Adapted from insights by Naval Ravikant on building exceptional teams
As school leaders in India, we face a unique challenge: nurturing the next generation while building teams of educators who can truly transform lives. The principles that drive successful organizations can offer profound insights for educational leadership. Here are lessons that can help us build schools that don’t just teach—but inspire.Your Team IS Your School
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“The team you build is the company you build” – this startup wisdom applies equally to schools. Your faculty isn’t just a collection of teachers; they are the living DNA of your institution.
The teachers you hire in your school’s early years, or as you rebuild and transform an existing institution, will set the culture for decades. Every hiring decision is a decision about what your school will become. When you delegate hiring to committees without your direct involvement, you begin to lose control of your school’s destiny.
For Indian school leaders: This means you cannot outsource the crucial work of finding and selecting teachers. Yes, you can have HR support and teacher panels, but the final decision—especially for your core team—must involve you directly. Your judgment, your vision, and your understanding of what your school needs cannot be replicated by anyone else.
Excellence Attracts Excellence
The best teachers want to work with the best teachers. It’s that simple, and that profound.
When an exceptional educator walks into a staffroom and sees mediocrity, they feel it. They know they could be somewhere else, doing something better. But when they’re surrounded by peers who challenge them, inspire them, and push them to be better, magic happens.
The Random Interview Test: Here’s a powerful thought experiment: Could you tell any prospective teacher, “Walk into our staff room, pick any teacher at random, interview them for 30 minutes—and if you’re not impressed, don’t join us”?
If you flinch at the thought of them interviewing a particular teacher, that’s the person you need to counsel, support intensively, or if necessary, help transition out. That person is preventing you from building the high-performing team your students deserve.
Look Beyond the Resume
In India’s education system, we’re often obsessed with degrees and certifications. M.Ed, B.Ed, PhD—these matter, but they’re not everything.
The best educators are often undiscovered talent. They might be:
- A passionate graduate who’s been tutoring neighborhood children with remarkable results
- Someone running innovative workshops at a library or community center
- A professional from another field who has a genuine calling to teach
- A young teacher at a lesser-known school doing extraordinary things that nobody has noticed yet
Your mission as a leader: Find these people before everyone else does. Don’t wait for them to apply to top schools or become famous on LinkedIn. By then, they’re out of reach.
One of the most effective school leaders I know recruited a phenomenal science teacher from a roadside coaching center. The establishment mocked him for it. Five years later, that teacher had transformed the entire science curriculum and was winning national awards.
Every Great Teacher is Also an Artist
This might sound poetic, but it’s deeply practical.
Think about the teachers who changed your life. They didn’t just deliver curriculum—they created experiences. They saw teaching as a craft to be perfected, an art form where every lesson was a performance, every explanation a carefully crafted piece of communication.
In your school, look for teachers who:
- Create beautiful, thoughtful classroom environments
- Design worksheets and materials with care and aesthetics
- Think deeply about how to explain complex concepts simply
- Pursue creative interests outside teaching—music, writing, art, sports, coding
These creative pursuits aren’t distractions from teaching; they’re what makes someone a complete educator. An English teacher who writes poetry will teach language differently. A math teacher who plays chess will see patterns everywhere. A science teacher who gardens will bring the natural world alive.
Build a Culture, Not Just a Workplace
Early-stage teams, whether in startups or schools, often look like cults—and that’s not a bad thing.
This doesn’t mean everyone must think identically. But your core team should share fundamental beliefs:
- That every child can learn and deserves our best effort
- That excellence is non-negotiable
- That innovation and tradition can coexist
- That teaching is a calling, not just a job
For Indian schools: This is especially important in our context where we’re often trying to blend the best of Indian values with global pedagogical practices. Your team needs to be aligned on this vision. You cannot have half your teachers believing in rote learning while the other half champions critical thinking. That’s not diversity of thought—that’s confusion.
Small Teams, Deep Work
We often think bigger is better. More teachers, more support staff, more administrators.
But the best schools know: small, excellent teams outperform large, mediocre ones every time.
When teams are small:
- Weak performers cannot hide
- Communication is direct and clear
- Everyone knows their work matters
- There’s no room for politics or bureaucracy
Practical advice: Before hiring your 50th teacher, ask: “Could we achieve more by having 40 exceptional teachers instead?” The answer is often yes.
Create space for your teachers to do deep work—not just preparing for the next class, but thinking about pedagogy, designing curriculum, reflecting on their practice. Cut down on unnecessary meetings. Reduce administrative burden. Let teachers teach.
Break the Rules for the Right People
In education, we love our rules: fixed salary scales, rigid timetables, standard job descriptions.
But exceptional people rarely fit into standard boxes.
The teacher who could revolutionize your math program might:
- Need to work four days a week because they’re caring for an aging parent
- Want to teach both middle and high school because they see the curriculum as one journey
- Require resources for an experimental teaching method nobody has tried before
- Need higher compensation because they’re leaving a lucrative corporate job
As a leader, your job is to make it work. Break the salary scale if you must. Redesign the timetable. Create a hybrid role that doesn’t exist yet.
The mediocre teachers will fit into any system you create. The extraordinary ones will need you to bend the system for them. Do it.
Look for Low-Ego Learners
In Indian culture, we often confuse confidence with arrogance, humility with weakness.
The teachers you want are confident but humble. They:
- Take feedback without defensiveness
- Share credit generously
- Learn from colleagues, even junior ones
- Admit when they don’t know something
- Put students’ needs above their ego
Warning sign: A teacher who constantly needs validation, always points to their own achievements, or cannot handle constructive feedback will create more problems than they solve—no matter how talented they are.
You can manage 30 low-ego teachers effectively. You can barely manage five high-ego ones.
Simplicity is Sophistication
The best schools, like the best products, are simple.
Ask yourself: Does a parent or student need a manual to understand how your school works? Do teachers need to navigate layers of bureaucracy to do their jobs? Are your policies so complex that you need a handbook to explain them?
Simplify ruthlessly:
- Clear admission process
- Transparent fee structure
- Simple communication channels (don’t make parents check emails, apps, WhatsApp, and notice boards)
- Streamlined curriculum (depth over breadth)
- Few rules, consistently enforced
Complexity is easy. Any school can add more programs, more rules, more procedures. Simplicity takes courage and clarity.
Your Personality IS Your School
As the founding leader or principal, you cannot escape this truth: your values become your school’s values.
If you:
- Value punctuality, your school will be punctual
- Tolerate mediocrity, your school will be mediocre
- Champion innovation, your teachers will innovate
- Respect teachers, students will learn to respect teachers
- Cut corners, everyone will cut corners
This is both liberating and terrifying. It means you cannot fake it. You cannot ask teachers to be passionate if you’re going through the motions. You cannot demand excellence if you settle for “good enough” in your own work.
What this means practically: Before you write that vision statement or value charter, look in the mirror. Who are you? What do you genuinely care about? What are you willing to fight for? Build your school around that truth.
Invest in Iterations, Not Just Hours
We often measure teacher development in hours: “Our teachers complete 40 hours of training annually.”
But hours don’t matter. Iterations matter.
How many times does a teacher:
- Try a new teaching method
- Observe the results with students
- Reflect on what worked and what didn’t
- Get feedback from peers or mentors
- Adjust and try again
A teacher who goes through this cycle ten times a year will grow more than one who attends 100 hours of passive workshops.
Create a culture of experimentation: Let teachers try new things. Encourage them to fail safely. Build in time for reflection. Celebrate improvements, not just perfection.
A Personal Note to Indian School Leaders
We work in one of the most complex and rewarding educational environments in the world. We navigate board requirements, parent expectations, limited resources, and incredible diversity—linguistic, cultural, economic.
But here’s the beautiful truth: great teaching transcends all of it.
A great teacher in a small town school with basic facilities can change more lives than a mediocre one in an elite institution with every resource imaginable.
Your job isn’t to have the fanciest infrastructure or the most programs. Your job is to find, nurture, and retain the teachers who will change children’s lives.
Everything else is secondary.
Five Things to Start Tomorrow
Review your hiring process: Are you personally involved in selecting teachers for key positions? If not, change that.
The Random Interview Test: Identify teachers who would make you uncomfortable if prospective hires interviewed them. Have honest conversations with those teachers.
Find undiscovered talent: Visit a small, unknown school in your area. Observe classes. Look for that one exceptional teacher nobody knows about yet.
Simplify one thing: Pick the most complicated process in your school and cut it down to half the steps.
Create maker time: Block out at least one three-hour window each week where teachers have no meetings, no duties—just time to think, plan, and create.
The school you build will be a reflection of the team you build. Build carefully. Build thoughtfully. Build with courage.
Your students are counting on it.
