Accelerate Your Performance
Accelerate Your Performance is a weekly podcast hosted by Dr. Janet Pilcher, Managing Director of Studer Education and author of Hardwiring Excellence in Education. Every week, Janet highlights tactical and actionable strategies that leaders in educational organizations can hardwire to meet successful student, service, and people outcomes. Listen now, and you’ll see why it’s ranked by ListenNotes in the top 5% of podcasts worldwide.
As she introduces a variety of pivotal leadership practices from the 9 Pillars of Leadership Excellence, Janet underscores the importance of seamlessly integrating each practice to deliver positive and impactful results. For each leadership practice she introduces, Janet provides a solid foundation and then collaborates with coaching experts to dig deeper and demonstrate its practical application. Janet also interviews leaders and partners who excel at the tactics to hear about their implementation journeys, hurdles they’ve faced, and their notable achievements. To bring it all together, she offers a broader perspective on leadership, interviewing guests about a diverse array of topics on their paths to achieving organizational excellence.
Follow for weekly insights and actionable strategies to accelerate your performance and become your best at work!
Episodes
451 episodes
The Power of People, Work, & Mattering: Reflecting on 450 Episodes
Since 2019, Dr. Janet Pilcher has used this podcast to share the stories of effective leaders—their successes, their challenges, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. Across 449 episodes, those stories have revealed countless lessons w...
Listen to Learn, Act to Improve
Good leaders listen with intention and then act on what they learn. Listening to those closest to the work provides the most meaningful and accurate information because they are the ones that know the work best. These people can share what’s wo...
Build Stronger Teams by Including Students and Families
When schools, students, and families work together, everyone wins. The truth is that teachers, families, and students have the same goal – student success. Therefore, building teams that allow everyone to work together for this shared goal help...
Show Gratitude for the Gift Called "Teacher"
Teachers are a gift to the world, and the work they do each day is transformational. They leave special marks on our lives, and their work is impactful. Teachers need to be reminded how remarkable and appreciated they are; they need to be remin...
Care, Concern, and Community
Good leaders are effective at showing care and concern for others. Acts of care and concern can be demonstrated in both expected ways (such as check-in meetings) and unexpected ways (such as difficult conversations). The bottom line is that whe...
Getting and Keeping Team Members Engaged: Part 2
Getting and keeping employees engaged is hard, intentional work, but it's worth the continuous time and effort. As Lana Fontenot, Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement and External Relations at South Louisiana Community College, states,...
Getting and Keeping Team Members Engaged: Part 1
Employee engagement is key to a successful organization, and getting team members engaged should begin even before their first day of work as a new hire. New hires naturally feel a mix of excitement and anxiety, but leaders must capitalize on t...
Drive Improvement Through Leading and Learning
Continuous improvement is grounded in learning. In fact, continuous improvement necessitates a mindset that focuses on continued learning and growth and that acknowledges that there is always something new to discover. Through this learning, gr...
The Bottom Line
In today’s episode, Dr. Janet Pilcher implements her own advice to “face the brutal facts” in education. As educational leaders in both K12 and higher education face a changing landscape, Dr. Pilcher explains that it’s crucial for leaders to at...
Know Your "Why"
Dr. Howard Spearman, one of the 2026 Studer Education Difference Maker Award winners, believes that knowing your "why" is essential for a leader. Without knowing your why, Dr. Spearman shares that a leader can "lose their way." When a leader kn...
Become a Student of Leadership
Even the best leaders know that they can continue to learn. That mindset is partially what makes them good leaders; they continue to seek ways to improve. In this episode, Dr. Janet Pilcher talks with Dr. Vincent June, one of those great leader...
Change Is Everyday Business
Change is everyday business for leaders, and employees rely on leaders to guide them through change by effectively managing and leading change efforts. Listen as Dr. Janet Pilcher reflects on the idea that change is everyday busines...
Change Organizational Culture With Standards of Excellence
People want to do good work, and they want to work in an organization that has a positive work environment. According to Kelly Krostag, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resource Services for Escambia County Public Schools in Florida, a positiv...
Enhance the Student Experience with Student Rounding
On the heals of Studer Education's 2026 Destination High Performance Higher Education Conference, Dr. Janet Pilcher reflects on the event and her takeaways. She calls out an idea shared by Dr. Brendan Kelly, President of Eastern Michigan Univer...
Using Scorecards to Keep the Strategic Plan “Alive”
As Dr. Kristine Strickland, Chancellor of Fletcher Technical Community College, proposes in this week’s episode, strategic plans are important…if they don’t sit on a shelf to collect dust. Rather, as Dr. Strickland shares, strategic plans must ...
Add Voice and Value with Rounding and Recognition
Employees want to feel valued and heard at work. When they feel this way, they feel safe sharing ideas, are motivated to do their best, and see the impact of their contributions and the contributions of others. In these ways, value and voice bu...
Connecting to Purpose: The Little School District That Could
Bright spots of good work are all around us in organizations. It is a leader's responsibility to create ways for people to harvest the stories of these bright spots. These stories reinforce why someone's work is valued, the impact it has on oth...
Build a Feedback Culture
In preparation for an upcoming webinar, Dr. Janet Pilcher provides a brief introduction to the idea that feedback is a gift. She discusses how feedback is a two-way gift – leaders must provide and receive feedback. Feedback is a gift that provi...
Get Aligned: Strategic Plans, Scorecards, and Measures that Matter
Every day in an organization, good work is being done. Ensuring that all this good work is aligned and focused on the same goals and outcomes is what Superintendent Michael Maine of Martin County, Florida calls getting “locked tight,” and Super...
Listen, Learn, Improve: The Gift of Feedback
Getting feedback is one thing; capturing feedback with the mindset that it is a gift is another. The idea that “feedback is a gift” relates to proactively seeking feedback to better understand what is working well and what needs improvem...
DHP 2026 Virtual K12 Leadership Conference Launch
Good leaders continuously seek improvement; they want to grow and learn. They lead the way in growing, improving, and surpassing status quo. The 9 Pillars of Leadership Excellence frame these kinds of continuous improvement efforts and shape ho...
Words Have Power
"Words have power," which is why Dr. Janet Pilcher issues a call for leaders to be thoughtful of words, choosing them carefully and using them in positive ways. Leaders model how to use words effectively, and operationalizing values, including ...
From Survey Results to Real Growth
Improvement is a team effort, and teams must support one another to be able to move forward together. As Dr. Jennifer Kubista, Superintendent of Central School District 13J in Oregon states, “You have to be reflective and working hard together....
Lead With a People-First Mindset
In this episode, Dr. KK Owen, a leader coach at Studer Education, shares that “our best chance of success is through our people.” As she explains, it’s for this reason that people need to understand that they are valued and that they bring valu...