Mentoring Moments with Rob Wottawa - Reflection Episode 3

What does leadership actually look like when you're not reading about it in a book?

In this solo reflection episode, Dr. Rob Wottawa pulls back the curtain on conversations with four Long Island leaders: David Wicks, Dr. Teresa Grossane, Brendan Cusack, and Dom Armano. From the power of presence to building trust and capacity, Rob shares his biggest takeaways — including why leadership isn't about a title, how to listen twice as much as you speak, and why you should never take the advice "don't smile until December." Plus, Rob answers his own RW Rapid Fire questions and reveals the mentor who taught him to walk slowly through the crowd.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the Mentoring Moments, Empowering Leaders to Mentor Our Future podcast. I am Dr. Rob Watova and believe that through teacher and leader mentorship, we can impact our future through our influences on students. As much as we believe in the power and impact of mentorship, many shy away from this rewarding work. The goal of these episodes is to lean into the work with teachers and leaders, hear their stories, and have fun with the mentoring process. Hello everyone and welcome to mentoring moments. This is our 15th episode, and I am very excited to be recording my third solo reflection episode. I am just about at 1,500 views and downloads, and I am so impressed with all of my support that I've gotten from people and the love and the feedback. It is so appreciative. And the guests that I've had on are so fantastic. And I hope to have great guests aligned for you coming up in the upcoming school year. You know, this is um it's a new journey for me. Uh, you know, so I'm recording one episode a month, and then every four months I'm recording a solo episode to reflect on the four uh people that we've met with and got to know a little bit better. Um and I have some some surprise surprises uh set up um coming up for the anniversary of the first year, and then also a couple of great guests that I'm aligning. So I'm excited to share that. But let's dive into the work. So, you know, we had some great guests the last four times. So the question that's kind of the overarching question for today's solo episode is what does leadership actually look like? You're not reading about it in a book, right? So many times we go to our leadership courses and you read about what it's like to be a leader. And then when you become an administrator and then become a leader, you realize that a lot of those things don't matter, but there's things that are much more important. So I've spent the last four months with incredible leaders from Long Island. You know, one was David Wicks, who is the person that oversees the huge Eastern Suffolk Bosees Agency. I've met with Dr. Teresa Grassane, who's a math and computer science director. I work closely with her. Uh Mr. Brendan Cusack, who is uh former principal and is now the assistant superintendent of curriculum instruction, and a good friend of mine, uh Da Morano, who's an elementary principal, who's all about bringing people together and having that sense of belonging. So here's what I learned just in general about the four of them, uh learned from them is that leadership isn't about a title, which is really important for all of us to understand. It's about how we show up, it's about how we listen, and it's about how we make people feel, right? That's like that old saying people will forget what they said, they'll forget what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. Just remember all about that. So today what we're going to do is we're gonna lean into this kind of concept and think about the best advice, my own takeaways, and a few hard truths about leading into what education is today. All right. So let's dig into this together. All right. So the first part that we're gonna go into is the part one, as I'm calling uh the power of presence, you know, which aligns to how we show up and how we listen and how we make people feel. Um, and one way of being present that a lot of my our guests shared is one-on-one leadership, be visible, right? It's not just about being seen, but it's also about being available to the people when it really counts. You know, and I know, uh, and I don't want to hem on COVID, but I remember my phone ringing at 10 o'clock at night and picking up the phone to speak to my teachers that were in tears. Um, being there for them, it mattered. And one of the things, this is a quote from Brendan Cusack, this is exactly what he said. He said, I think more important than being visible in the public sphere is being accessible when everybody, well, sorry, when nobody else is around. So let's say at nine o'clock or 11 o'clock or two o'clock in the morning, you know, you get an email. He says, being accessible is part of being visible and it's part of the visible leadership. Um, and he's he jokingly says, of course, it doesn't hurt to be a screaming maniac on the sidelines either, right? So being a leader means that the phone rings at two o'clock or the email shows up at two o'clock in the morning and you you're you're paying attention to that. Um maybe it's first thing in the morning. It also means that every morning you're standing outside, you're greeting the students as they enter, you're talking to parents. Um, or for Teresa, she said something something similar. She said to me said to our audience, make the time. I know as administrators always running around, especially at the district level, this is important. She said, just stop, breathe, and listen. I love that. Just that's a pause, right? Stop, breathe, and listen. And then she went on to talk about the theory of you, which basically says uh don't listen at the top, right? But listen um to all members all together to build this level of capacity and to take in what the person is actually saying. So my interpretation of that is be present, right? And build on common ground. Oftentimes when I'm presenting at a concert or a conference, I always say to parents, be present. This is the only time you're gonna see this concert. This is the only time you're gonna see this conference, put your devices away. Uh, be present with your children because something silly is gonna happen and we don't want to miss it, right? And there's a the quote that I love listen to understand rather than to respond. So very important to take that pause, uh, take that moment of presence. And one of the tricks that I that I've been sharing with people, and I and John Maxwell uh talked about it a little bit, and so has uh Simon Senek. John Maxwell talked about the cell phone and talked about how you know when somebody walks in the office, he puts it down. I'm gonna tell you, I go a step further. If my cell phone is in my office and it's on my desk, when somebody comes into my space and I want to sit down and talk, I physically take my phone and put it in my pocket because I want to send the message that I'm present, that I'm here with them. I'm here to listen to them, I'm here to understand them. Because there's nothing worse than having a barrier between the people that you are leading and the people that you're listening to. So Dom also reminds us about leadership. Um, and in like oftentimes our people come to us, right, and they think that we have the answers, or they think that you know we might be the hero, right? But he said it's about being human. So he kind of unpacked this a little bit with his personal story as a kid. And I love this, and I'm sure his teachers really appreciated him sharing this with him. He says, I was the kid that sat in the principal's office, and that's why I think I'm there now. I was just really used to it as a student, sharing that with my staff took courage, but at the end, it brought back memories for them that they forgot. And they said, they actually said to him, You brought back memories for me. That was really, really amazing, right? Um, so one of the things that we have to think about is the small things that we do make a big difference, right? Um, and we have to always think about being present. Uh, I say, you know, we were born with two ears and one mouth. So we should listen twice as much as we speak. And I'm gonna share, this is not easy. Um, you know, it takes a lot of practice and a lot of skill to be present and to put down your phone and listen to the people that you're speaking to. It also takes a lot of patience. Uh, I'm learning now a lot of patience because when you've been doing leadership for a while, you kind of can predict what people are going to be saying or what they're going to ask you. And I find myself oftentimes in my head anyway, wanting to cut them off and wanting to tell them what they're going to tell me before they say it, right? And I, and my one of my assistants the other day or a couple of weeks ago caught caught me. They're like, that person was in here talking, and we could see that you physically wanted to respond, and you took your hands and put them at the side of your body to stop yourself from speaking. Um, because yes, it is that challenging to do that. So, right, to the power of presence. So whether you're you're at 2 a.m. in the morning, or it's Teresa who's pausing in the hallways to talk to a teacher or with a student, or whether it's Dom when he's sharing his own story with his staff or his students, um, they all understand that leadership happens in those small, small moments. So, again, it's those small things that make a big difference. Um, one of the things that I like to do is appreciate the people that I work with and I and I alongside I work to write thank you notes and appreciate them with even birthday texts or emails. And I know that sounds small, but I will tell you that the amounts of responses that I've gotten about the handwritten notes and thank you that I've given out over the years has been tremendous. And I have had somebody to me, why do you do that? So is it worth it? Why? It's not worth it. You're wasting all this time. And I'm gonna tell you it's it's not it's not a waste of time taking that time and writing a handwritten note. And then when you see your handwritten notes being posted on bulletin boards by custodians, by directors, by teachers, by principals, that means something because to them, obviously, because they posted it. But then you know that you're it means something um to you to continue to do that thing. So um that's that's our wrapping up that power of presence. And so let's transition to building trust and capacity. So this is really important because as leaders, there's a lot of times you'll hear, you know, we can't do it alone, or you know, it's really lonely at the top. Um, but bottom line is uh many hands make light work, right? So we have to take the time and not burn ourselves out, and we have to lean in on our teams, and we have to allow people to support us. And David Wicks, did it, who is in charge of uh probably thousands of people, um, said this, and I think this is very powerful. Surround yourself with the people that are better than you at what you're you're not the best at. As you move to positions with more responsibility, it becomes more and more lonely. You need to count on those external networks. If you don't do that, we will get lonely real quick. So here's the thing: we hear this all the time. It's gonna be lonely at the top. It's gonna be lonely at the top. John Maxwell, I'm sorry to keep talking about him, always says, well, if you if if you're feeling lonely in leadership, then you're doing it wrong. So what David was talking about is building your your PLN, your personal learning network, right? And I'm calling it your PLN 2.0 because we had our PLN from Twitter, which was just connections that you had. PLN 2.0 is the people that you actually go to and actually go out to lunch with and actually speak to regularly and are on the same page. Um, and it's so important that you build that network and that PLN 2.0 because when you think you might be lonely in the space in which you are leading or you are teaching, you have your people that you can lean on, people that are outside of your network, people that you can call up or text and say, hey, we really need some advice on dot dot dot. The other element that that I really want to touch on here is what David had said is surround yourself with the people that are better than you. Um, I always say hire your weaknesses, right? So if you know that you are not a good organizer, you want to find somebody that is a good organizer, and then you can disseminate all of the things that are organizing things to that person because you want to build that weakness. And it also builds capacity for the district or the organization in which you're working with, right? So you're gonna build those internal capacities with those shared visions, which of course, of course, in turn fosters leadership because now you have people that are out there leading other things uh on your behalf because you've disseminated them to them, and you're building that internal capacity. And in speaking to about this internal capacity, Teresa really, really um shared a good point about this within her departments. She shares, I select teachers that I know are going to be very interested in learning more about something. And then I make them kind of sort of like key people and to turnkey the knowledge to other teachers in the department. It's much better to build capacity within a department and you get more buy-in and it's in a sustained way. So, what she's talking about is that shared vision, right? Which shows trust and allows people to be publicly recognized. You know, so you can say these two people are going to a conference and they're gonna come back next week. And during our department meeting, I'm going to let them lead the discussion, lead the meeting. And all of a sudden, the others are seeing these other two people are being publicly recognized. They're gonna want to get publicly recognized in the future, and they may say to Teresa, hey, I know you picked so-and-so and so-and-so. Maybe next time, maybe next year. Do you think maybe you would choose me? I would love to have that opportunity. And then the people that were selected feel a sense of pride and they have a sense of um buy-in because they're going to a conference with the know it knowledge that my leader uh trusts me and believes in me to come back and talk about the things and train our team. So it's really important to allow our teachers to do those things because it does um foster a wonderful sense of internal capacity, builds trust, and builds relationships that will last for a long, long time. Brandon Kusack said uh this in a different way. He said, You can't possibly do it all by yourself. There aren't enough hours in the day. Build your team and value them. They may not do it exactly the same way as you would, and you gotta get over that. There are no clones. It's not about sorry, it's about building capacity, not about building replicas of yourself. So I love this. This supports the um the abundance mindset, the give more to get more. Now, when I say that, I don't mean give to give more, like give more things, I mean give more away, right? So if you want to get more of people, give away your leadership more because that allows for them to grow and to be uh building that trust and feel confident, right? And also uh Brendan is also talking about the level of collaboration and flexibility, right? So when you are uh going out there and building a team and collaborating with people and saying, hey, I don't know all of the things about this topic, and you join me on the journey because I think you may know more and may bring value to our committee, to our team. And in also saying we don't want to have clones and we don't want to have replicas of ourselves and allow people to do it their own way, speaks to that flexibility, right? That not everybody's going to have the same answer to a challenge. And that is okay because what we do today, right, may not be what works for tomorrow. And it takes time to realize that. So whatever solution you may think that is perfect for the moment, tomorrow might be different. So it's so important that we build that team capacity, and a strong team that we are building is unstoppable. They can achieve anything that they put their minds to. And they build that abundance mindset, that mindset of yes, we can do this, and we make we can make our organization, we can make our teaching, we can make our department, whatever it may be, we can make it better than it was yesterday, which is an amazing feeling. So let's transition because all of that work takes courage. So we have to think about the courage to change. And that's gonna be kind of our our final theme for today is the courage to change. And what I like to talk about is change is hard, and we all know that. And the only person that we really can change is ourselves. As leaders, we are living in a constant state of change, and we are hired to make change all the time. So I say applaud those people who want to join you on that journey of change because it's unnatural for them, it's unnatural for all of us to want to jump in to a change because it's scary, right? We we like to live in our comfort zones, and when we come in and we say we need to change this, that's not always a good feeling, right? So Dominic Dom had a really great idea here, and I think he he he shared a lesson that I need to live with as well, and I'm still struggling with it, I promise you, I'm still struggling with it, but I I I'm working on it. And here's what he said I made a huge mistake my first year as principal. My son was born and I didn't take a single day off until December. My wife finally texted me and said, I've been home for four months, you've got to take off a day. I realized I wasn't doing what I was preaching. What he was preaching was family first, family first. But I was doing it for myself. Now, this is a challenge because I I I'm very guilty of this. I I say family first to my teachers when they come in, they have a crisis, go family first, get my family first. And there are many times that Kim will say to me, Are you putting family first? And it it's been something I've been working on. Um, and this is a choice that we all have to make, and when it's a choice that we can think about the balance. And I think in Dom being that honest about his failure to model this life work balance, if you will, is something that every leader, every teacher uh needs to hear. Because remember, change starts with us. So Dominic said to himself, or his wife texted him, and he's like, Oh my goodness, I have to make a change for myself. Because if he doesn't make a change for himself, he's not gonna have a relationship with his son or his wife. So he made that change. Now we know that change is inevitable. It's the only thing that's constant, right? And yet we all fight it, right? So David shared a point about change um when he was working to roll out the DEI work in um districts across the island and across his BOSE's organization, which is the um diversity, equity, inclusion work. And this is what he says this problem, meaning the rolling out of the DEI work, is never going to be completely solved in our lifetime. That's why people struggle with it because it's hard. Every day we're working just as hard as you did the day before to make sure you don't lose momentum. This can be applied to everything we do, right? What like I said before, what works today may not work tomorrow. So then we have to pivot to be flexible. We have to ebb and flow with what's going on. And if you're listening to this and you're out of the country or out of the state, um, New York State, we call it the pendulum swing. We go from one extreme to the other extreme, and you know, their education is cyclic, meaning what we're working through today, somebody worked through 25 years ago, um, and that ebb and flow is so important. Um and that's why I believe uh good leaders um will always want to take things slowly, like we were saying before, to take things as a pause. Um, because if you move through work like DEI and you work through it really, really quickly, people are not going to buy into that and they're not going to build the momentum, right? So small. Small slow and steady wins the race, right? And and Teresa really kind of spoke about this the slow and steady concept. She said it is what she learned in her lessons. I made a lot of mistakes as a new administrator. One of which was I moved too fast. And you need to spend time just sitting back and building relationships. You gotta have trust if you're going to move forward. So this is what we she's saying. She's learned that change requires trust, and trust requires time. Takes us back to that concept of slow and steady. Slow and steady. Take the time, you know, walk slowly through the crowd cloud crowd. Uh Charles, Carl, Carl Lewins is a theorist that I that I wrote about many, many years ago, and he has a theory on change. And he talks about it like water and ice. You know, so you walk into something and you look at the ice cube and you're like, now that ice cube is not quite fitting the mold anymore. We need to change it. And we got to bring some people in and say, how are we gonna change this? So as you're bringing people in, that ice starts to melt. And when our ice melts and becomes water, you know that we can then rebuild the mold and then refreeze the water to become a new piece of ice. And that process should be continuous, it should be ongoing. You know, when a change happens, we shouldn't always guarantee that it's the right change because we have to go back and assess and make sure that it's still working. Because again, change is constant, and the answers are never going to be um forever. So life changes, things change. And we as leaders don't always have the answers all of the time. And it's so important to allow people to provide us with the answers, provide us with the solutions. And um, Brendan Kusak shared this with us. He says, giving yourself the time to get the lay of the land, learn the people, the systems, the networks, come to your own conclusions over time. You don't need to rush to any conclusions, right? So here's my takeaway of this theme overall, right? Um, that we have to lead with presence, we have to build capacity, right? We're not looking to have any clones, and we never will, hopefully, plus we are you know in Star Wars, of course. Um, and we have to have the courage to change, but be patient to do so and to have the perseverance and endure to endure continuous change, right? Um, that's my overall takeaway for these three themes. Um, and and I I cannot thank my guests enough for shedding some light on some learning in these areas because I I think these are the things that um you don't read about in textbooks. They're the things that we've gained through tacit knowledge, through the experience that we've had over the years. All right. So we've heard from our guests, we've heard of my reflection of our guests, and now it's my turn to be in the hot seat with my RW rapid fire questions. So here's the question that um I'd like to answer. Here it is Would I rather mentor a leader who's all heart but no organization, or all data but no empathy? Now, for those of you who know me and know me well, would say that this is an easy, easy response for me because it's heart every time. Every time. I believe that when I hire somebody, I can teach them to um organize things, I can teach them how to use math, I can teach them differentiation strategies, I can teach them classroom leadership strategies, right? But I can never teach a person to love kids. I can never teach a leader to love people. And I would I would always say I'd much rather mentor somebody that has that heart. And those of you who know me or the people that I've hired know that I've always come in with the heart first. And it's so important that you I and you and we truly love our people. And I often say to my people, I love you. And I think that's so important that we lead that way because we we can't keep we can't teach that, but we can teach all of those other those uh skills that we had mentioned earlier. All right, before I ramble on too much, right? So, question number two What's the worst piece of well-intentioned advice I've ever received? Um, I'm sure you've all heard this before, and I know that we've even heard this on this podcast before, but this is truly advice that I had gotten um from a teacher that I first met when I was first hired. They are like, Rob, don't smile till December. I was like, oh, okay. And I'm like, what is that about? So, you know, never smile on day one. You know, that's not gonna work, right? So here's the advice for you don't listen to that toxic advice. Smile on the first day, build relationships with your students. I say to my teachers all the time, like, look, build silly handshakes, high fives, fists bumps, ask silly questions. What's your favorite pizza topping? You know, what's your what's your favorite type of taco? What's your favorite, you know, burger? What's your favorite sport? One-word answers as they come in the door to build those relationships. Um, and then the rest will follow. So I'm going to share a story that that um, so when I got that advice, right? So don't smile until December. And I've spoken about Shirley before, and I will always speak about Shirley because she's a a person that I've always uh dear to my heart. She passed I taught her for many, many years, probably over 20 years, and then she passed away in her 90s. Um, and she was a teacher for many years in education, uh and general education um at the elementary level. And when I came through and I said, you know, what's your piece of advice here for for me going in as a first-year teacher? Um, you know, I taught her privately, so it was it was different. She said to me, Rob, think of the three F's fair, firm, and friendly. And if you have, and if you do those things, you're going to have fun, right? And just like the quote that that I have in my office, and I'm sure you've you've had heard seen this before. A teacher who loves teaching teaches children to love learning. And that's what Shirley said to me is that Rob, if you're gonna be, you're gonna go in there, be consistent, be fair, right? Sometimes you may need to be a little firm, stick to your rules, stick to your guns, but be friendly, have fun with the kids. Because at the end of the day, they're gonna want to have to look wanna learn with you. And there's lots of stories that I have about Shirley, but at the end of the day, we want kids to really, really love learning. All right. My last question Do I prefer a coffee IV or 4 a.m. emails? Look, I'm gonna tell you, I never prefer 4 a.m. email. A 4 a.m. email is either a crisis or it's somebody complaining about something, right? Um, so yeah, I never really want those. But I will tell you that I don't also prefer a coffee IV, but I do prefer my morning coffee, my morning coffee ritual. So typically what I do in the morning is I have I drive into a school, I'll have a couple sips of my coffee, I will go outside and greet students, record my daily video. Um, if you see all of my socials, I do a video every single day. Um, and then I sit in my office and I drink my coffee. And when I'm drinking my coffee, I am reading um a little passage either from my daily reader or I'm reading a passage from another book that I'm reading. And it's my time to kind of rejuvenate myself, get myself set up for the day. Um, and and it's something that I just really love to do. Uh when I'm off and I'm home, um, Kim and I will sit and drink coffee together on the couch, and oftentimes we'll either be reading emails or reading a book or playing video games on our phone or something like that. But it's just a morning ritual. So thank you. All right. So before I let you go, I want to answer the one question that I've been asking every single guest, and I will be asking future guests. Who was a mentor to me and what did they teach me about leadership? So I'm going to share that it was one of our guests. Um, that person is Deb Winter. She um was a great mentor to me. Um, she was my cooperating administrator when I was going through the admin program. At that time, she was an assistant superintendent. When she retired, she was a superintendent. And the thing that she taught me was walk slowly through the crowd. Take the time. She even suggested adding about 30 minutes to your meetings. So, for instance, if you had a 10 o'clock meeting, when you put it in your calendar, put it in for 9:30 because you want to get in the building at 9:30 to give yourself the 30 minutes to walk to the meeting because somebody's going to stop you and they're going to want to talk to you and they're going to want to connect with you. And it's important that you build that time in because you don't want to get to the meeting late. So that advice I've had with me now for jeepers, probably 15 years. Uh, I work really hard to practice that. And I'm not always the best at it, you know, because it's not always easy. Um, but it also sends the message that if I'm walking through slowly through the crowd and walking slowly through the halls, that I'm not in a rush to get somewhere. And if somebody sees me in a rush to get somewhere, they're gonna say, Oh, I'm not important because he doesn't have time to talk to me. So as I'm walking slowly through the crowd, walking slowly through the the building, people are going, Wow, okay, so I can do that. I can walk slowly, and you're not gonna run into the meeting and maybe go, oh my goodness, I'm so sorry I'm I'm late. You can just say thank you for waiting for me. I was connecting with some of the teachers down the hall. And chances are the meeting didn't start on time anyway, let's be honest, right? All right, so here's here's our final thoughts or closing. Um, you know, getting to know and loving the people we work with and we lead, that's it, right? Just get out there and love people, right? Um, that's the secret. And I'm gonna say kiss. Keep it simple, silly, right? It's about building relationships, whether you're a teacher, you're a principal, you're a director, or a superintendent. Lead with love. Be present, build capacity, and take your time and pause, and don't forget to have fun and doing this work. Yes, have fun. It's right, it's okay to have fun leading people, right? And lastly, I want to thank all of the guests, David, Teresa, Brendan, and Dom for sharing their wisdom, for pouring into us. Um, I really do appreciate it. Um, it's so very, very important. And I want to say that if this conversation meant something to you, hit follow on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, or Spotify. It takes five seconds. It's how other educators find our conversations. And it tells the algorithm that mentorship matters. Also, visit my website at robwadawa.com slash podcast so I can feature your questions on future episodes at any time. So thank you for listening. Go be someone's mentoring moment. Be well, everyone.