Who’s At Your Table? | Summer Shorts Series – Ep 27

🎧 Episode Overview

Most school leaders feel buried in meetings.

Too many committees.
Too many conversations.
Not enough movement.

But the problem usually isn’t the number of meetings.

It’s the lack of clarity and purpose.

In this Summer Shorts episode, Mario and Courtney break down one of the most overlooked leadership levers in schools: intentional teams designing for shared leadership.

Who should be in the room?
What should they own?
What should they influence?
And how do you structure leadership so you’re not carrying the entire campus on your own?

This conversation is about moving beyond random meetings into purpose-driven distributed leadership, where every table has a clear role, the right people, and the right work. 

💡 Big Ideas From This Episode

• Not all meetings should serve the same purpose.
• Every leadership team needs a clearly defined lane.
• Shared leadership builds stronger decisions.
• Small schools can still use the same structures with a tighter cadence.
• Advisory teams provide input; leadership teams help make decisions.
• Climate and culture require intentional structures.
• The wrong people on the right committee can derail progress.
• Great committees create future leaders.
• Shared decision-making is one of the strongest indicators of a healthy school culture.

🧠 Leadership Takeaways

1. Audit your meetings.

Not every meeting is necessary.

But every necessary meeting should have:

✔ A clear purpose
✔ Defined outcomes
✔ The right people

If not, it’s just calendar clutter.

2. Separate your leadership lanes.

Mario outlines four major leadership lanes:

Operations → How the school runs
Curriculum & Instruction → How students learn
Culture/Vision → Where the school is going
Climate → How people feel

Each lane matters.

Each deserves intentional attention.

3. Advisory teams are different from leadership teams.

This distinction matters:

Leadership teams help make decisions.

Advisory teams help surface information.

Both are essential.

But they serve different purposes.

4. Every team needs a purpose statement.

Purpose creates alignment.

Examples:

Climate Team:
How do we help people feel safe, supported, valued, and fulfilled?

Culture Team:
What do we believe, and how do we align behavior to those beliefs?

Operations Team:
How do we ensure safe, supportive, orderly systems?

Without purpose, teams drift.

5. Build committees based on values + performance.

Mario introduces a powerful filter:

Ask:

Who aligns to the values of this committee?
And…
Who performs well in this space?

Don’t just fill seats.

Build intentionally.

6. Protect your teams from “shadows.”

Constructive skeptics are valuable.

Chronic complainers are dangerous.

The difference?

A constructive skeptic asks:

“Is this better for kids?”

A shadow asks:

“Is this easier for me?”

That distinction changes everything.

7. Great committees build future leaders.

Leadership teams are not just for solving today’s problems.

They are your pipeline.

Today’s committee member can become tomorrow’s AP, principal, or district leader.

Leadership grows where leadership is practiced.

🔥 Powerful Quotes

“Never have a meeting without a clear purpose.”

“Shared leadership is the hallmark of an effective culture.”

“Climate is not about happy. Climate is about how people feel.”

“The wrong people at the table can slow everything down.”

“Leadership teams are force multipliers.”

🛠 Practical Framework: The Leadership Team Audit

Step 1: Identify your lanes

What work must happen in your school?

Examples:

✔ Operations
✔ Instruction
✔ Climate
✔ Culture
✔ Advisory

Step 2: Define purpose

Why does this team exist?

What problem does it solve?

Step 3: Define authority

What decisions can they make?

What is outside their lane?

Step 4: Build intentionally

Choose people based on:

• value alignment
• skill
• perspective
• credibility

Step 5: Protect the cadence

Even if you’re a smaller school:

Don’t eliminate the work.

Condense it.

Rotate it.

Protect it.

🎯 Final Thought

The strength of your school is often determined by the strength of the tables you build.

If every decision runs through one person, the system eventually bottlenecks.

But when the right people sit at the right tables with the right purpose—

clarity increases, trust deepens, and leadership expands.

Don’t just build meetings.

Build leadership structures.

And let those structures carry the work.

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Join our growing community of school leaders navigating today’s challenges together.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hey Mario.

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi, Courtney.

SPEAKER_02 0:02

You know what leaders love?

SPEAKER_00 0:04

What do leaders love?

SPEAKER_02 0:05

They love more meetings. More meeting.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

I'm Courtney.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

And I'm Mario.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

And this is the Ed Leadership Pair podcast, now brought to you by Marzano Resources and Solution Tree.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Who doesn't love additional meetings?

SPEAKER_02 0:29

Oh my gosh. And it, but however, there are ways that you can structure meetings so that they are way more effective by making sure that you have clarity around the purpose of the meeting and the people that should be there. Today's episode, we are really talking about the meetings that you have on your campus to move work forward. And while most leaders would say they have too many meetings, too many committees, and not enough impact, the problem isn't usually the people. It's that our teams maybe don't have as clear of a purpose as they could. And potentially we also maybe sometimes have the wrong people sitting at the table. Would you agree?

SPEAKER_00 1:13

I agree. I think especially, well, I mean, all of that you said makes so much sense. Uh the purpose. Why are we meeting? Like, why are we bringing this group of people together? So I do think it was a real important thing to me. Like, never, never, never did we have a meeting that we didn't have clear purpose on what we were there for.

SPEAKER_02 1:29

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

And then you're right, second, do we have the right people in the room based on the purpose of why we have this meeting? So I'm excited to explore this short. This idea, this summer short came to me from I was having a coaching, leadership coaching session with a principal, and she was asking this question, like, hey, what kind of leadership teams did you have? And who did you put on those teams? And why did those different teams exist? And when did you use each different one? And I said, you know what? This is a great conversation that I think all of our listeners could engage in. Because listeners, remember, Courtney and I are doing the summer shorts series because these are just little nugs, as Courtney calls them, little summer nugs, brain nugs, little summer brain nugs for you. Like, look, this is not the big rocks. We we've talked about interventions and master schedules and hiring and PD plans, or this is not the big rocks. But these are those little pebbles that fall in between the big rocks. That look, if if you don't think of this stuff, you're you're less efficient, less effective. But if you'll take the time in the summer to tackle some of these things, these little tiny pebbles, these little nugs, as it were, you know, you get a little six-piece of the right nugs and it can change your it can change your school year.

SPEAKER_02 2:35

Let's talk about pick one of your teams.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

All right. So for me, I I had a lot of teams because I had a big school. So I want to acknowledge that anybody who's listening, you might go like, Mario, that's stupid. I don't have that many teachers. I couldn't even put that many teams together if I wanted to. It's fair. Just kind of do that translation in your mind.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

But and maybe you have one team that encompasses all of these areas. And that's probably the right answer.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

Is you if you've got less teachers, you're just gonna have one team do a lot of these same things. I think that's fair. So, you know, off the top of my head, I know we had our school leadership team, very traditional. We called it the SLT. This was our operational leadership team. A lot of folks on this team had been at the school a long time, people that were well respected and well trusted in the building. And these are the people I came to for, you know, big issues. What do our calendar changes need to be? How do we, you know, what do we want this to look like? I just this was our big traditional bell schedule. And um, here's the calendar for the next month. What are things we need to be thinking about? Or, you know, just that traditional operational leadership team on there, though. I would urge you, I included more than teachers. I would have my registrar, I'd have my administrative assistant, I'd have a counselor representative. You want to have somebody from the entire school system um on your SLT, your big team, because if you're gonna talk operations, everybody touches operations. I had a security guard that would join us on there. So even hourly pre-paraprofessionals, we we would bring pretty much someone from every department, besides not just the academic departments, to come in on our SLT. Okay, that's fine. That's pretty normal. Now I had another team that was my curriculum and instruction team. This group was solely to work on our teaching and learning. So we had a lot of programming at my school. We had international baccalaureate, IB. We had AP Advanced Placement, we had dual credit, the community college that would show up and teach there. We had our regular grade level content. So we had all these different types of curriculum. CTE and CTE. And so I had to bring these folks together to make sure that all of our pathways were correct and all of our sequencing was correct, and the rigor level was correct in each of these different courses. So truly a curriculum and then instructional body. How do we teach here? What are some of the innovations? How do we use technology effectively? So this particular team were some of my more, you know, instructionally minded and curricularly minded people. Now, there were a few of them that were also on the SLT, but not necessarily. Actually, far fewer of them. This was almost a separate committee. So I want you guys to think about like, well, I have grade level leads. Would they be the same? I don't know. Is your grade level lead instructionally and curricularly minded the way you want them to be?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Um, or are they just they're hey, they're really an institutional voice. They know how we've done it here, they're great. They have they, you know, they want to be on the operational side. So I had my SLT, I had my curriculum and instruction team. Then I had what I called my visioning committee. This was my culture committee. These guys were what I used to call our committee of possibility. This is where we would do a lot of book studies and we would talk a lot about what do we see for the future of Westwood High School? What else could we do? What else do we should we do? This was our big um, you worked in a district where you guys called it learning and dreaming or dreaming and hoping or something along those lines. But this was our ideation. This was our think tank. So the people in there were probably not on those other committees. These are just people who are willing to dream about, hey, here's what could, here's what it could be. Then eventually you take all that think tanking and you got to put it into the other committees.

SPEAKER_02 6:01

So they have lots of scouts on that group.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

A lot of scouts. That's right. A lot of scouts. And matter of fact, all scouts in the visioning committee by design. We're running out into the dark. Hey, let's try some of this out.

unknown 6:11

Cool.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Then I had a sunshine committee. This was just climate. Climate is how people feel in your organization. And by the way, Courtney, I we haven't really talked about it much, but Tina Bogren and I are publishing a brand new climate book, which will be out at the end of July. Oh. You can get it from solutiontree.com. It is called Reimagining School Climate, but this is all about how people feel when they come to school. Your children, your staff, even the administration, how do we feel? So I had a whole committee that just dealt with climate. Sunshine. Hey, how do we help everybody feel when we're feeling bad? How do we pick each other up? How do we celebrate when we're happy? So off the top of my head, those are kind of the big ones I can remember. So culture, vision, climate, how do we feel? Instruction and curriculum, make sure that we're doing the things right that way, including professional development. And then our SLT school leadership team, that was the operations. Is everything functioning um in an orderly and efficient fashion? So I know that's a lot of teams, and you might be like saying, Hey, I only got 20 teachers. That would basically mean everybody's sitting on every team. So maybe, as you said, you're going to condense and collapse, collapse some of that.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

Can I add a couple for consideration?

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Please, please do.

SPEAKER_02 7:20

Okay. So I will add any kind of teacher advisory committee, like a general advisory committee at Admintum. We have the ETAC, the Admintum Teacher Advisory Committee.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

ETEC, baby.

SPEAKER_02 7:32

ETAC. And we meet once a month, and we just we go through our agenda, they submit items a week ahead of time. And then those are the items we talk about, in addition to updates from anything from the month before. They've had a lot of impact and change in things as they are bringing up uh feedback, input. Sometimes it's idea generation about how things are going, surfacing concerns that they have or that they know about. Again, we talked earlier about everybody feels this way. So you got to make sure that you choose the right teachers on that committee because you can't have these extremist people that are ready to say everybody's saying blah. Well, okay. Then you start having different conversations. And then I know we both had a a team of students that were also student leadership advisory committees. Nice. We had we ours was called so smart. Well, that idea actually came from John Yonker. Student leadership, student leadership advisory committee. We called them the Slackers, Slackers. And they were adorable. Um, and that was like the bright spot in the month when you got to get together with all your student leaders and have feedback conversations with them too. So I would just uh add in your advisory teams, and if you have any parent advisory, obviously them too.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Yeah, the parents too.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:53

Anyway, I know we're talking mainly about your staff teams, but I did want to bring up, especially with e-tac and then just branching off into student and parent teams.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Well, I think it's an important delineation because you you've got leadership teams. So the teams I discussed, the vision, the climate, the instruction, the operational leadership teams, that's all about decision making, shared decision making. I was gonna bring as many of my of my staff around me to help me make decisions, but your e-tac, this is about input. It's not really about decision making.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

No, they were not. And we were very clear that you do not make decisions.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

No, no, you're just here to give us information about how things are going, what's going well, what's not going well, why is it not going well? Why is it going well? So that's about information gathering. And as you said, that feedback loop, bring us back information. So I think I could see teachers being willing to be part of a of an advisory committee. Cause look, it's like I don't need to sit here and help him make any decisions. They're just going to ask me my honest truth of what I hear and see. I'm going to bring them what I hear and see. And then I'm going to trust that that information makes it into those leadership structures. And then they're going to take all that info and help make good decisions. So I could see maybe you're a young teacher, first year, second year, third year, and you're like, look, I don't think I'm ready to sit on a leadership team, but my administrator has this advisory council. I don't mind showing up once a quarter and just telling my principal what I'm seeing and hearing.

SPEAKER_02 10:13

And having that voice is really valuable of a new teacher, a veteran teacher, of different types of teachers at different grade levels. And all of that is really critical to have a good mix on an advisory. Well, I think you're right.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

I think, you know, so if we're going to list out what we talked about climate, how people feel, culture, where are we going? What do we believe? Uh, instruction and curriculum, how are we going to actually build out the work inside the classrooms, right? Um, our operations, and then these these advisory committees of being a fifth one of just being able to check the pulse. How is it going? What's going well, what's not going well, and why. So I think right there, there are five big structures that you and I kind of just kind of spitball that we've used that you're using to this day right now. Um, I am no longer on a team, so I am all five committees for myself. You've seen me. Well, we're on a team now. We are the ed leadership pair. That's right. And I get to ask you, how's it going? And you're like, I don't want to record anymore. Leave me alone. So I have to deal with the climate. The climate on this team is gotta take care of my wife. Happy wife, happy life. That's right. Make sure she is in a good space. Babe, will you record this weekend? I don't know. It depends. Do you feed me right? Could you get the kids taken care of first? Yep, absolutely. Climate on this team matters a lot. It's critical. Yeah, your climate.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

It's critical.

unknown 11:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

So I think um one of the important pieces that you probably had in place was how do you identify like a purpose for each team and what does that look like? Did you have some kind of specific purpose statement for each team that I don't know, you reviewed at the beginning of the year, beginning of a meeting, beginning, whatever, every semester you go back to it and say, this is our purpose? And I mean, what did that look like?

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Yes, we did. So I told I told you I named four committees and you added a fifth that I loved. But for every one of those committees, we absolutely had a purpose. So we knew why we are on this committee and what are we intending to accomplish climate to help everyone feel safe, supported, and valued on this campus. Okay, that was our purpose.

SPEAKER_02 12:19

I noticed that you didn't say happy.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Well, if if you will all seek out a brand new book called Reimagining School Climate, right? Dr. Bogren and myself published, but we found that there are four core feelings that that lead to effective climate. So they are feeling safe, feeling supported, feeling valued, and ultimately feeling fulfilled in your work. And so gotta be careful with happy because sometimes you're not gonna be happy. But if I feel safe and I feel valued, maybe today's a tough day. Kid, kids having a hard time in class, the kids, you know, it was a bad period. But I feel safe that my boss isn't gonna fire me for having one bad period. And I feel valued at this school because they know that I can have a bad day, and I feel fulfilled because I know tomorrow I'm gonna get these guys. It's okay. I'm not like so. Climate is not about happy, climate is about the way we feel and being effective. Again, safe, supported, valued, and fulfilled.

SPEAKER_02 13:10

That's so great. And how how fantastic and helpful would it be on that committee to spell that out for them? Like we we are not in we are intentionally not trying to say that everybody's just happy. That's right. But these four areas are the areas that we are trying to have an impact on.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

Yeah, and celebration crosses these. I can celebrate you and you will feel supported that your work went noticed. You're also going to feel valued. That look, we're cheering for you, and and you that we're recognizing something that you're doing that brings, you know, and a positive ad to your classroom, to the school. So when you ask me about purpose, it's going through your committees and saying, like, why, what is their work about climate, safe, supported, valued, and fulfilled. Culture. What do we believe? And how do we align everyday behaviors to those beliefs? That was my culture committee. So we had our big vision statement that again, you guys can access in the book, The Schools Our Students Deserve. And we had this is who we are. This is what we believe. Now, in this committee, we seek out behaviors for the future that align with who we are. How do we show up like this? What else could we do to bring more to this school in alignment with who we are and what we believe? So there's your visioning committee, it's got a definition. Our instructional and curricular committees, the purpose was to evaluate and then improve upon our curriculum and our instruction. So that had everything to do with like the resources we used, to the way we functioned in our collaborative teams and our PLC process, to our instructional program. And you and I talked about in an episode earlier in the spring about building a full instructional program. You know, who helped me build that was that committee. I, the leader, said, Look, here are the five components of an instructional program. What do we need it to look like here at Westwood High School? And we built that out. Then we had a purpose statement for our operations about making sure that the school was functioning in a safe, supportive, and orderly fashion. Safe, supportive, orderly fashion. So that everything we do in operation should be is this safe for adults and kids? Is this gonna make sure that it's supporting and valuing adults and kids? And then is it gonna make sure that we operate orderly? Every single committee had a purpose statement at the top of the agenda, but it was more than about being at the top of the agenda. That is how we recruited into that committee. When people were like, Oh, why would I even want to be a part of this committee? Well, that that's the work we're gonna do. So come to us if that's the work you'd like to be a part of.

SPEAKER_02 15:34

Yeah, and I would think you could even build out an entire like a charter on what they are so that you have just this standing information of not just the purpose of why does the team exist, but what does what decisions do they own? What decisions do they not own? Because that's really important to identify too. And then are there are there specific recommendations you're looking for this team to make and and what is in and outside their authority? So I think having some kind of document that lays all of that out in addition to the purpose would be really beneficial.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

That's exactly right. Last week we talked about the the pillars and for a campus leader to lay out all the pieces of their campus by person, by role, by responsibility. I would argue this is one part of that. So in my pillars playbook, uh, I better have leadership teams, colon, and then all my leadership teams that I have. And then next to each one of those, it better be clear on what are their roles and responsibilities. As you just said, who what decisions are we gonna come in here and look at and which ones are not on the table for this group? That's that belongs in a different space. That's not for here. So I think you're right. I think if we connected to last week's short of this idea of having a pillars manual of all the things that are supposed to happen, this is one of the pillars. I guess that's a connection I'd want to make for our listeners. But it's a really important one is your shared leadership. In the literature, all of this is called distributed or shared leadership. No one leader should hold all of this because we've said this all season long leaders can't see everything.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

No matter how good you are, you can't see everything. So the more you bring people around the table with you to help you discuss and identify and strategize what you're saying, is make sure you have clarity on not only the purpose of this committee, but what are the roles and responsibilities for each committee?

SPEAKER_02 17:23

And then we talked about having like different experience levels and different demographics, like departments and grade level, subject, all of that. Are there different perspectives that you're looking for within these different committees? And like maybe you're looking more for one thing in one committee than another, if we're talking about an optimist or like a constructive skeptic or somebody that is a problem solver. Like, are there certain things you're looking for? You talked about instructional leadership. Obviously, you want your most instructionally sound teachers and staff on that particular committee. But for some of the other ones, what are you what were you looking for as you were recruiting?

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Uh and I put this into my book, The Schools Our Students Deserve, is uh in in chapter two, there's this structure called the performance and value assessment. It gives you an opportunity to measure an individual in your organization against their alignment to a particular value and then their performance in that space. So if you can imagine just like a horizontal axis and a vertical axis, but the idea is let's say we are on the instructional committee, and the people we want on the C and I committee are going to be people that are growth mindset, right? That's the value we're looking for because our instruction and our curriculum need to always be growing and doing what's best for kids. They need to have a kid-focused mindset. So there's some values you're looking for in these people, and then you're looking for really the people that are talented at it. I I don't want to bring in people that are like idea people, but can't teach a lick, right? So this performance and value measure, if you think about it on this, like on this chart, right? The idea is I'm looking for folks on each committee that have a high value match. It doesn't mean they're low value humans, it means their values match the values that we're looking for in this committee. So growth mindset, um, student focused, that would be on the value. So I'm gonna say, okay, who on my staff is growth mindset and student focused? I'm gonna build a pool of those people. Then I'm gonna say, okay, vertically, who are the better teachers? Who are the ones that understand their curriculum better of that, of those growth mindset and value, those value match people? Now I'm looking for that that double corner of high value match to that committee and high performer for that committee. That's how I profiled everything. Now in my book, I call them scouts, and sometimes we call them sentinels because the sentinels are dragging along the past, and sometimes you want the past to come with you. Right. But this idea of a performance and a value measure, I couldn't, I couldn't give better advice to leaders on how to build committees. If you know the purpose of that committee, you say, What kind of values do I want on this committee? What kind of people? Growth mindset, student focus, uh collaborative with other people. All right, build out your values. Now go look for those people and then ask yourself, here's my pool. Who's better? Who are the higher performers? And I want to kind of generally land in that, in that higher performer area.

SPEAKER_02 20:16

Yeah. One thing I know that we try to protect against is it's okay to have someone that is a constructive critic versus someone that is like a chronic complainer. How do you protect against that on your committees? Because you do want people, you don't want somebody that's going to get on your committee and be like, everything's amazing. We love everything, everything's incredible. Because that doesn't help move any of the work forward. Um, but how do you protect against getting someone that is just a chronic complainer? What systems do you put in place?

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Well, I think for me, it comes down to this one litmus test, and I use this all the time in my culture work. The difference between a shadow and a sentinel. And you and I talked about this in the spring when we talked about supporting veteran teachers. But a sentinel that's is gonna be somebody that is a constructive skeptic because here's the litmus test. I want somebody around me who is gonna say something like this. I'm not sure that this thing you're bringing us, this new thing we're working on, I'm not sure it's better for the school or for kids than what we already do. So I never mind that. I don't mind if somebody is saying, look, this thing you're asking of us, I'm not sure it's better than what we're already doing. That's so important as a leader because leaders sometimes we get in love with change for change's sake. We see something, we're like, oh, that's cool. Well, it might have been cool over there where you saw it, but that might not be better for your system. So I love these sentinels because they're constructive skeptics. They are trying to check us. Is this new thing better for us than the old thing? All right, that's one category. I'm all in on that. I want those people around me as frequent as possible. Our sentinels, they protect us. From doing dumb stuff, and they keep us anchored to who we are. Now, the other side you call the chronic complainer, this is somebody who is not trying to discern if the new thing is better for us than the old thing. This is a person who was saying, This new thing's not better for me. I don't like that. That's gonna be harder for me, for the adult, whatever. That's a that's a totally now, those people were never allowed on my committees. If you were only going to think about you, yourself, and what was better for you, that I didn't have any committees where there was a place for that.

SPEAKER_02 22:34

Are you checking that through applications or conversations with them or an actual interview process, or it just depends on the committee?

SPEAKER_00 22:43

A little bit, but invitation only.

SPEAKER_02 22:45

Like I know this person.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

Well, all of these committees were either invitation only or application interview based. I I was a little freaky about my leadership committees because if I'm gonna put you around the table to help me make decisions, I'm only gonna let the people around that table that I that I that I trust to be around that table. And again, it doesn't mean people that are gonna agree with me. I intentionally need people here who will professionally check on is this better for us? But through the interview process and application process or through the uh invite only, that's how I weeded out, you know, people that were only about themselves. 100% you were not going to be welcomed into any of my committees if you were that, you know, uh type of person.

SPEAKER_02 23:32

Yeah, I will say when we did um our last round of e-tac interviews, we it had been gone for a year, and then it the e-tac became part of my responsibility. So I brought it back with a partner that was working on it as well, and we said it would be great if we could have 12 teachers. We had this idea in our head that we really wanted 12 teachers, like the apostles. Yes, the 12 apostles of Edmonton Education.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Not appropriate.

SPEAKER_02 24:03

No, it's not.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

We don't mean to offend anybody, but we're from the South, so we just we didn't talk about the apostles anymore.

SPEAKER_02 24:11

Um, so anyway, but we we really wanted 12 on the committee, and when we did, we decided we were gonna do an application and it was gonna have blind scoring, and we would use other leaders to actually score the applications. After the blind scoring, we would then take, we'd make a cut score, and then we would take those teachers and have little mini interview conversations with them to do exactly what you're talking about. Are you doing this for selfish reasons or are you doing this for a more altruistic, like the whole organization will be better because I participate on this committee? So um, and it when it happened and we made the cut score, it was like, oh my God, we're we're down to like nine teachers. We only had nine teachers that made the cut out of whoever had applied. And then from there, once we had the interviews, I think we cut another one or two teachers because we were like, oh, this is not what we're looking for.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

Despite the paper score, right? I don't know what I want.

SPEAKER_02 25:12

Yeah, once we had the conversations and things came out and we were like, I don't think this is a good fit. Yeah, because you can't get somebody in there that's just gonna monopolize the conversation and take it down a road you don't intend to go down.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

The shadow is going to make it about themselves, which I would argue you cannot have shadows on leadership committees. You can't.

SPEAKER_02 25:31

Right, because they're not leaders, they're no, they're only gonna steer it for themselves. Yeah, so anyway, we ended up, I think, with a committee of eight, and that's that's what we live with for the whole year. And we're going through the process again this year to see if we can get a few more on the committee and the nice thing is add in.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

I found, and you're gonna find, I think, that there's momentum that builds because when you have a real true committee that's doing real good work, yeah, the word gets out. Like, hey, because teachers are always going on this like time value assessment. Like, if I invest that of my own time, is it gonna bring any kind of value? Is it worth it?

SPEAKER_02 26:04

Are they even gonna listen to my ideas and my thoughts?

SPEAKER_00 26:06

And is it worth it? And and you guys are proving that, yeah, I mean, this is a rigorous process, but it's gonna be worth it. You're gonna have a lot of voice and you're gonna bring a lot of of impact to this company. And so the word starts to spread. And other people who last year were like, I wouldn't do that. Now they're like, Oh, maybe I maybe I will do that.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

I I would bet you go from eight this year. I'm gonna just throw a number out here. Let's say you're gonna get to 16. I'm gonna give you a double. We'll give you a double, double it. Perfect.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

So, and and I'll one more thing that I wanted to talk about with this that I think is a cool byproduct of these committees. Talk to me about how many leaders you got out of these committees that then pushed into other roles beyond a teacher, department chair, leadership team member.

unknown 26:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:57

How how much did this benefit your pipeline of leaders?

SPEAKER_00 27:01

Yeah, I mean, we talked in previous episodes about building your own pipelines when it comes to growing leaders. This was enormous. As a matter of fact, just yesterday I got a text from a former assistant principal who's now a principal in a doctoral program that we went through, and she was at an event. And so, okay, it's a former assistant principal who's a principal who is watching a former teacher of ours that was on a teacher committee that turned into an assistant principal that it is now a principal presenting at a conference. And so you talk about layers on layers. For me, she's sending me this picture of the two of them. One was my assistant principal, one was a teacher of mine, and both of them came through different leadership structures. And this has nothing to do with me. This is just that we set up these opportunities to breed positive leadership. Yeah, we we put great people around the table and we worked the good work, and everybody gets better. The school gets better, the kids get better, and the individuals on those committees get better. So I can tell you a tangible example. Man, I mean, I'm in the dozens now, court, of people that were either teachers of mine or former assistant principals of mine that are now holding higher leadership positions, and it's got nothing to do with me. They're great people.

SPEAKER_02 28:14

They were around other great people and did great work.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

We just put them in positions, and that's what this does. So it's a force multiplier because it's it it you, the leader, win because your organization is going to be exponentially better because of these great people working together. And then those great people are gonna win because by being around other great people in a great system, they're gonna grow and explode into their own journey of what they need. So it's just there's really no reason not to audit what you're doing with your leadership teams. I and and I would argue just the traditional well, I have a campus leadership team and they help me build my schedule. And we talk about early release and we talk about buses. Okay, that is one lane. Yeah. In this short, you and I have talked about 14 different lanes that all matter a great deal and will will enhance your campus, you know. We did summer shorts because this is sometimes your leadership brain can't slow down enough during the school year to think about where are the pebbles that fall between the big rocks. And so we tried to just throw this little pebble at people.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

Yeah. And if you're in a school that is a little bit smaller and you can't afford to have all these teams that people are going to all these meetings, then I would just encourage you to think about a cadence of meetings where maybe it is a a smaller group of the same people and it is one team, but you're saying intentionally this week on this day, we do this. And then the second week of the month, the second week of the month, we're gonna do this. And the third week, we're and and your topics adjust as as the cycle goes through the month and and semesters.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Everything we said climate, culture, instruction, and curriculum, operations. You're right. That could be the same six people, but get on a cadence and be intentional, don't leave it to chance. Make that your agenda, roll it around on purpose, and you can get the same benefit with a small team. Now they'd gotta be the right people. I'd have to have a real good set of people that are willing to go through all of those different components right there.

SPEAKER_02 30:15

Yeah, and the only one I would say eTech, you could take out of that and have it be a different group of people that maybe aren't leaders. Um, like you you had talked about that earlier, but I think that group could be a separate, a little bit more um different group that doesn't necessarily have to be a leadership profile.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

It's probably better too, right? Because like your leaders are gonna give you input all the time, they're gonna tell you what they're hearing all the time.

SPEAKER_02 30:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

But if you've got this sort of separate advisory committee, you get a whole different perspective that that is going to supplement what your leadership team is bringing you. Leadership committees are maybe one of the most important things you can do. And when we talk about effective school culture, what I found in my research on effective school culture was shared decision making is the hallmark of an effective culture. If you've got a single leader making all the decisions, we just have seen so many counterexamples of how that is just not an effective culture or a good organization. So I would I would put a pro I would put a priority on this if I'm sitting there in the summer and I'm looking at my leadership teams going, gosh, I don't think I'm I don't think I'm hearing enough from enough people. So we've given you hopefully some good suggestions here. And as we bring this episode to a close, we want to remind you that on July the 30th at 3:30 p.m., we're gonna follow up which what was an absolute grand slam event with our principal panel. The prince weren't they great? Weren't the principals fantastic? Hearing from them. And so we're gonna go with a second live event. It is going to be a national parent panel. We're just gonna hear what parents from around the country have to think. So that way you leaders can compare and contrast because I know you hear from your parents in your community. What are parents beyond that thinking? And you can kind of try and round out some of your ideas from that. So July the 30th, 3:30 p.m., we're gonna go live again with some parents from around the country. We hope you'll tune in and join us for that.

SPEAKER_02 32:05

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Other than that, we want to say thank you to Marzano Resources and Solution Tree for their partnership and sign out. I'm MADEO.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

I'm Courtney, and this is the Ed Leadership Pair Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.