In June 2017, I took over the leadership of Blue Engine from its founder. The organization, a nonprofit that partners with schools to give every learner the support they need reach their potential, needed stabilization. The founder, Nick Ehrmann, had grown it from inception in 2010 into a nonprofit deploying more than $5 million annually in public and private funding, and reaching nearly 2,000 students across New York City’s district schools. Early results were significant; third party evaluations showed that students in Blue Engine classrooms demonstrated meaningful academic gains. But there were problems, including a climate of growing distrust among staff, misaligned priorities, and revenue challenges, not to mention programmatic uncertainty.
By the time I accepted the role, I‘d already begun questioning whether the organization needed to rethink how it delivered on its mission. But that was not what some funders expected of me; they wanted a “fixer,” a culture carrier focused on survival. It was like owning a new home but not having authority to reshape the interior and make it mine. It was a pretty low bar and profoundly disempowering.
As a first-time CEO, I wasn’t prepared to question what I would later reflect on as unspoken guidelines for my role as successor. I later realized that what the organization truly needed of me—and what many other organizations need from successors—was the boldness to lead using my own insights, instincts, and entrepreneurial ideas. I needed to be confident enough to make it clear my leadership wasn’t just about quick fixes that would paper over underlying challenges or ignore new opportunities. I needed to communicate that I was going to lead us toward a path that would honor our history and remain grounded in our core values, and that would enable us to make large-scale change. Here are three important lessons from my experience.
1. Do What’s Right for the Mission, Even If It’s Not What People Expect
Blue Engine was founded on a vision of making classrooms across the United States more intimate and personalized. It wanted to make them places where students could build empowering relationships with educators and receive more rigorous instruction tailored to their needs. Originally, we aimed to create that large-scale change by bringing more instructors, or Blue Engine Teaching Apprentices (BETAs), into classrooms. But while we saw results, over time it became clear that scaling the program to a system-level magnitude was both operationally and financially unsustainable.
My understanding of how the organization needed to change began to take shape before the succession, when, as chief operating officer, I dug into research from our burgeoning innovation-and-learning team. In classrooms where students made the most significant academic gains, we saw that impact wasn’t predicated on the number of teachers in the classroom, but on how effectively instructors worked together in service of student learning. This emerging understanding of our core innovation—a model based on a set of practices for teaching teams—set the stage for a seismic shift in our approach. We didn’t need to work only at schools where we were bringing in our BETAs. Instead, we could train and support existing teaching teams already working within the school system, an increasingly common structure in districts across the country. We could use our knowledge and resources to: 1) help school leaders shift school schedules and professional development structures to leverage the full potential of their teaching force, and 2) develop teachers’ ability to work as a team and thus respond to a wide variety of student learning styles, and social and emotional needs.
In other words, as author Dan Heath writes in his book Upstream, our approach to driving real change needed to be about “fixing the system, not the symptoms.” Our organization was focused on addressing educational inequity—including changing patterns of systemic racism that lead to racial disparities in outcomes. I felt that not actively working to dismantle an unjust system meant we were complicit in maintaining the status quo. When I stepped into the role of CEO, it felt challenging, risky, and uncomfortable to drive a directional shift—to go beyond stabilizing what already existed. But it was a move grounded in the organization’s core values, and that honored Blue Engine’s foundational mission.
2. Sell (Your Case for Change) Like Hell
I may have been bold in moving us forward with a different approach, but I was too tentative in making the case. Regretfully, I internalized a belief that I had to earn the right to take us in a new direction. At one pivotal board meeting early in my tenure, I presented a plan focused on stabilization rather than building the case for a new way to realize our vision. In doing so, I undermined my own responsibilities as leader, and played into a false narrative of being an expert in operational know-how and organizational survival. It was a mistake that enforced the broader dynamic, where our future and my potential felt anchored to our founder’s worldview and strengths.
My hesitance came, in part, from sitting in meetings—mostly with funders—who wanted to talk about Nick’s brilliance, to know why I wouldn’t just want to keep replicating the original program, and to hear what Nick thought of my decisions. In their lionization of Nick, I experienced little consideration for how my own insights, gifts, and views could propel us forward. As a result, I held back, waiting for permission to offer a strategy different from what many others expected.
I also naively assumed that investors who bought into the original vision of large-scale change would be open to a different, more achievable way of getting there. I didn’t do enough to garner buy-in from our funders. I should have developed and offered a more-cohesive message that explained our phased approach to testing new pathways to scale, including rationale for how our commitment to living out anti-racist values underpinned our strategic choices.
I needed to craft a story that honored our founder’s vision while authentically and unapologetically layering on mine. Building my story and bolstering my case for change from the beginning would have helped me sell my earliest decisions, including downsizing the organization while investing heavily in innovation and learning. It also would have helped shaped the idea that a successor should be a next-generation entrepreneur, who can turn insights into fresh organizational perspective and new direction in service of the founding mission. My faulty assumptions made the process harder than it needed to be.
3. Change Is a Team Effort
For me, the job has been anything but lonely.
With help from a coach, I developed a purposeful and aligned leadership team of exceptionally talented, diverse women. We prioritized internal communication, focusing on transparency around decision making and creating feedback loops to incorporate perspective from all staff. It took a couple of years, but the leadership team ultimately earned back the staff’s trust and created a more inclusive culture. In addition, by acting as a group, steadfast in our commitment to social and systemic change, we were able to convince those who originally believed the next phase for Blue Engine was merely about steadying the ship that we needed a new course of action. Together, we recalibrated expectations over what a successor and her team should be.
Throughout the years, Nick has been a stalwart friend and advisor. He’s consistently validated my perspective, choices, and leadership, and advocated for my vision of a new future from the outset. He has always understood that my efforts were never about upending the original vision as much as changing how to live it out. As a board member, his support has been personally meaningful, enabling conversations about things I couldn’t talk about with others and adding wind to my sails. His support for me has also been important to shifting the power dynamic so that board and funders don’t defer to him.
Throughout our stabilization and change efforts, our board of directors has locked arms with our leadership team. While some board members were initially reluctant to let go of the organization’s original approach, others wanted us to move forward with the new one even more quickly than we did. These different perspectives enabled us to consider trade-offs from multiple vantage points (such as student impact, financial sustainability, and scale) and helped us to navigate complex decisions. Today, the entire board is united on our approach; members unanimously voted to phase out our original program model in 2020 and are helping us launch our first expansion effort. Meanwhile, our partners—teachers, school leaders, and collaborating nonprofits—have informed our progress and helped us refine and improve. And while we lost some funders in the shift, some transitioned their support to our new work and new funders have come on board.
Over the years—through personal work, and with the support of informal and formal mentors and coaches—I’ve found my voice, refined my style, shaken off the self-doubt, and perhaps become more outspoken. Nick’s off-the-charts charisma helped him sell his vision—a trait he needed to grow the organization into one of the most-watched startups in the education field. My charisma level is firmly on the charts, but I am also analytical and bold—perhaps even bolder in my own way than Nick; I’ve had to pave my own path for the organization while navigating someone else’s. I’ve needed these traits to move us forward as an organization and reconfigure the expectations of my leadership.
Throughout all of this, clarity and hope have guided me. The days of making hard choices and facing interminable struggle were real. Every leader experiences them. Through intentional, inner work and with the support of inspiring people, I found the courage to get up every day and push against expectations, and in a small-but-important way, redefine what it means to be a successor. But ultimately, it wasn’t really about me. It was about effectively challenging the status quo within the educational system and transforming classrooms into truly inclusive places of learning for all students—and that’s certainly a fight worth fighting.
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Read more stories by Anne Eidelman.