and learning in the instructional core that you would like. So oftentimes your mentors are

[06:20]

are books and case studies that help guide your work. So having a personal theory of action, taking the mental models that are in your head, which we all have, writing it out and then sharing it publicly, you really do lay out for the organization, for the board members, for the elected official, for the power brokers, for your classroom teachers, the unions, how you will operate as a leader. So if you do get pulled away by the noise, you can always go back to your statement and get yourself grounded again on what is critically important that you focus on as a leader and what the people that are following your leaders across the school district and your schools and your departments and divisions what they should be doing and what you hope the larger, broader theory of action for the whole district, the organizational theory of action, which is usually if you can, I was able to get the board to adopt a policy that kind of defined those strategic elements.

[07:18]

So hopefully that answers your question around, you know, how do you take something as simple as an if-then statement? It's not just one, it's multi-layered and it's actually keeps you really grounded on where you want to go directionally with the district.

[07:35] SPEAKER_00:

So it almost seems to me like that theory of action serves as kind of a filter, right? As a leader in kind of a public position, there are thousands or tens of thousands of people who could potentially want some of your time in a day, could send you a priority and try to put something on your plate. And you have to have various filters in place, not just in the way that someone might help screen your calls, but really strategic filters that say, this is what has made it onto the agenda. This is what I'm going to remain focused on. And you said this is not something that you keep to yourself, just put in your journal or whatever. This is something that you actually communicate publicly.

[08:09] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, you have to. I mean, if you're going to be effective as a leader, a big element is trust. And like I talk about in my book and I tell an interesting story around trust is that trust is a two-way street. You have to earn people's trust and they have to earn yours. So if you hide your theory of action, people are guessing, you know, what do you stand for really, right? I mean, and ultimately the theory of action is spelling out what you stand for, how you're going to operate as a school leader, whether you're, you know, at the superintendent level or you're at the school level as an assistant principal or principal, you should all have some type of system of values and beliefs that you think will impact student learning for me i made my personal theory action public in two major ways one is actually sharing i mean everything that i talked about fits on an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper right so it's a system very some clear if then statements this is how i'm going to operate so i would share those publicly with

[09:15]

My administrative team with the union presidents may not give them the actual document, but talk about who I am and what I stand for and how am I going to approach things. With the board, the same thing. It starts at the interview level. If you have a clear sense of who you are as a leader and how you want to operate, you might not give them this document at the interview, but you kind of lay out everything that's in your document in the interview process. And then when you're a superintendent, as you create programs and services and policies, they're getting played out and you're making them public. And ultimately, like I said a little bit earlier, part of my personal theory of action incorporates the overall organizational theory of action, which I was successful to get both of my boards to adopt as school board policy.

[10:07]

which is fantastic because once the board owns that policy, which is aligned with an element of your personal theory of action, it helps you have the board backing the direction that you're going to take instructionally and everything else that happens in a school day.

[10:25] SPEAKER_00:

I love it because you're essentially telling people upfront what you're going to focus on and what you're not going to focus on in order to achieve the things that you are going to focus on. Like you're being proactive about the things that you are not going to let distract you from that plan, right? You're putting up some defenses.

[10:43] SPEAKER_01:

Well, you hope it doesn't distract you, but it will distract you. Things do come along that do distract you. But the personal theory of action, if it's written out, shared, and people know where you come from, they're not surprised when you take a certain position. They may not like it, but they shouldn't be surprised because you've been very clear about how you're going to be approaching your leadership in that particular district.

[11:05] SPEAKER_00:

I love it. I wonder if I could ask about the internal dimension of that distraction, because especially for those of us who are voracious readers, we tend to collect lots and lots and lots of ideas. Everybody listening to this probably has a shelf full of books that could pull them in many different directions. But I love in the premise of your book, just this idea of organizing things as a theory of action, organizing things as an algorithm that can help us test our hypotheses, help keep us focused. Do you have any just kind of general advice for doing the two things that we've talked about so far of putting together that theory of action and learning from book mentors? Because I feel like every time I read a new book, I want to go in a different direction.

[11:47] SPEAKER_01:

Well, listen, the good thing is if you do pick up my book, the first chapter is Defining the Leader's Algorithm, which I did a little bit earlier. And I take you through that. But then the second half of that chapter, I teach you how to write your own personal theory of action. And then in the Appendix A, I believe, Appendix A has both of my final versions of my theory of actions for Elizabethan Passaic. So you can see what I actually wrote. at all those different levels.

[12:18]

And then you can say, I like some of this, I don't like some of this. So the book helps you think through the process by sharing what I wrote over time, and it helps you write your own. The critical piece of it is that it changes. My two school districts contextually had a lot of things in common, but ultimately they were at two different phases of their academic performance. So what you may have been doing in another district may need to be modified. And the example that I'll give is in Elizabeth, my guiding principles in my personal theory of action were the three L's, love, laser-like focus on teaching and learning, and leadership.

[13:07]

And as I transitioned to Passaic, Passaic, the system was more broken. They didn't really have a lot of parts that were working well. The strongest part of the organization was actually their business office and their purchasing department. That department would win awards, but everything else that mattered for kids were pretty broken. I mean, one example is they hadn't updated their school board policies in two decades and people were kind of just winging it. I would ask a question and it's like, you can ask it 20 different people, you get 20 different answers.

[13:39]

And it shouldn't be that way if it was strictly a board policy. It's pretty clear. You should be able to read it right off the top. I tend to read a lot of leadership and management books. And they're generally written for the business world. And they use a lot of like business examples to amplify their leadership principles and One of my book mentors is John Maxwell, so he does a little less of that because he kind of just takes stories from all over the place to amplify his leadership principles.

[14:13]

But if you read a book like Good to Great, they're clearly comparing two different companies and a cluster of those to come up with his final analysis of how you move a company from good to great. So my challenge always has been, especially when I became the superintendent of schools and I set up learning structures for the organization, which I called councils and cohorts, was getting educators to read the stuff. That wasn't the challenge because I set the structures and set the time and you had to be there and you had to do this because we all needed to learn together and to grow together and to create a common language together. But, you know, it was more difficult to translate that context, that content to the education world.

[15:04]

And, you know, I'm teaching graduate school at Lehigh University and I'm using a lot of the same, you know, business books and Harvard Business Review articles and stuff like that. And that's one of the questions I pose to them. It's okay. Do you like this model? You do. So how would you translate that to the education setting?

[15:21]

So that is a challenge and I worked through it. It comes a little bit easier for me because I'm always looking to translate. And the example that I'll give you, like my three things that I tend to focus in on is keeping the school system focused on vision and mission in an effort to produce excellent results, select effective leaders to carry out the mission. That's number two. And number three is get the resources into the classrooms. Now, I ended up adopting that from a book I read years ago on a former CEO of Coca-Cola, Roberto Grossetta.

[15:59]

And he ended up having those three buckets on how he managed Coca-Cola, which is an international company. And he just generally focused on those three items. So I took those three items. I liked them. Then I changed them and modified them to my setting, especially the last one. The last one for him was keep an eye on the bottom line.

[16:21]

which meant for every dollar that Coca-Cola invested, he wanted $1.20 in return. So I'm saying, well, how do I translate that to a nonprofit school system that generates his revenue from state, local and federal basic tax dollars, right? I'm not creating profits. What I did was think about the resources in dollars and how that got translated. And the most critical piece for me to emulate Roberto was, to get the resources into the classroom.

[16:52]

And if anybody knows urban ed, you have finite resources, and then you have to battle all the different constituents to make sure that the money actually gets into programming services that reach the classroom. And that tends to be a big battle for superintendents, probably in every community, but definitely in the urban setting, it plays itself out. There is a second point to your question, right? You said, how do you read so much and then decide what keeps you on track and what pulls you away. It's really about discipline. When you have a theory of action, it's really about being very disciplined on always getting back to it, especially if you're pulled away.

[17:37]

And you might be pulled away by a great idea, by a new book. But if it doesn't fit into your theory of action, then it was a great read and you put it aside. That doesn't mean you discarded it. You know, like I'm having this discussion with some of my students. We just read The Five Dysfunctions of a Teen. And I have their master candidate students and many of them, I'm not even in their current first administrative job.

[18:02]

And they like the model, but they don't really have administrative context to apply it. And I said to them, if you like it, just keep it aside. And someday when you become an administrator, it might be a tool that you want to use when you're building your team. So, yeah, I mean, I spent a lot of time reading books on leadership management, not always in the context of education. I was translating it back to education, but then, you know, spending time on reading, teaching and learning materials, because ultimately my job as a superintendent is even though I told you I have many layers, is to get the organization completely focused on the instructional core, which is the relationship between the teacher, the student, and the content. And the most, most important thing that I can do and repeat over time is that task predicts performance.

[18:51]

So I'm many layers removed from the classroom, but as the superintendent, I have to continually articulate to the organization that the most important thing that we do as a school system is putting cognitively challenging tasks in front of students and then improving the elements of the core, which is teacher knowledge and skills, the content, which is around the rigor and its level, and then student engagement, all those three things working together. So read a lot, And then hopefully you have your personal theory of action written. If not, you can use my book to help you design one. And over time, as you read more and more and you actually have experiences leading at different levels, then you modify your theory of action, personal theory of action based on new information, either from experience or from texts.

[19:46]

And that's how I go about it.

[19:49] SPEAKER_00:

I definitely want to ask you about testing those hypotheses and modifying the theory of action over time. But before we shift into that, I just wanted to mention the kind of perspective that you're talking about. You've mentioned some of Richard Elmore's work around the instructional core, and I know there are other authors who've spoken to the instructional core. You mentioned Jim Collins' Good to Great, and both of those books are over 20 years old. I'm wondering, I mean, I'm starting to consider myself an older guy in education now. We'll just say generously that we're both over 40, right?

[20:20]

And I'm struck by how often the solution to our present troubles is something that is 10 or 20 or 30 years old. And we have a tendency in our fast paced society to just discard anything that's more than three or four years old. If it's not the fad of the moment, a lot of people seem to think it doesn't really have any value. So clearly you've held on to some things that have been, I think, foundational in many people's careers, but that are not necessarily new and shiny. How do you stay focused on those more timeless principles, those more time-tested and proven concepts like the instructional core that may not be hot off the presses, but really that have guided educators for decades?

[21:03] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I guess I can be dull that way. I took over two school districts from two former superintendents and they were both different level managers. And as time went on, I would have like side conversations with board members or staff or whatever. And it's like, the stuff we're doing is not rocket science. Actually, the people that were here before me could have implemented the very same things. They just chose not to.

[21:30]

And they didn't really have a personal theory of action. So they were probably following the new shiny thing of the day. Again, I'm pretty disciplined. I'm not chasing fads. You know, when I finally came across, and I learned this around 2008, 2009 from Liz City and Richard Elmore's book, Instructional Rounds in Education. how do you improve teaching and learning?

[21:52]

And there was only one answer, which is improve the instructional core. And then there were seven principles, which I don't put to memory. I just put two of them to memory because those are the two important ones that I can have an impact on, which is if you work on one element of the core, you have to work on the other two. And I knew as a supervisor, I had fouled that up years earlier when I bought new instructional materials. I said, oh, well, a new instructional materials, the world is going to be a great place now. And I did not work on the two elements.

[22:22]

2008, after reading the book, 2009, when I think it actually came out, it was like, aha, that makes a whole lot of sense. You should have known that at the time. But if I only had one thing to say, it's what I said earlier. Task predicts performance, right? So don't go chasing all the shiny stuff, right? It's really around academic performance is going to improve if you put cognitively challenging tasks in front of the kids.

[22:49]

And then everything else you do, policy, programs, services, personnel that you select and the professional development and your organizational theory of action has to support that. You have to put all the things that support them. And for me, sometimes, you know, new shiny things do come along, but it has to fit into my personal theory of action, has to fit into the organizational theory of action, right? Like in Passaic, the children's literacy project decided they wanted to work with us. I didn't have that in Elizabeth. We did a different literacy program with a different consultant.

[23:22]

And then we went from K to three and we kept on expanding the work. So that was kind of newish, but it fit into my theory of action, which at its core all flows back to getting students to learn at higher levels and achieve, right? Because that's the end statement, right? My then statement in Passaic was we will create a top tier school system that prepares students to attend college and to earn high pay in the 21st century marketplaces. So if that's where I want to go, everything that I look at and everything people bring in has to be aligned with my personal theory of action. And since I got the board to adopt a organizational theory of action as school board policy has to be aligned with, with that.

[24:06]

I'll tell you the story when I first actually, it's not, this doesn't appear in the book, but when I first landed in Passaic, I was meeting a lot of different people on, in my entry plan, my, my listening and learning tour. And one of them was a department of education representative from the local County office. And he came to my office and we were talking about how they were going to support us and so forth. And I said, Hey, problem, love everything you hear. But let me tell you, and I already had nine years in and I had some credibility by then, I guess. If I had said this in my first superintendency, they probably would have laughed at me.

[24:39]

But by then I had some credibility. I had already eight and a half years and Elizabeth transitioned to Passaic. And in my first year, in my first week, I said to him, hey, if you tell us to do something and it aligns with what I'm doing, I'm going to do it. No problem. If you tell me to do something and it doesn't align with my theory of action, my personal theory of action or the organizational theory of action, we'll listen to you. We'll say nice things to you and we'll make believe we're doing it because I'm not going to do it if it's not aligned, if it's not aligned with what we tried to do.

[25:16]

And it's to your point, otherwise you're going to get taken in so many different directions and it's so easy for that to happen. What I suggest to anyone who wants to be a leader, right? You don't have to be in a position. You can be leading a volunteer group in a charity or in a religious organization, right? Leadership is not positional, right? John Maxwell said it's influence.

[25:40]

So you don't need a title, but most of us do ultimately get titles and we have responsibility to lead elements of an organization. Having your personal theory of action will keep you Pretty focused, especially when people bring in new wares and new ideas. And even when you go looking out, going to conferences and getting new ideas and reading new books, you always have to go back, well, does this fit into what I'm trying to accomplish as a leader for the children in my schools? And if it doesn't, then I'm not going to incorporate it. And if it actually makes my theory of action better, right? Because part of the process is that it should change over time as you get more information, whether it's from reading a book or actual live experiences.

[26:29] SPEAKER_00:

So let me ask about the kind of bottom line testing of those if-then statements and the decision to maybe change it. Because I'm thinking about a particular theory of action that I know I had because I wrote it on a sticky note. I stuck it on my bulletin board in my office as a principal. I had a theory of action around skill and strategy instruction, especially in reading. And I was listening to a podcast the other day about some of the new research on reading instruction and the importance of building knowledge. And I realized my theory of action that I had, and this was about 14 years ago, that theory of action was now, in retrospect, definitely wrong.

[27:07]

I just had... you know, based on the information available to me, based on my training that I had at the time, I was wrong about the best way to teach reading. And as science advances, as educational research advances, we're all going to probably be in that situation at some point where we bet on the wrong horse or we were doing the best we could at the time. But we do need to look at the results and to look at the research and update our theories of action.

[27:31]

How do we do that while at the same time, as you said, stay focused? How do we not jump to a new horse every couple of weeks, every time we read a book? But at the same time, take very seriously the possibility that our theories of action may be wrong or may just legitimately need to be updated.

[27:46] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, a fantastic question. At least at the superintendent level, I don't get that finite around a reading program, right? My strategy statements are much broader, right? So for example, I'll give you the organizational layout in the organizational theory of action. that ultimately makes it into my personal theory of action, right? And in Passaic, I said, if I moved the district to an aligned instructional system and it had seven variables, so I create and implement aligned and coherent detailed curriculum.

[28:22]

Number two, develop effective teachers and leaders driven by a culture of high performance. Number three, provide a comprehensive professional development system. Number four, set clear standards and measure progress through formative and summative assessments. Five, build a comprehensive student information system. Six, establish interventions for students, teachers, administrators, and schools. And seven, measure progress, performance, and growth.

[28:50]

So from my level, you can see that these are pretty broad statements that If in fact we determine that when we write our language arts curriculum that we bet on the wrong instructional program, my theory of action doesn't change, the district's doesn't change, because that's just a programmatic element, right? That's more detailed action. It's not necessarily... a broad strategic decision.

[29:21]

Although when you invest that amount of money, someone may say, well, that's just, that's your strategy, right? But yeah, if once you start getting down to the more finite layers and more descriptions, when you get into your program of study and how each different content errors, scope and sequence is going to play out over time from kindergarten to 12th grade, or for three year olds to 12th grade, or in my case, from three-year-olds through college because my students were taking college credits. And actually I have kids graduating with associates degrees and high school diplomas. In Elizabeth, I used the three L's as my guiding principles, love, laser-like focus on teaching and learning. and leadership. And then in Passaic, when I landed there, they were a much more broken system around instruction, right?

[30:12]

And so I ended up creating, in my personal theory of action, I removed the three L's. They were still embodied in me, but I did not talk about them in Passaic. But I used the two Q's strategy, which was quantity and quality. And quantity got In my theory of action, I wrote it this way. We must provide more opportunities for significant student learning, including after school, Saturday and summers, productive use of classroom time, community partnerships, and digital learning platforms, right? Because those things did not exist.

[30:55]

And if it did not exist robustly. And the second thing, the second cue was quality. So we needed to define what effective teaching and leading is so that we can provide frequent and meaningful feedback, evaluation, and professional development. So that was the major shift in my theory of action going from Elizabeth to Persegue. In Elizabeth, I talked about the three L's all the time, love, laser-like focus on teaching and learning, and leadership. And in Persegue, I transitioned to the two Q's because I had to kind of rebuild the whole school system that really wasn't focusing on improving teaching and learning.

[31:36]

If you do find out that the program and the curriculum is not working, then you modify it. So in our case, we always had five-year curriculum plans, and we were always looking at and modifying the curriculum and the programmatic material based on formative and summative assessments, right? That's in my theory of action. So that's not going to change. But the data that comes back to us, if our kids aren't performing up to par, then we have to ask our question. The three questions.

[32:07]

Is it the content? Is it the teacher knowledge and skills? Or is it student engagement? Or is it all three? And that goes back to the instructional core. So yes, like you could say, all right, I didn't really figure out the reading program, do a well enough job.

[32:23]

I have to change. And if you can change, right, because that could have been a pretty big investment if you were buying instructional materials to support all that. And you spent probably a lot of money on curriculum writers. Now you have to convince the people above you, right? You as a principal, you got to convince your assistant superintendent, your sup, that we need to change direction. So yes, when you start getting like a school principal may get more finite than me as far as the details of what they're doing in their building.

[32:52]

But to the extent that you can think about your theory of action as broader strategic statements and the detail of that stuff, it will change over time as you get more data in and it tells you I'm seeing success or I'm not seeing success.

[33:09] SPEAKER_00:

The book is The Leader's Algorithm, How a Personal Theory of Action Transforms Your Life, Work, and Relationships. And Pablo Munoz, if people want to get in touch with you, learn more about the work that you're doing these days, where's the best place for them to go online?

[33:25] SPEAKER_01:

Best Place Online is at my Munoz and Company website, which is themunozcompany.com. There you can find out about me and the work that I do and the services that we provide. And it also has the book laid out there with links and free downloads that you can get from the book. And you can also find me on LinkedIn as Pablo Munoz at Munoz. talk to me there.

[33:55]

My email is Pablo at the Munoz company.com. So anyone can email me there as well.

[34:03] SPEAKER_00:

Well, thanks again for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Justin, thank you so much for having me.

[34:09] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.