A New Approach to School Leadership

Well, hello, Robyn. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

I’m so excited to be here.

wonderful. So for those who may not be familiar, can you share a little bit about yourself as well as what inspired you to focus on transforming school leadership?

So my name’s Robyn and I am the founder of Buildership University where I help K -12 principals turn their 100 % vision into reality in their schools. I started out as a high school English teacher and then I became a middle school administrator. And right before I was about to be assigned a school as a principal, I started feeling like that wasn’t where I should be heading and I should write a book.

And so I was being offered the job and I resigned on the spot and without any plan. So I don’t advise doing that. But the desire was so strong in me that I resigned on the spot. And then I sat down and I wrote a book. My first book was Never Work Harder Than Your Students and Other Principles of Great Teaching. And there was this idea that the way that we were teaching teaching was too complicated, that there were really only a few guiding principles that teachers needed to understand.

And if teachers could understand those principles, they could be really successful in schools. And so that led me on that journey. And then I began to train people on what I wrote about in the book. But the big challenge, the next challenge I faced was that teachers were so excited about what they were learning. when they tried to implement in their classrooms, the administrator would come in with the traditional observation tools. And instead of looking at the results for kids, they were looking at whether or not teachers were conforming to those tools.

So they’re giving teachers really bad feedback. They weren’t giving teachers the support they needed. So teachers felt really trapped because they wanted to do, they knew what would work for kids, but their administrators were asking them to do something different. So then I realized if this is going to really work, I had to start training the administrators as well. And so first I thought, I’ll just train administrators on how to give better feedback. But I soon realized that just like there were principles for teachers, there were things that administrators need to do. And it wasn’t their fault that they were doing this. It was the way they were trained. And so started realizing that the way that administrators are trained is almost antithetical to transforming schools and making sure that every kid is successful. And so I started challenging that status quo with the idea of buildership. And here we are.

Well, I’m fascinated by this idea that how administrators have been trained is antithetical to what we want. I have been trained as an administrator. I’ve gone to the dark side myself. I have a master’s degree in that, but I’m so curious, what were some of the things that you were seeing that administrators were required to do that weren’t really beneficial to teachers or the teaching practice?

Hehehehehe

So it goes back to this idea of leadership. And leadership, the whole concept, it’s an artifact of the institution designed by the institution to maintain the institution. So everything that you’re trained to do as an administrator under the guise of leadership is really designed to maintain or slightly improve the status quo. But it’s not designed for transformation.

I remember I was reading an article. was frustrated by this, and I was reading an article in Harvard Business Review back in 2009. And in that article, the author introduced me to this idea of being a builder. And he said, we don’t need any more leaders. And he gave this quote that stuck with me to this day. He said, bosses say go, and leaders say let’s go. And we’ve heard that before, right? And it sounds so really good. Bosses, they sit at their desk. They sit in their office. That’s a principle that never shows up person says go, but a leader says, let’s go. They get down with the people. They lead the people to the promised land. But the problem with that is that when you do that, you can only move as quickly as the people behind you move. And the idea that people are behind you, that you’re a leader, you’re in front, and that in order to be a leader, people have to follow you. So I’ve heard the advice. If you’re a leader and nobody’s following you, then all you’re doing is taking a walk, right? So we’ve all heard that advice. It sounds great.

But here’s the problem. If you can only go as quickly as everybody else goes, and if you have to stay with them in order to move, how do you know what’s ahead? How do you know where you’re taking them? So the quote that I read that just changed my life was, bosses say go, leaders say let’s go, builders say come. And when I read that, I thought, this is it. We don’t have to wait for anybody to move. I think that’s a big frustration that a lot of leaders feel today is that they know where they want to take their school, but they feel like unless everybody’s going with them in lockstep, they’re not going to get there. But the reality is not everybody is going to go with you at first. Simon Sinek talks about the theory of diffusion of innovation, and he talks about how people move at different rates. So if that is true, then as a leader, you are stuck until everybody moves, and everybody’s not going to move until you move. So it’s a paradox. But when you’re a builder, you have permission to step away and start building. And then as you begin to build, instead of leading people to the promised land, you’re inviting people to come to something that has already started taking shape, which is very different than just leading people to something you’ve, where at some place you’ve never been, someplace you’ve heard about, someplace you think will exist. No, you go out, you start building it, you show people that it can work, and then you invite people to join you. And here’s the beautiful part, they’re not behind you.

They’re working alongside you. They’re building it with you. And people don’t tear down what they helped build. So you don’t get the same resistance. You don’t have to. You don’t get the same frustration and resentment that leadership naturally creates. Because when you’re a builder, instead of focusing on the people behind you, you’re focusing on your students. You’re focusing on what you’re building for them. And people are attracted to that. That’s why we’ve gotten to this profession to begin with.

Yes, yes. So I love this concept of being a builder. Can you give me some very specific examples of ways that being a builder is different than maybe some traditional school leadership and what sets it apart from the traditional models?

One of the first ways is in how you set a vision. So we were trained, all of us, that you needed shared vision. So you create these vision committees and you spend months wordsmithing and then you come out with this behemoth of a vision with 25 clauses and commas and you know, and the way that it was created was through compromise. So.

The committee gets together, everybody has their own idea, and you don’t come up with a shared vision. What you do is you take everybody else’s vision and tape it together into one vision. So you don’t end up with a shared vision because people will approve it because their part is in there. But they’re not supporting the entire vision. They’re supporting the part of the vision that they contributed. So at the end of the day, you don’t have a shared vision.

What a builder does is a builder realizes that as the builder, the vision is your responsibility and yours alone. So you create the vision. There’s no committee. There’s no behemoth. The vision’s very, very simple and it involves 100 % of your students. So if you set a vision like we were taught to do where, know, okay, in three years, we will have 60 % of students proficient or above.

What you’re saying in reality is that in three years, we will only be failing 40 % of the kids versus whatever percent of the kids we’re failing right now. You created a vision and we’re taught to do this that plans for a certain percentage of students to fail. Or we do the opposite. We say, okay, no, I want all kids. So we say every kid every day, no matter what it takes, what does that even mean? So we have a vision that is so amorphous that it doesn’t mean anything.

It’s useless. It cancels itself out. I don’t even know what that means. And people can weaponize that vision to make it mean what they want it to mean. And that’s why we get into all these skirmishes, right? So that’s leadership. That’s what we are trained to do. At the very beginning, we are leading people where? We’re either leading people to a place where a certain percentage of kids are gonna fail, or we’re leading people to a place that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t mean anything. So what builders do, is builders say, I’m responsible for the vision. This is what we’re gonna be building. We are gonna build a place where 100 % of students can be successful. So that sounds like 100 % of students will be proficient or above in reading and math by the end of second grade. 100 % of students will graduate enlisted, enrolled or employed. 100 % of students will be eligible for at least one honors class in ninth grade. These are all visions that builders right now are working towards. Very clean, very clear. And then what creates the shared part is that when you invite other people to build that vision with you, it becomes shared. People believe in it, people take ownership of it, and people begin building that, and that transforms schools. So that’s one very concrete example of the difference between leadership and buildership.

Thank you so much. That’s very, very helpful. And you’re right, having done many of those shared visions in the past, I mean, that’s exactly the process that you outlined. I’m curious though, as a builder, when you present the vision to your staff, what happens when they don’t buy into it right away or they start to question like, 100 % is not possible. What happens then?

So that’s a common question, but when you’re a builder, you’re not even worried about it anymore because the way you share the vision matters. You see, the way leadership teaches us to share the vision, if we created ourselves, if we don’t do the committees, we walk in, we are the hero, we say, I have seen the promised land and here’s where we’re heading and you declare the vision to people and it becomes your vision, not their vision and they don’t see where they fit in.

But what a builder does is first of all, we present the vision to the staff in a way that makes the staff the heroes of the vision. So inside of our program, Buildership University, we teach you very specific way of doing it. It’s called the vision story. But basically what you do is you don’t go in as the hero and say, here is where I’m taking us. What you do is you go in and you talk about the vision from the perspective of the people to whom you’re talking. So if you’re talking to teachers, you talk about the vision from their perspective.

You address their concerns in the way that you share the vision, right? And if you’re talking to students, same thing. If you’re talking to families, same thing. And so by the time you’re finished, they see how they play a role in that vision and that helps them take ownership of it. So when you do that, you don’t get a lot of initial pushback because it’s about them, it’s not about you. But people will naturally say, well, 100%, I mean, we can’t do that. To which I always respond,

You’re absolutely right. With the school we have right now, we’re not going to get to 100 % because the school we have right now is producing the results it was designed to produce. So what does our school have to become in order for 100 % to be possible? And when you ask that question, that’s when you unleash people’s imagination and creativity. That’s when people get permission to start thinking differently about school and you invite them to build that with you that’s very different than the way that No Child Left Behind was where we just set a deadline or we set a goal, but we didn’t give people permission to transform the institution into something that could actually meet that goal. But when you invite people to build something different with you, it’s a whole different thing. Then you don’t get the pushback because they are right. We’re not going to get to 100 % doing what we’ve always done. But then when you say that, you then say,

So let’s dream of something else. What would it take? And then you invite people instead of, they’re not complaining anymore, they’re building it with you.

Yes, yes, that’s two things that just popped out of out of my head as you were speaking. The idea of how you share it is so important and that I’ve done a Miller talks a lot about story brand on being the and letting everybody else be Luke Skywalker, right? So that you’re the you’re the Yoda that’s walking alongside of the hero of the story, but you are not the hero yourself. And I think that’s so important for leaders to often remember, right? And also this idea of who do you need to become in order to get to that end goal? I know that for me, when I coach individuals and I’m coaching leaders all the time, that is something that we talk about. Who do you need to become in order to get to where you wanna go? But this idea of presenting it as well to your staff, to your parents and to the students in the community themselves, think, does that, when you share the 100 % vision and this idea of we need to become or transform into something different than what we are now. How does that impact parents, students, community members when you share that?

My goodness, it’s so refreshing for parents and students to hear that you are intentional about ensuring that every child is successful. The relief that comes, you know, I was working with a district who decided to make this a district vision. So not just an individual school, but district -wide, 100 % of students were going to be successful in these three areas. And I was at the school board meeting where the superintendent presented that vision to the school board plus all the community members who were there. And they had a student group of a group of students who were a part of the school board that they were trying to get more student voice on the school board. The students said, finally, because that when any other school, any other goal, let’s say we get really ambitious and we say we want 80 % of our students to be successful. The first question that every student and every family has is, am I a part of the the 80 % that you plan on serving or my part of the 20 % that you treat as collateral damage. When you say 100%, what it tells families is that we’re gonna be intentional about you, your student. We’re gonna be intentional about making sure that you’re successful. It’s not okay if you fail. And that makes everybody feel safe. It gives families a sense that the school really is about them.

And it changes how the families and students interact with the school because they don’t treat the school as their enemy anymore because the school saying, no, we’ve got to figure it out for you too. It makes them feel like finally they’re being seen. All those students who are kind of hiding out or feeling unseen, we’re going to be intentional about seeing you. And that changes things. It makes the school feel like a safe place. And it encourages families that we’re going to take care of you too.

So what are some of the biggest challenges that you find leaders facing when they decide they’re going to shift from this traditional mindset to a builder mindset?

The hardest thing is just letting it go of all of the baggage that we were taught about what a good leader is. Because when you’re building, you do things differently. it’s not just that you do things differently. You do things that you’ve intuitively known to do for a long time, but you’ve been told we’re too naive or too optimistic. So people have for years told you that those things won’t work.

You’ve always known that they would work, but you’ve never been given structures or examples or space to be able to do the things that you already know work. So there’s a lot of self -doubt when you first become a builder, because on one hand, you’re doing things that work, you’re seeing the results, but on the other hand, you’ve got this voice in your head saying, but I should be getting into more classrooms. I need to be getting into three classrooms a day. Builders are like, they’re not putting three classrooms a day on the thing.

We recognize that you need to be in classrooms, but which classrooms? Builders are very intentional about the classrooms they’re going to be in and what they’re going to do when they get there. So they’re not just wandering around and popping up in the classrooms and leaving glows and grows. They’re going in and they’re having an ongoing conversation with teachers about their practice and what it’s going to take to get that classroom to 100%. It’s totally different way of doing it. builders are not, when you’re leader, you’re taught to be busy all the time.

Whereas builders are taught to be intentional, to take time, to step back, to don’t just work in your school, but work on your school. And you feel guilty about that at first. You feel guilty about taking a few hours a week to take a step back and, OK, let’s get back to the vision. Let’s be more focused. When you’re a leader, you’re taught you’ve always got to create these kind of goals that incremental goals. Okay, so let’s try to get another 5 % here. Builders are saying 5 % isn’t enough. We need 20%. We could do so much more than that. And being okay with saying that aloud. And it’s not until you get a couple of wins under your belt that you begin to say, no, this does work. And you begin to have the confidence you need to do it, even if it means swimming against the tide. I’ll tell you a quick story. was during the pandemic,

We had a builder who’s still focused on her 100 % vision when everybody else said, we just need to hold on until after the pandemic. We just need to kind of hold things together. We can’t work on a big vision right now. And she continued to work on her vision. And she went to a meeting in a very large district and the principals were there. And one principal got up and said, I’m proud to say that we have 70 to 75 % of our students attending our online classes every single day. And everybody applauded.

And she looked around horrified because she was regularly getting 95 % attendance. If she dropped below 95 % attendance, she panicked. If she got 70 to 75 % attendance, she would have been upset. But they’re applauding that. And that’s when she realized, wait a minute, this thing is different. When everybody else was accepting that students’ grades were going to drop and their performance was going to drop because of the pandemic, she was still pushing for, no, we’ve got to grow. We’ve got goals.

She doubled her math, the number of students who were proficient or above in reading. She quintupled the number of students who were proficient or above in math during the pandemic. So when you are a builder, it’s just the hardest part is letting go of how you were trained so that you could see something bigger and better for your kids.

That’s powerful. And it’s also, it takes a specific mindset in order to be able to do that as well, I think. What about when you’re in a district that if you’re the lone one who’s become, who’s decided I’m taking on this builder mindset, and yet you still have to answer to the district office, right? And the district office doesn’t care that you’ve decided that you’re doing this builder mindset. They still have their own expectations and goals and and you know requirements for you as a leader. How do you maybe circumvent or work around that kind of an issue?

So builders are very practical, and you can be a builder and still fulfill your district mandates. So let’s say your district says you must go into three classrooms a day. Well, as a builder, you’re very intentional about which three classrooms you visit. So you can still do your three classrooms a day. You might do more than that on some days. But the classrooms you go into and what you do in those classrooms can still be done from a builder’s perspective.

Let’s say that your district says that you have to set an incremental goal and turn in a school improvement plan with an incremental goal. You can set whatever the district mandates, but you’re gonna blow that goal out of the water, right? So go ahead and turn that paperwork in, but what you do, how you pursue that goal, you know that we’re pursuing that bigger vision. So pursue the vision because the goal is so easy to get. Once you become a builder, you’re not even worried about it.

So when the district gives you mandates, the first thing that we do as builders, and we have office hours every week inside a Buildship University, and people come and they’re like, okay, my district’s making me do this. And then we say, okay, great, how do we do it like a builder? And we even have like a hashtag, like a builder, because you can still fulfill the mandates of your district, but when you approach them like a builder, you take that mandate and you exceed every single time, whatever outcome the district’s hoping you get. And then after you do that a couple of times, the district starts to come to you and say, what are you doing? The challenge for a lot of builders is they do that, then the district holds them up. We have one builder right now. She was from the middle to the bottom of the district in every category. And after one semester of shifting to being a builder, she went to the top of the district in every category.

And then she did it two years straight. And then her AP became a principal at another school. And her AP is second now in the district because they’re doing it the builder’s way. So now the district is saying, OK, we’re going to leave y ‘all alone because whatever you’re doing, it’s working. So at the beginning, you swim against the tide. But then because you’re a builder, at some point, you become the tide. You become the person everybody’s looking to in your district because it works and you’re producing results. And so then the district starts to recognize that it works and then they leave you alone.

Yeah, that’s amazing. I love that. So doing this process, of course, I think requires a lot of us to rethink some of the processes or reimagine the processes that we have in place, not just around our vision, but around a lot of things that are required for the school. So what are some key areas that you would advise people to rethink and how can creativity help drive some of those changes?

So one of the things I love is this idea that structure gives you freedom, right? So every builder follows the same structure, but because there’s a structure that works, you have so much freedom to be who you are. You don’t have to become somebody’s cookie cutter version of what you think a principal should look like or a district administrator or even a superintendent should look like. You have permission to be yourself because the structure gives you that freedom.

And so we have something called the Buildership Model, and it focuses on what you need to be doing and the specific processes you need to really focus on. So it starts with creating a vision and mission and core values. I almost hesitate to say that because everybody’s done that, but can you remember your vision, mission, or core values in your school? No, right? So what Builders do is we redo that, we reimagine what a vision mission and core values should do and they become your North Star. So they create the structure for your school. So your vision answers the question, what are we building? Very simple. 100 % of students will what? Your mission explains why we’re building that. And so, you know, we’re built, we exist to set students up to be successful in school later on. You know, that’s an elementary school mission. So it’s very simple and it connects to the vision then the core values are the non-negotiables. This is what has to be non -negotiable if we’re gonna achieve that. So the core values for builders are very different. So for instance, even in our own company mind steps, our number one core value is drama -free work environment. It’s non -negotiable. If a copier is creating too much drama, we buy a new copier. If a client’s creating too much drama, we fire the client. If I’m creating too much drama, they sit me down and tell me. So because in order to be able to serve our clients,

We have to have that, right? So what you do is when you create a vision, mission, and core values, that function is one sentence. Vision because mission, therefore core values. That’s the way you state it. Then that becomes the structure. And as long as you are doing things within that structure, you can be as creative as you want. As long as it aligns with the vision, mission, and core values, teachers have a lot more freedom. And you can trust the decisions they make because you know that they’re within that vision, mission, and core values.

Then for the builder, the next four things you need to do are really about maintaining the commitment of your people, setting people up to be successful. So the big systems you need, you need a system around giving people really great feedback. You need a system around supporting them as they act on that feedback. You need a system around accountability, not the way that we were taught where you’re chasing, checking, correcting people.

But how do you set people up to be accountable? Well, how do you put systems in place to make the right thing the default? And then you need a system around maintaining a culture where everybody stays focused on the vision, mission, and core values. And then after that, you need a system around how do we make decisions as a school, a system on how do we execute those decisions, and a system on how do we work together as a team. That’s it. That’s it.

And if you focus on those 10 core things, then you’ve built an institution, a school, a place where creativity can be unleashed because you have those structures in place to support people to be creative in the right direction, to support people so that their creativity yields results for kids. And that’s all we want.

Yes. that’s so powerful. I mean, you’ve just dropped a huge amount of gems that I feel like a leader that I am totally rewiring how now I’m thinking about some things, which is fantastic is exactly what we should be doing. Before we go and before you share with us how we can kind of get involved in your system, because I think this is amazing, I would love to give you the opportunity to brag on maybe your favorite story of transformation from your Builders program.

There are so many. The one that just brought me to tears recently was we have what we call our OG builder, somebody who’s been with us from the very beginning. We were working on the model and refining it, Kevin. And Kevin started out as an assistant principal, and he took on culture at his first school and creating core values. And his principal let him lead the whole staff in building these non -negotiable core values.

And it transformed the culture of his school to the point where his school went from having the, it’s a high school, it went from the highest number of suspensions in the district to the lowest number of suspensions in the district. So of course, because of that, then he got moved to another school. He’s starting from scratch again. And that school, he still brings the buildership principals to that school. And his principal said, I want you to be in charge of literacy. And he set a hundred percent vision for just the literacy portion of that school.

And when he did that, his principal said, you know what, that’s really ambitious, but if you could just maintain our literacy scores and not drop, I’ll be happy. And after one semester of just focusing on 100%, his school had the highest gains in literacy in one semester for the entire district. set the record. Then he became a principal. And now he’s gotten good at this, and he’s been doing this for a while. He became a principal. He started a new high school.

And he said 100 % vision, 100 % of students were going to earn all their credits. That was the first part. And then they were going to earn at least a 70 % in all their classes. First semester, he had a teacher. failed. And then last semester, 50 % of her kids failed because she had high standards, very rigorous. She was very resistant to this idea of 100%. But he worked on her, and she did it.

One semester later, she had 98 % of her students pass her class. In fact, school -wide, 98 % of students earn their credits. But what was so beautiful about this is he went to the teacher, because he wanted to congratulate her on what had changed. And she said, but there three kids I didn’t get. And she got on the phone, and she called those three kids. Instead of kind of celebrating the 90 -something percent, she said, there’s still three kids.

The fact that when you start changing people’s perspective and really focus it on 100 % means that even when you make gains, yes, you celebrate them, but you still think, but there’s still three kids and your creativity starts going to, okay, now how do I get those kids? And that is the whole point that at the end of the day, we all became educators, not because we wanted to fail kids, but because we wanted to make a difference in every kid’s life that we touch. And so this teacher,

In one semester, because she had a principal who said 100 % was able to get over a lot of the baggage that even she was taught about what it meant to be a good teacher and a tough teacher. She did lower her standards, but she changed the way that she saw her kids. And because she changed the way that she saw her kids, she was able to reach more kids than she even imagined possible without lowering the rigor of her class. And she’s still thinking about, there’s three kids I still have to get. I love that. I mean, that is the whole point, isn’t it?

Yes, that’s wonderful. Wow, what a great story. So for those who are interested in becoming a builder, tell us how they can find you and stay in touch and get into your programs.

So we have a program called Buildership University, and you can go to buildershipuniversity .com, and we open it up several times during the year. And the whole purpose of Buildership University is to mentor you as a principal, so you get very individual mentorship on becoming, moving from being a leader to being a builder. But if you want some just free snippets of training, I have a podcast called School Leadership Reimagined.

And every single week, all I do is I train you on how to become a builder. And so we just do bite -sized pieces, mindset shifts, specific practical things. Recently, I was just showing people how to get an extra four hours a week to work on your school, not in your school. So not four hours a week after work, but how do you carve that out in your workday? How do you build your workday so that you can get four hours a week just to focus on doing the work that you never have time to do, but that makes the biggest difference for your students. So that’s the kind of training I do and that’s on the School Leadership Reimagine podcast.

Well, we will include links to both in our show notes for this episode so everyone can go there. Robyn, thank you so much for joining us today. This was such a wonderful master class in how we can transform our leadership and our schools moving forward. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.