EPISODE #313

You can’t get to 100% on good intentions

You're listening to the School Leadership Reimagine podcast episode 313.

Hey builders, before we jump into today's show, I need to know something. Are you and I connected on the socials? Because if we're not, we need to be. So connect with me. I'm on Facebook at Robyn Jackson. I am on Twitter at Robyn_Mindsteps. I'm on LinkedIn at Robyn Jackson. Let's connect and let's keep the conversation going.

Now on to the show. You're listening to the School Leadership Reimagine podcast episode 313. How do builders like us make a dramatic difference in the lives of our students in spite of all the obstacles we face? How do you keep your vision for your school from being held hostage by resistant teachers, uncooperative parents, ridiculous district policies, or lack of time, money, or resources? If you're facing those challenges right now, here's where you'll find the answers, strategies, and actionable tips you need to overcome any obstacle you face. You don't have to wait to make a difference in the lives of the people you serve. You can turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have. Let's get started.

Hey, builders, welcome to another episode of the School Leadership Reimagined podcast. 

I'm your host, Robyn Jackson, and today I want to have a tough conversation. There's something that I've noticed, and it's been something that's been kind of bothering me for a while. And so I've been hesitant to do a podcast episode about it because I didn't want to come off as if I was scolding or fussing or shaming people. But it's time I need to talk about it. So today we're going to talk about it. But before we do, I just want to tell you, if you're listening to this in real time, today is the day that we are doing the Hire Your Next Master Teacher master class. We still have a couple of seats left at the time of this recording.

So go to the website. If you can get in, it means it's still there. If you can't, then it means that we're all full because we're capping this at 75 registrations. This master class is all about how to hire A next master teacher. Hiring seizing is here. And for those of you who are facing shortages and having trouble finding the right person, for those of you who are trying to figure out what your interview process is so that you can get the right person on your staff. For those of you who may have found a great person, but you want to make sure that you get them started right away, this master class is for you. I'm giving you everything.

We're going to be writing the job posting right there in the session. When you walk out the session, you will have a job posting that attracts the right people and repels the wrong people. And I'll be giving you real time feedback on that plus, well, I'm going to give you my secret to interview questions. I'm going to give you an entire interview question bank. I'm going to give you 8. I think it's 88. I think it's 8 ideas for how to structure your second interview. So your first interview is really about this.

Are they a good fit or not? 

But the second interview, when you invite them back to really now see if they're the right person for your school and job that that needs to be conducted differently. I'm going to give you everything. I'm going to 8 ideas for how to do it and step by step instructions for each one. I'm going to also give you the secret to making sure that you keep people excited. You get them engaged from the very beginning. You make sure that they have a smooth transition into your school. Everything, the playbook is so good.

And so if you want a ticket, go to buildershipuniversity.com/master Class. Buildership university.com/master Class Now, if you're listening to this later and you missed this master class, we do want at least once a month inside of the 100% collective so you can join the 100% collective. You'll get this master class. You get the archives from all of our master classes. You get all of the playbooks, you get all of the tools. So good. You get all of that when you join the 100% collective. So if you just want to just skip all of this and join the collective and get everything and then look at it and go through it on your own time and in your own way, then just go to buildershipuniversity.com/community.

All right, so let's talk. There's something I've noticed for a while and it is a quiet source of frustration for me. And I don't normally talk about it because I get it. Like I understand why people do it. And my frustration is not at people. It's more at the potential that's getting wasted because people do this thing. And so like, you know, I've never said because I don't want to, I don't want to shame anybody. I don't want anybody to feel bad for feeling this way because it's absolutely normal and natural.

But I need to talk about y'all. I, I just, I, I, I think that we should just go ahead and talk about it so that we can get it out in the open. And so that when, when you see yourself going through this, you can stop yourself before you head down the road to frustration and, and, and, and disappointment. See, a lot of people are really attracted to the idea of buildership, right? That 100% vision is so inspiring it, it speaks to a lot of people and what they felt and believed for a long time and they've just never heard anybody articulated. That's great. I mean, that's, that's why I do this work because I want you to know that it doesn't have to be the way they're telling you. It has to be where you're stuck with incremental gains.

You can achieve 100% success for your school. 

And we have people right now inside of Buildership University who have done it and we have a lot of people who are right at the cusp of doing it. And so I know now without a shadow of a doubt that it can be done. I can say that with confidence. And, and, and, and people like hearing that, right? So they hear this idea. They're saying, you know what, I'm going to be a builder. I'm going to do 100 percent, 100% vision.

I'm not I'm not going to settle for incremental gains anymore. And then they go about pursuing that 100% success like a leader, not like a builder. You know, they, they, they, they, they, Meanwhile, they, but they're, that leadership habit dies hard. And so people hear the first part, the 100%, they get excited about it, but then they use the same strategies that they were using to chase 5% and they expect things to be different. The, the vision is powerful, but the magic of the vision is not that you now have great intentions. The magic of the vision is the work, the system, the process that you put in place in order to achieve your vision. So if you ever have seen the buildership model, it's three parts, right? There's the compelling purpose, that's the first part.

But then once you have that compelling purpose, that vision, mission, core values, the next part is you need to get committed people and you need there are systems you have to put in place in order to help your people who may initially be excited about your 100% vision, but then go back and see their classroom and do business as usual. How do you help people truly commit to that vision, not just by their words, but by their actions? And then the third part is you need coherent processes. You're going to have to upgrade the systems in your school. And in some cases you're going to have to replace them all together because you the way that you get to 100% is you need that consistent execution. You need to continually choose the right pathway. You need your team to be working on the right things or you're not going to get there. And so that's why it's a complete model.

But what a lot of people do is instead of focusing on the entire model, they just focus on the that vision. And they think that that vision and their good intentions alone are what's going to get them there. And they don't ever make the changes that they need to make and how they manage people and, and, and, and how they grow people. And then how they put processes in place, the systems that they put in place in order to achieve 100%. And then they wonder why they never get there. Listen, I get it right. The 100% vision is the sexy part. That's the part that everybody gets excited about because it speaks to something deep inside of us.

But in order to achieve it, if you really, really, really want to achieve it, you can't just say it. It can't just be about your good intentions. You've got to do the work and you've got to do the work like a builder. There's a reason why our hashtag is like a builder, because everything you do shifts. Once you say 100%, everything you do shifts because the way that we've been trained is not designed to get us to 100%. So that stuff, the stuff we were told to do, no matter how good at it we are, no matter how much we like it, that stuff no longer serves you as a builder. You have to do it differently. So the challenge that I have when I'm working with people who are saying to me, I want to be a builder, I want to do this.

The, the, the thing that I, and I blame myself, like I haven't figured out a way to make this message more clear is that the, that you have to change everything. You can't have any leadership residue in your practice because if you do that leadership residue will stop you from getting to 100%.

And so what is leadership residue? 

Leadership residue is when you take that concept, that buildership concept and you try to execute it by using a leadership operating system. I'll let you, you try to execute it like a leader and not a builder. Let me give you some examples. You know, you do your vision, you get excited, you do your vision story, you get excited, and now it's time to do your mission and core values. But instead of doing your mission and core values and, and giving it the time that it takes and having the hard conversations and keeping people engaged in the process until they commit and really releasing ownership of the mission and the core values so that that that all it becomes something that is a collective mission and, and, and non negotiable core values.

What a lot of people do is they say, Oh, you know what? I've got to do mission and core values and it becomes another thing on their To Do List. And then they try to push the mission through in one staff meeting, or they try to push the core values conversations through in two staff meetings. And they start messing with the process until the process is unrecognizable. And then they wonder why it didn't work. You did it like a leader. You, your leadership crept in and it leaded all over the process to the point where you've made the process meaningless. You know, we, we say you need to create a one plan, you know, like there needs to be a simple plan for how you're going to achieve your vision.

And the one plan is, we call it the one plan because it's really about looking through all the things you do as a school and figuring out if we only did these things, these specific 7 things, could we achieve our vision? And once you get to the, yes, that's your one plan. But a lot of people take that one plan and they treat it like a school improvement plan and they put everything that they're doing and they, they just kind of litter it up with what they're doing already rather than thinking strategically about this one thing. If we did this and nothing else, we would achieve 100% success. So they, once they create a one plan, they wonder why things don't feel different. It doesn't feel different because you didn't do anything different. You still don't know how you're going to achieve your vision. You still have not given that any kind of consideration.

You just kind of put some things that sound nice and that's that, that's, that's that leadership residue showing up again and messing up one of the most powerful tools you have as a builder because that one plan is your road map to 100%. When he gets to the people part, there are four things, feedback, support, accountable and culture. And people like, oh, I already do that. No, you do, you do it. You do it like a leader, but when you're doing it like a builder, it's totally different, different. And so people here, you know, like, Oh yeah, with feedback, Oh yeah, I need some micro slicing. And they treat micro slicing like another leadership strategy rather than an entirely different way of looking at giving people feedback. People do their interrogated rubric, and then they go in and and shove that interrogated rubric into the same feedback system they've always used.

And then they wonder why teachers have not improved. 

People build their teacher dashboard. But rather than using your teacher dashboard as a guide to help them figure out what do I need to do next to help teachers grow, they use it as a recording device for the observations that they were doing anyway, that it becomes just another piece of paperwork. I, I'll never forget, I was working with a school system and they wanted their teachers to do teacher dashboards. And the teacher dashboard is really simple. I've written articles about it. You know, you can look them up a line, you can see the teacher dashboard. There's no mystery around it, but I was teaching these principals how to do it and the principals were saying, but I already have to record my observations using the districts, you know, recording system and and that's what the teacher dashboard isn't about recording what your observations are.

The teacher dashboard is about identifying a teachers one thing and then being very strategic about how you're going to help that teacher to grow in that area and move from one level to the next and show tangible growth this school year. That's totally different than the observation compliance documents that you have to submit for your district. And they just, they never saw that. OK. And so I again, I, I got to find another way to, to, to, to, to help people see it because I did my best. They never saw it and they they rejected it entirely because they said I already have enough work, I don't need more work. And they missed the point, which is that if you are doing the teacher dashboard the right way, it creates less work. It makes the work that you do impactful.

You see change and growth and in the areas that matter most. And the more your teachers grow, the less you have to spend your time chasing, checking and correcting and pushing to get this 3% incremental gain. And the more you're able to get these really amazing, mind blowing gains from teachers because you are focused on their growth and not just on checklist and compliance. So they took this powerful tool and their leadership turned it into just another thing to do Leadership residue, right? You know, we, we say you need accountability. And we talked about accountability is about individual alignment to your vision, mission, and core values. So people get that accountability architecture they go through and they see the accountability leaks in their systems. And then they take that new system that they built and they try to impose it on people as if it's just any other new initiative that they were doing before.

And then they wonder why the accountability leaks persist. Well, the purpose of an accountability architecture is not to create a system that you are then going to go out and enforce. It's to build a system that people naturally begin to adopt because it makes sense, because it moves you closer to your vision, mission and core values. And as they do that, they get their behavior more in alignment with the where you need to go. And they take personal accountability for the work. You know, people do the culture audit and they're like, Oh yeah, these are the habits and stories. And then they they do all of that and they're like, Oh yeah, this is the the heart of what we need to do. And then they either try to impose a new habit on people and when it's when it's in reality a new initiative and then wonder why it doesn't take.

Or they take the, the the habits that they have and they don't change them. They just go buy cupcakes and feed them to people in the staff lounge that it's not going to build culture. And everybody wants to talk about, Oh yeah, my culture is all this toxicity. And they nod their heads when I talk about, you know, the early warning signs that your culture is heading toxic. But then the work that it takes to change that nobody wants to do. They just want the toxicity to go away and, and the leadership in them says to make it go away, just impose a new habit and give them some cupcakes. That's not what culture, that's not how builders build culture. And then when we get to the, the, the processes part, a lot of people give up even before they get there.

But the people who do get there, you know, the first thing is we got to figure out you can't do all the things. You need to focus on the one thing. And people say, what do you mean one thing? I've got a million things on my plate. Yes. You're not supposed to have a million things on your plate. There's only there's whenever you're dealing with a challenge right there, there's only one thing that will fix it. All the other stuff you're doing isn't moving the needle.

So builders, instead of spending all of our time getting stressed out, we deal with the one thing that actually moves us forward and we ignore the noise around us. But it's hard to do that because your leadership training says, but what about, but what about what? And your leadership training starts, you know, getting in your ear and making you panic because there's all this other stuff. And the a leader, you know, leadership teaches you to play whack A mole, right? So your job is every day to just whack at every problem that comes your way, whereas the builder says, no, my job is not to solve all of our problems.

My job is to solve the one problem that unlocks everything else. 

And so there's a discipline involved in that, that, that that gives you a sense of peace and calm. But that leadership residue that that's still there just doesn't even allow you to do that because it's telling you, you got to solve everything. You know, as a builder, one of the things you do is you build a team architecture. You, you think through the position and the position is what's important, not the person in the position. And you build the position around the needs of the school, not the personality or skills of the person who currently occupies the chair. And so as a builder, you're doing that, but as a leader, you're like, but this is the position. But the person in the position can't do all of that. And so you start offloading responsibilities to other people, are taking it on yourself, and never growing people on your team to be able to take over more ownership. And then you wonder why you're still at every meeting, you're still CC D on every e-mail, you're still running around like a chicken with her head cut off because you haven't built your team and team building. And, you know, I was talking to somebody the other day, they want me to come in and do something and and they were like, yeah, you know, we're going to start out with a team building thing.

And then that's like, wow, you know, like I got to follow the trust fall. But again, we're still doing all this team building stuff to make people feel good, but we're not doing the work that we need to be doing in terms of building a true team architecture to help people to step into the roles successfully and be successful in their roles, right? As a builder, you have to build an execution architecture. You need a meeting rhythm. You need, you need to have a scorecard. There's some things you need to do that help you stay focused. But then our leadership leaks all over it. And the residue of our leadership says, oh, it's just a meeting.

I know how to do meetings. And we do meetings the same way we've always done meetings. We, we, we start out saying, yeah, I want to do a, a daily standup. Yeah. And then our daily standups become just an onerous new meeting we have to go to. And then eventually we don't do them at all. And then we wonder why our team is not accountable, why we're not making the progress we should, why stuff is slipping through the cracks. We're not doing the work we are we we hear it and it sounds nice and some of it even sounds sexy.

But when it comes to our day-to-day work, we just go back to being leaders. And again, I get it, because this is how we were trained. And everything around us reinforces leadership. And it takes a special act of discipline to act like a builder. And if I'm really being honest, I slip myself. I've been doing this for a long time. And there are times when I'm in our DS U's and the DS U's turn into something else and I realize I'm doing my leadership is showing.

I still got a little leadership residue in me.

There are times especially when a problem comes up and it's really fraught and I want to force it through and, you know, scold my and do and do the chasing, checking and correcting stuff because I'm sometimes frustrated, sometimes scared, sometimes overwhelmed, and the leadership residue leaks out builders. Real quick before we get on with the rest of the episode, I want to talk to you about The 100% Collective. If you are interested in becoming a builder and developing that 100% mindset, then The 100% Collective is for you. Not only do we have monthly master classes, live master classes, where I show you how to take some work that you are already doing, but do it like a builder. Do it in a way that is more effective, more efficient, in a way that takes the work and stops it from being drudgery and makes it actually something that feels meaningful, that moves you forward. We also have done for you tool boxes with all the tools you need to be able to implement. And we have step by step playbooks that layout the entire process for you so you don't even think about it. You just take the playbook and you can implement it right away in your school.

And we have a supportive community. So this is a safe place where you can bring your challenges. And there are other people, other builders just like you, who are encouraging you, who are plotting you when you win, and who are giving you their experiences as well so that you can learn from each other. If you are tired of just kind of going through and doing the work the way you've always been doing it, and you're ready to stop being a leader and to start building something amazing, the 100% Collective is where you need to be. Join us at buildershipuniversity.com/community now. Back with the program. And so if you are seeing some leadership residue in your practice, this is not to beat you up. Instead, I want you to call it out.

I want you to recognize that it's leadership residue. And the more you begin to call it out and recognize it, the less you will fall victim to it. You see the this time of year in particular, it's the end of the school year. If you're listening to this in real time. And there's so much going on and it's so convenient and easy to say, let me just get through this and then I'll go back to being a builder. But buildership is not something you do. Buildership is something you are. And the more you begin to embody what it means to be a builder, the less you will find yourself slipping into leadership.

And I don't think many of us have made that identity shift yet. You know, we are leaders doing buildership. Or we are saying, I'm a builder, but let me use this leadership operations operating system and hope that I'll get there. It doesn't work that way. Leadership is about managing what's in front of you and trying to keep it from becoming too chaotic. Buildership is about eliminating the chaos, right? Leadership is, is, is fueled by pressure. It's very reactive.

Buildership is fueled by clarity and it's very proactive and strategic. And so a lot of times what we do is we, even if we understand that we, instead of doing the hard work of buildership. And by the way, what makes buildership hard is because you have to stop doing all the stuff that makes you feel really good. I've been thinking about this a lot. Leadership feels good. It does because you can be busy and feel very productive in the moment without actually producing anything. And so buildership, you can do some work and you may not see the, the, the benefit for a while because you're changing systems, because you're stepping back and looking at things and, and, and, and paying attention and, and figuring out what is the one thing and then doing the one thing, even though you probably would rather be doing 25 other things that make you feel productive, that focusing on one thing feels like, but what about all this other stuff? And so it feels negligent sometimes to just focus on the one thing rather than focusing on everything.

I fell into this trap all the time. 

I go to work and I know what the one thing is sometimes, but then I, you know, go and do other stuff because I can check it off my To Do List. And at the end of the day, I look at my To Do List and there are a lot of things checked off, but I still haven't made any progress on the one thing. Because the one thing sometimes is it's boring. Even though I'm supposed to be done a year boring. I'm failing miserably at it, by the way. But you know the one thing, it's boring or it's hard or you know, it's unfamiliar. You know, I know how to send an e-mail.

I know how to record a podcast. I don't always know how to, to address an, a gap in the curriculum yet or in BU or I don't always know. Like I'm, you know, when we're doing the master classes and I'm doing playbooks, sometimes I'm trying to build a playbook to resolve a problem and I'm not quite sure how to do it yet. But I want to make the playbook valuable and take some deep thinking. And sometimes it's just easier to send an e-mail. So I, I do this too. But we've got to do better, y'all, because the work is becoming harder, not easier. Things are happening in the world that make it a lot harder to to, to, to make sure that 100% of our students are successful.

There are a lot of distractions right now that that can take us take our minds off of the work we came here to do and the difference that we're supposed to be making in the lives of our kids. The pressure is greater, the support is less. Getting to 100%, as much as we want to believe in it, feels daunting because it is, you know, we're not just doing the little 5% gain. We're in getting a certificate. We're changing lives. We are. We're changing the way that we do school. We are, we are, we are confronting the lie that not all kids can be successful and proving people wrong.

That's hard. Sometimes I think, you know, I wish I'd chosen an easier path, right? If I had written, you know, as an English teacher, if I'd written English books and, you know, talked about different ways to do seminar, you know, did PD on those kinds of things, I could be way wealthier, way more famous. You know, the Jackson method of reading, right? Like I, I, this work is hard. Why did I pick up something so hard other than this little masochistic streak I probably have? The reason that I did it is because it's that important. Because anything that is world changing and life altering, it's hard.

You chose to be a builder and I applaud you for that. 

I'm so proud of you for rejecting the notion that not every kid will be successful for for standing, taking a stand and saying not on my watch, 100% of the students I serve not only deserve to be successful, but I'm not going to stop until I figure out how to make that happen. So you're my people. But y'all, we got to do better. And I say we because I've fall into this too. We got to stop letting the leadership residue that we all carry leak all over our work and blunt its impact. We've got to call it out when we see it and recognize that that may have been the way we used to do it and it may have even felt good and we may have even gotten rewarded for it. But that's not going to get us to 100%.

You see, we're not going to get to 100% just because of our good intentions. We got to do the work and the work has to look different than the work we've been doing. But here is the good news, because even though it looks different and even though making the shift feels hard because, you know, we're we're we're have to walk away from what everybody, our whole careers have told us to do and do something different. And it's sometimes it takes some bravery because we're the only ones. And sometimes it just takes discipline because it's easy to fall back into it. And sometimes it just takes renewing and re anchoring in our commitment when the work gets hard. But we we have to do that. We have to be able to step away from how we were trained and all of that leadership stuff.

And we have to step into buildership. But here's what happens when you do, when you become a builder, the work gets easier and more rewarding. Here's how it gets easier. You see, it's hard at the beginning to make the shift because we haven't experienced the benefits yet. But when you start giving feedback differently, when you start supporting teachers differently, when you you create different systems, better systems, smoother systems, what happens is you get a sense of calm and confidence. So if you look again at the buildership model, there's three things. You have clarity, right? So you know what you need to be doing.

And so when you go to work every day, you're not like, what do I know you? You know what you need to be doing, right? You have more confidence not just in yourself, but in your vision. And you have confidence in your team. You're you. You can trust them to do the work because they're committed to it. And then you have more competence, you get better at the work, the results speak for themselves. And it gets to the point where you're so used to putting up great results that at this point, like it's you just almost take it for granted.

People are like, whoa, you just you just got the highest growth for students in your district three years in a row. And you're like, yeah, I mean, it doesn't even, it's it's not even a big deal anymore because of course you did. You got those results because you built a school that was designed to give you those results. It just becomes a thing when you do this work and you become more and more of a builder. The work is easier and it gets more rewarding. I just got to, I just got to stick to it. And so if you are looking at your work right now and you see some leadership residue, don't feel bad.

We all have it right?

I, I was trained to be a leader my whole career and I was good at it and it was really, really hard and continues to be hard to not slip back into it because. And in the short term it feels easier and sometimes even more gratifying, right, because you get those little quick wins. But in the long term it doesn't it doesn't satisfy. It's not enough because you and I were called for something bigger. We were called to make a real difference. Can't do it with the leadership stuff. So listen, I want you to take some time this week. Take a look at your work spot that leadership residue and then when you see it, just call it out and then get refocused on buildership.

Look, I know those playbooks are, are sexy, right? And you're doing the playbooks and you getting these quick wins and and they're designed to give you wins, right. But if you do the playbook and and you implement the playbook, but you don't treat the playbook like a new system, a new way of doing the work, like a builder. If it's just a, a fun exercise to fill up APD day and it's not something that you are actually going to now implement as part of that bigger system that you're you're building for 100% student success, don't bother. I know that some of the buildership tools that you're experiencing, they're they're cool, they're fun, they're different, they're good, if I'm going to say so myself. But if you're just grabbing the tools, but you're not shifting how you do work and you're implementing those tools like a leader instead of like a builder, they're not going to work for you. This is this work that we do this this, this calling that we have as builders, this movement that we are building towards 100%, having 100% mindsets and building, 100% staff alignment and 100% student success. It takes discipline.

We got to stay in the buildership mindset. But when you do the work, I keep saying it, I keep I'm repetitive, but because it's true, the work is easier, the work gets more rewarding. That's it. That's all I have to say. That's my that's my little that thanks for coming to my Ted talk. This is this is this is this is you know, I don't I don't even know the end this episode other than just please, I believe in you. I believe in this work and I know you believe in it too. So let's do better.

Let's start cleaning up the leadership residue from our work. Let's get up every day and change lives and make the difference we were called to make because we approach our work like a builder. I'll talk to you next time. If you're ready to get started being a builder right away, then I want to invite you to join us at Buildership University. It's our exclusive online community for builders just like you, where you'll be able to get the exact training that you need to turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have. Inside you'll find our best online courses, live trainings with me, tons of resources, templates and exemplars, and monthly live office hours with me where you can ask me anything and get my help on whatever challenge you're facing right now. If you're tired of hitting obstacle after obstacle and you're sick of tiny little incremental games each year, if you're ready to make a dramatic difference in your school right now, then you need to join Buildership University. Just go to buildershipuniversity.com and get started writing your school success story today.

Hey, real quick before you go, if you enjoyed today's episode and you know someone who would really benefit from what you heard here today, maybe they're struggling with a thing that we talked about in today's episode. Would you take a moment and share this episode with them? You see, not only will it help us get the word about buildership out to more people, but you're going to look like a rock star because you're going to give people something they can really use to help them get unstuck and be better at building their schools. Plus, it would mean the world to me. Thanks so much and I'll see you next time.

Thank you for listening to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast for show notes and free downloads visit https://schoolleadershipreimagined.com/

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