Episode 80: Be the Change: School Leadership Strategies to Build Culture, Support Teachers, & Grow in your Leadership

Modeling Growth As A Leader

Principal JL 1:20

As a principal, we need to model what we ask our staff to do. And we talk to our staff a lot about professional development, getting better, and really honing in on their skills. But as principals, assistant principals, superintendents, directors, assistant superintendents, what are we doing to hone our own skills? Are we practicing what we preach? That is the focus of today's episode. This episode is about how can we be the change for our staff, our community, and for our school. And how can we lead in a way that is effective, but we're also modeling what we preach. Let's dive into today's episode. Welcome back, everybody, for another exciting episode of the Educational Leadership Podcast. Today I'm very excited to bring to you my presentation about being the change, how school leaders can shape culture, influence public perception, and protect the future of education. So let's go ahead and dive into it. So just a little bit background for me. I've been a principal going into my ninth year right now. I've been a principal of a small rural district out in Southern Valley where I was surrounded by cornfields. But I'm also a building principal at the high school level in Hastings, which is a large, we would like to call it a urban, suburban school or a suburban rural school. Let's get a suburban rural school, where we're kind of surrounded by cornfields, but we're a city of about 25,000 people. And we actually have two other high schools in our community as well. Really, what this episode is for is we're going to talk about how do you show up each day as a leader? What story about education are you telling? And then what can you do to influence your leadership beyond the school doors? I think that's really important for us because guess what? We do a really good job of helping other people get better. But what are we doing better for ourselves? And I think that's really, really, really important for us to think about how are we getting better as leaders? Because a lot of times we are in a silo, we're on our own. Even me as a building principal with assistant principals and a really nice team to work with, I still need to get better personally because

Why Your Leadership Story Matters

Principal JL 4:09

if I don't, I cannot help my staff get better. So I really fall back on the law of the lid from John Maxwell. John Maxwell talks about the law of the lid is basically is as a leader, I can only pour into people as much as I have knowledge about. So if my lid is at a certain point, I can only pour into people so much. But if I raise the lid, if I get better, if I grow and learn, my my lid raises, which means have more things that I can pour into people, my staff, when it comes to their ability of getting better. So what am I doing to make myself better? And I think remembering the law of the lid is really important when it comes to leadership. So how you show up every day is super important. What kind of tone are you setting? Are you bringing the energy? Are you bringing the crud, right? Like you could choose to have a great attitude, choose also choose to have a negative attitude. So what attitude are you choosing? Are you choosing a positive one or are you choosing a negative one? Guys, there's days that I don't feel like dealing with certain things. They're like days I come to work and I and I feel defeated because of the day before. But what do I do to get myself ready for the next day so I can go in and be the change and make a difference and impact people? Because every day I can choose to either come in with a great attitude or poor attitude. So it's up to me to choose that that attitude. What kind of language are you using in difficult situations? Are you being intentional with the words you say? Are you just flying out the cuff? Are you just letting your emotions get to you? Because a lot of times you got to think through the situation and respond in a way. And the more you can do that, the better off you are. And then, you know, your response to challenging situation, are you being solution focused? Are you just being frustrated and complaining and complaining about what's going on? Like what attitude are you having? How are you showing a growth mindset in those challenging situations and emotional steadiness?

Attitude, Language, And Staying Calm

Principal JL 6:20

What kind of emotions are you having? Are you being able to stay calm in a situation that gets heated? Are you able to keep your cool when people get upset with you? Because a lot of times that's where we lose it as leaders. Is sometimes someone's coming at you and you just get mad and you say things you don't want to say. How do you can you keep yourself calm under pressure? I think that's really important for us to think about when it comes to dealing with emotional situations because what you're modeling is the culture you want to build in your school. And I think having a positive mindset and having a positive leadership style is super, super important when it comes to showing up every day in your school. So what we want to do is we kind of want to shift our mindset a little bit. We want to think about management instead of managing, how are we developing? Instead of evaluating, how are we coaching people? Instead of compliance, how are we growing? We understand we got things to do, but are we compliance driven or are we growth driven? How are we growing the people that are in our building? Because that's really, really important. But then how are you growing yourself? Because you can't grow the people in the building if you don't grow yourself. And then how do you go from oversight to investing in your people? How you intentionally do that? So, you know, let's think about we want to celebrate people, right? This is a strategy you can do to help show supporting staff, and you want to be able to celebrate them, but you got to know your staff because not everybody wants to be celebrated publicly. So sometimes you have to just go in and say, hey, you did a great job. I really like that. But some people like the kudos. So you can you can celebrate them in like a staff meeting, things like that. But what are you doing to show support and be intentional? Like one thing we're doing this year is we're co-teaching. And so one of the things I wanted to be intentional on is make sure the co-teacher and the teacher have common planning because it's something that we got to do better at. But I have to be intentional when it comes to setting up my staff so they

Shift From Compliance To Coaching

Principal JL 8:25

can grow, but also helps them feel supported. And then how do we reflect on what we do, where we're at, and how do we help people get better? But how are we getting ourselves better when it comes to that? And when you reflect, how are you responding to that reflection? Are you saying, hey, here's some things I do to grow to get better? Or am I just kind of like, yeah, I'm not gonna do that? Like, what attitude are you having when you are looking to reflect and grow as yourself and how you support your staff? I think that's really important to think about. All right, so think about your daily leadership and how you can make an impact. So pick one thing that you can get better at and adjust it. So, what behavior, what habit, how do you come in, what tone do you have? I think choose one support practice to implement. So, what strategy can you do to help people? Is it celebrate them? Is it protect their time? Is it finding ways to help them get better or their wellness, or how do you help them? Like, you know, one of the things I like to do is like bringing in a food truck, you know, and things like that. And, you know, supporting them and showing them, hey, I I care about you. I want you to know that we want you to get better, but at the same time, how are you supporting your staff beyond your normal coaching and evaluation stuff? So they just see so they see that you value them beyond just being a teacher or a staff member in your building. And then a lot of people start to do this is they're creating a personal mission statement. Here's some things you could do. You can you can write down a personal mission statement, and there's things you can do to create that guide. So here's some things to think about. You can identify your inspiration. So name three people that inspire you, reflect on your experiences. So what are what do you do best? What are you proud of? Things like that. Examine your relationship. So identify three important roles you play, but also how what how do you want others to feel about interacting with you? What are you hoping people do when you're not in the room? And then gather the themes. So those are the first three steps, and you gather the themes and figure out what are the things you're good at, and then you can draft a personal mission statement to where you are really clarifying your mission personally for your staff, so you can say this is what I'm about. But the personal

Write A Personal Mission Statement

Principal JL 11:15

mission statement is something that you can change, it's something that evolves when it goes through to you. And I do have a creating your personal mission statement document that I will share in the show notes for you so you guys can go in there and check it out as well. So here's some other things to think about when you're talking about just being the change. How are you shaping public perception? Who is telling your school story, right? Because guess what? If you're not sharing your school stories, somebody else is gonna share it for you. So are you sharing weekly highlights? Are you talking about the achievements? Are you telling success stories? Are you spotlighting staff members and their things that they're doing in a classroom? You know, are you being able to address things with transparency and solution focus? Because what we want to do is project out into our communities all the great things that are happening, because people all they think about is all the negative things about school. Because if you think about the national media, even look at your local social media when it comes to your complaint pages. I know every town's got one, and so think about like how can you change that narrative and have people talk about the great things because if you're not sharing your story on social media, people are gonna tell a narrative that's not true, and a lot of times you got to tell five to seven positive things to outweigh the negatives. So, how are you communicating with your community members about what's going on? The thing we use is our social media platform, our Facebook page, our Twitter page, and we just pump out posts daily. I'm lucky that I have a social media content director in my building or leader, and she does a fabulous job putting out the awesome stories. And the cool

Control The Narrative About School

Principal JL 13:06

thing is, is our staff and our teachers have the ability to push out stories and all the great things that are happening in their classroom as well, because there's so many great things out there, and it's really important to share your story out there because what's this gonna do? It's gonna tell your local businesses, your community members, your families, and it gives a visibility about your school beyond what you do day to day. It tells people these are the awesome things that are happening at my school, so it's really important to do. Now, another thing that I want to talk about is advocacy and getting involved. All right. One of the things that I have learned in my experience, and I didn't do this very well in my first probably three to four years as a principal, where I was not going to my region meetings very much because I felt like I needed to be in my building. I thought my building wasn't wasn't going to run without me. But guess what? This is something really important to think about. Your building, if it has systems in place, will run just fine without you. When it doesn't run, is when you don't have teachers. That's when you don't have teachers and staff, your support staff in there, that's when your building doesn't run. Your building can run without you. So being able to get out, do professional development opportunities is important because hey, we want our staff to do those things, but we have to model doing those things as well. So when you're getting involved at your region level, like in Nebraska, we have our region level, which is kind of like the schools in your region, your area, and then we have our state level, and then we have our national level, right? And depending on where you're at, depending on where you get involved. So we want to really be involved in a regional level to start with, or just the schools around your area, get involved with them. I also talk about getting involved with your conference principals. I think one of the things that the Eastern Middle Efference here in Nebraska does awesome with is they have a conference where their principals get together, their superintendents

Advocacy Through Networks And Legislators

Principal JL 15:07

get together, and their 80s get together. It's not just about activities and sports, it's about how we can get better as a conference school with other people. And guess what? I can email the principals in my conference that things that we're going through. And a lot of times they're going through the same thing because we are very similar school size and the things that that we have to work through and challenges that we have. So it's really important to can make those connections. And if you're not sure what state level, like for us in Nebraska, we have an elementary principal association, we have a secondary principal association, we have a superintendent association, a special education association, and a state school board association. If I'm leaving anybody out, I'm sorry. Uh, but those are like the main associations I can remember. But we're all under an umbrella through the Nebraska School Councils Association, where we have an umbrella organization that helps the other organizations when it comes to those things. So being involved in those things are really important because guess what? You can also get involved with the state legislation level when you do that. And also with national associations, the things you got to think about, like for me, my national association is the National Principals Association. It used to be the National Secondary School Leaders Association, but they changed it. So I'm going to continue to stay with the National Principals Association because that was the national association that I was under before the change. If you're an elementary principal, like whatever your state decides is what the one you want to go with. But for Nebraska, our elementary school principals will be under the National Elementary School Principal Association. So we kind of we kind of do that right now just because that is the way we do it in Nebraska. Other states are different, and I know that, and but get to know your association, what they do, and they'll help guide you to the national association you can be involved with because getting involved in all those different things is really, really important. And it's a great opportunity for you to grow professionally, and they have a lot of great things for you that offer. So think about those things and how you get involved. If you're not involved with those things, start getting involved with those things. Now, one thing that I did this past year was I was able to have state legislators or state senators come into my school and they were able to see all the good things, but I was able to have conversations with them, show them our building, show them how their laws that they're thinking about implementing are going to affect your building, good or bad. Like, hey, this is how it's gonna affect my building positively, or is this how I'm gonna affect my building negatively? You got to have those conversations because if you're not having those conversations, state legislators are gonna make stupid laws for education because they think they know what education is like because they once went to school, but they've never worked in schools a lot of the time. Some of them have, you know, and those are the ones that kind of get it, but the ones that don't get it are the ones making some of these just ridiculous state legislation laws to make honestly, it makes our job harder sometimes. If they just leave us alone and let us do our thing, we'll be just fine. But you have to have those conversations, you got to build a relationship with those state senators and put yourself in a position where they can trust your expertise to where having those conversations, bringing them into your school and doing those things are really, really important. I look forward to bringing in our state senator again down the road here when it comes to just having them visit and just be a consistent person that they can go to when they may have questions when it comes to education legislation in your state legislation. So I think that's important for you to do as well because that advocacy part is super important. Now, let's think about how you can grow professionally. That is really important. So these are things that I have done to make myself better, right? And you don't have to go to conferences all the time or workshops. You can actually do these things where you sit right now. Wherever you're at, doesn't matter if you're in a rural school, urban school, suburban school, wherever you're at, you can do these things to make yourself better. You can do something as simple as reading a book. Getting a great leadership book is really important, or something you can do that's meaningful. But then you can take the information you learn and you can apply it. So reading books. Now, I don't read a lot of books, I actually listen to a lot of books. So I have an Audible subscription where I download books, I read them. I probably have read, you know, it's not a lot, probably at least 20 some books in the past year. For me, you know, some people read a lot more than that. I just take them as they come, and things that I get interested in, I grab those and read them and I listen to them. And a lot of times it's something I've learned from somebody down the road, and I and I do that. So I think that's really important. Reading books, podcasts, guys. There's a lot of great podcasts out there. This is a great podcast, and I'm glad you're listening. But there's other podcasts that you can listen to, and I'm going to share some of those things as well. State

Books, Podcasts, And Pro Growth Habits

Principal JL 20:28

and national organizations, I kind of talked about that, getting involved with those because you need to connect with those leaders. You need to get involved. Your voice needs to be heard. Because I think that's the one thing we do not do a good enough job with is advocating for our profession at the state level with your legislation. And we got to do a better job at that because they're going to pass stupid laws you don't like if you don't do that. They need to hear from you. And guess what? Your expertise and your professionalism when it comes to state legislation is important as they need to think about everything when it comes down to it. And then partner with people around your area. So if you have schools in the area, get to know those principals, email them. You know, I talked about get involved with your if your conference has, if you have a conference, get involved with your principals there. Those are a great resource as well as your region. I also developed a little guide for you when it comes to where you're not, are you not sure where you start, right? So I have a list of books, I have a list of podcasts, I have a list of organizations. I kind of talk to you about those organizations for you to get involved with and you know, resources to grow yourself. Now, when I talk about state organizations in this list, I'll talk about Nebraska because that's where I'm at. But at the same time, here's some things to really just the starters, right? And I'll share this resource as well when it comes to this podcast. I'll put it in the show notes. Resources to grow. Here's a good book, The Leader and Me by Stephen Covey. You know, seven habits of highly affected people. You know, stop eating your own, hacking leadership, 10 ways great leaders inspire. That's by Joe San filippo. Do you have trust inspire? You have influence, new and expanded by Robert Caldwin. We have Developing the Leader Within by John C. Maxwell, Culturized by Jimmy Casas. We have Fundamental Five Revisited by Sean Cain, The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon, Recalibrate by Jimmy Casas, Atomic Habits by James Clear. And then we have the more than just Principals, Assistant Principals, Teaching and Support Staff. It's a four-book series by Robert Hinchliffe. You guys know him. He's on the principal's perspective here on this podcast. And then Empowered Principal, School Leaders, Alternative to Career Burnout by Angela Kelly Roebuck. These are just books to start with, right? There's so many great books out. Like Jon Gordon's got a lot of great books out there as well. I have only listed one, but he's got a few others that you can dig your teeth in when it comes to leadership as well. Now, podcasts. I'm talking about podcasts other than this awesome podcast you're listening to right now would be really good to kind of take a listen to. So Leading Into Leadership with Darrin Peppard, Empowered Principal with Angela Kelly, the Aspiring School Leader Podcast. It's a YouTube one with Donavan Smalls II. The PGP podcast with my friend Josh Tovar. He does an outstanding job. That's on YouTube. And then we have Proud Principles podcast with Tony Cattani. We have the AP and New Principles. That's YouTube. That's Principal Kafele. That's a really good one. And then an interview chair by Jimmy Casas. Those are really good podcasts to really kind of give yourself a lot of variety, but a lot of really good people to listen to, besides this one, when it comes down to it. Now I kind of talked about the national and state organizations, and I talked about getting involved in your area schools to when it comes to reaching out to people and becoming better around you. So I think those are really important places where you can start when it comes to your growth and becoming the change. Let's talk about things you can do now to get you going, right? So what's one change that you'll make now? How I'm going to show up? What's one thing I'm going to do differently when it comes up to how I'm going to show up to work every day? Because people want to be led by people that have great attitudes. And I think one thing I remember as a staff member, like there's days that I'm up and down. Like, don't get me wrong, but I choose to have a positive attitude because I know it affects my staff and I know it works because I had a staff member tell me, hey, I was having a cruddy day, but then I saw you being joyful, you having fun at work. And they thought, well, if he can be happy and be joyful, he's definitely got a harder job than me, then I can be too. Like that was a powerful thing that I learned from one of my staff members. Just because I chose to have a positive attitude that affected that person's attitude when it came to them having a bad day. They got actually inspired because they knew I deal with a lot of stuff. And they knew if I can be joyful, they could be too. So I think that's something to really think about. What's one way I can better support my staff? So think of one thing you can better support your staff with. What's one way you'll promote education public? What are you going to do to promote the awesome things that you are doing in your school building? And then think about one advocacy action you'll take this year. What can you do? Is it inviting a senator or a state legislator to your building to talk

Five Commitments To Start Today

Principal JL 26:42

about the things that are going on and giving them perspective that they haven't heard about? Is it getting involved, you know, at the state association level? Is it, you know, there's a lot of things that you can do to start advocating for your school because they need to hear from us. And then what's one professional goal or professional growth goal you can commit to? So commit to reading a book, commit to listening to a podcast, commit to something that will help you grow professionally. Those are five things you can do right now to get you going. And once you start this process, you're going to change over time. Like, guys, it took me time to get where I'm at. I'm in my ninth year. This didn't happen overnight. And I am a better leader now because I decided that I wanted to be the change for my people, and I wanted to really increase the lid that I have so I can pour into people when it comes to being the change for my school and for the people around me. So, how are you going to be the change, guys? That is so important. I hope you guys really enjoyed this episode. If you did, please like and share it. Send it to a friend that needs to hear it. Guys, I really grateful for all the awesome work you guys are doing out there. I really appreciate everything you guys have doing. And guys, like, I hope you guys are having a great start to your school year because we are now getting going. We're like we're getting into it right now. I know some of you guys ain't gonna be getting going until after Labor Day, but God God bless you guys when you guys get started as well. So hopefully you guys are having you know a great start to your school year, and I hope you guys are going to be the change for your staff, your students, and your community. Until next time, be curious and one percent better.