Creating a Cohesive Talent Strategy in Diverse School Communities

Dr. Jim: [: 00:00:00

It's no different in the K through 12 education space with a couple of key distinctions. One, you're not dealing with defined budgets on a year to year basis, and that creates some constraints that you have to deal with. And two, you're not facing generally the crisis of people leaving your profession.

So how does that shape what you do? How does that impact your hiring, your onboarding, your development decisions? These are just some of the questions that we're going to tackle today in our conversation with Dr. Leslie Bergstrom, superintendent of the Oregon school district in Wisconsin. This is part of our special series focusing in on the K through 12 education leadership space in order to identify the leadership.

Best practices [: 00:01:00

She's proactively been addressing educator retention and recruitment as a key value in the Oregon school district. She's often stated that she knows that educators in the classroom are the difference makers for the students.

And she wants our excellent educators to stay in the profession and in the Oregon school district. Leslie, since we're besties now, I'm going to go by first name basis. Welcome to the show.

Leslie Bergstrom: I'm happy to be here because this is a topic that is an absolutely crucial one for K 12 education, particularly as fewer and fewer people are entering the profession.

y areas of focus and various [: 00:02:00

So I'd like you to share that with the audience.

Leslie Bergstrom: The Oregon school district is a school district that is a combination of urban and suburban and rural. And we're a suburb of the city of Madison which is the capital in Wisconsin. We have about 4, 300 students, seven schools, and we cross multiple municipalities, even multiple counties.

that is unique regarding our [: 00:03:00

And it's competitive. Very often, we are hiring one another's teachers, and even though there is a competitive aspect to it, I also want to say that in Dane County, we're extraordinarily collaborative and willing to share and problem solve with one another, so there's a bit of a dichotomy, . During hiring season, there's a level of competition, but other than that, it's very competitive.

It's a remarkably collaborative place.

ls that are represented. And [: 00:04:00

Leslie Bergstrom: One of the things I've noticed throughout the entire county, and it certainly applies for us, is that when we have someone who lives within the community and is also a teacher, they're very interested in teaching in the same community in which they live. And so that really does Definitely help us during hiring season within the schools because there are some really excellent teachers who've been somewhere else for 5, 7, 10 years, but now they want to be on the same calendar as their own Children.

, . We've received a Amazing [: 00:05:00

They. really don't want to live in a suburb. They would rather live in the city. And so there's that piece too, where we of course do attract some of the new graduates, but they rarely want to live here. They very often want to live in the more urban environment and commute to work. So there, there's a pluses and minuses with our geography for certain

Dr. Jim: one of the things that's going to be useful for us to chat about is you quote unquote grew up in the district. And now you're leading the district from a K through 12 education leadership perspective. And one of the things that I'm curious about is when you think about your experience growing up in the district, how did that shape?

your hiring philosophy, your [: 00:06:00

Leslie Bergstrom: I definitely feel that my leadership strategy throughout my many different positions within the district has been one that's relied heavily on the formation of positive Caring and trusting relationships. And I think that's really the basis for much of what we do within our district, how we interact with one another as the adults who are in charge of the learning of 4, 300 students.

So because I've had so many positions and worked with so many different people over the course of time, I have developed relationships with most of the staff. And if not a reputation for being someone that is relational. And I think that matters, . Because when people talk to somebody at a soccer game or a party, what's it like to work in Oregon?

our district. to express to, [: 00:07:00

Dr. Jim: What I find interesting about your answer. Is that it gets into, man, I'm going to get super nerdy here. It gets into sort of organizational commitment. It's one of those drivers of turnover. So as soon as you see people lose their commitment to the organizations that they work with there's a whole lot of cascading negative outcomes that happens that, that.

Drives that person out of the organization that they happen to be in. You mentioned you want people that work within your district to be evangelists for the district. Hey, it's great working here and all of that.

Tell me a little bit about how you. How does that actually get that to show up in how principals are interacting with their assistant principals with the educators that roll into them? How does that actually show up in the day to day lives of the educators that are within your district?

ess itself, . You need to be [: 00:08:00

Because as you said in the very beginning, it's the people in the schools and in the classrooms that are making the difference for our students. So our biggest job is hiring the best people possible to do that work. And so it's, once again, a very relational and personal experience. Our staff serve on committees in the hiring process, so they're a part of who's joining their team.

And then also, nobody in the school district no professional staff in the school district is hired without sitting in an interview with myself and the Director of Learning and Student Achievement. Because we want to be able to really know who we're bringing on, and we want to be able to say this person is someone who, given their past professional experience this is someone who's committed to the same things we're committed to.

of course, our values, but a [: 00:09:00

Dr. Jim: You described an extremely collaborative hiring process. You also described a high degree of involvement that you have in the hiring process, where you're the backstop for the whole thing.

So when you look at that structure from a hiring perspective and in the hiring perspective that embeds district values into that process, what have you observed in terms of that structured process and its impact on your teacher retention and development outcomes?

is I couldn't believe I was [: 00:10:00

And that's a great thing to And it's really, it's just, it's the position, right? It's not necessarily me or anything I'm saying or doing, but it's the idea of we put that much time and attention and value to it that even if you're interviewing for a halftime position you're still meeting with me because your work with students is valuable.

Dr. Jim: There's something really interesting about what you just mentioned, and especially the impact that your involvement in the hiring process has had on some of those teachers. Now, I'm putting myself in the shoes of. A superintendent who might be listening to this conversation and maybe they're from a large school district and that hires a bunch of teachers and they might say yeah that's how that's all great and fine.

has more hiring in terms of [: 00:11:00

Leslie Bergstrom: right. And that makes a lot of sense because of our district were even another thousand students, perhaps that wouldn't even be possible any longer, but it's it isn't about the process itself. It's about how the process makes people feel. So whether it's the superintendent in the role or it's the principal or it's the HR director, whomever it happens to be, how will people feel about the organization when they walk away from that experience?

I think that's what Is a key as opposed to who's actually doing the work now, the fact that I'm the superintendent, that's a plus, but it doesn't have to be that way because as I said, it's more about how you feel. It's no longer us trying to decide which of 400 teachers we're going to select,.

It's not like that anymore. Now. It's also we are selling ourselves as an organization as much as the interviewee may be selling themselves.

Dr. Jim: So one of the [: 00:12:00

Leadership team and get them up, skilled and prepared to have the kind of conversations that lead to really positive candidate experience conversations that occur. In that vein, tell us a little bit more about, you're probably already planning for when your district is 1000 students. So what are the things that you've done within your organization to get your downline prepared for that sort of growth and skilled in a way where they're translating those really strong candidate experiences to their interview process, to their development conversations.

als could leave this process [: 00:13:00

That's really what we're trying to get at for everybody within the district, . We want them to feel connected and valued and seen. And that, so that's how we interact with, we try to interact with everybody all the time. And because so many of our principals have been with us for so long, first as teachers, very often then administrative interns.

And then assistant principals or principals that is how they have come about doing their business with families, course with students, and also with employees. So it's really embedded in the fact that people are. are moving through the system and they're being a part of it from the very beginning.

easons I feel very confident [: 00:14:00

Dr. Jim: I love the emphasis that you just pointed to. Developing your internal talent. And I think when you're looking at just broader talent strategy, it's always a lighter lift of growing your own talent versus having to go outside your organization and find the talent that you want. But I want to dig in to that a little bit more because this is a conversation about keeping Educators in the profession and also developing them to lead within their districts or within other districts and getting them prepared to take on those responsibilities.

Tell us a little bit more about what you put and your team put into place to better allow for that. If you've got this track record of growing your own and developing your own and getting people ready to lead, What? Are the elements of that has worked really well for you.

e pieces. One of the things, [: 00:15:00

That job isn't for everybody, but there's a lot of really great teachers who can spread in a positive way what they know about how to make an impact on kids. So we have tried to develop that. pathways for leadership within all of our buildings that isn't formal and positional. So we have every building has a leadership team that is comprised of seven members that and they don't talk about things like Too many cell phones in the hallways.

They talk about leadership [: 00:16:00

Now, to cultivate a pipeline of really talented administrators, we have a program called the Administrative Intern, and that is an educator who applies to serve as an intern in one of our K, any of our schools through K 8. And they spend three years serving in that role and they're guaranteed at the end of three years, they would be a very attractive candidate for a job that happened to be open, or we would support them if they wanted to apply elsewhere, or if they said that was great, but now I want to go back to that.

helps us because they attend [: 00:17:00

Because what we've done is we've helped someone realize their leadership potential and non verbal influence, potentially who knows how many students in a positive way. So whether the person becomes a part of our permanent administrative team or goes elsewhere, it's a plus for kids. So we believe really strongly in what that program brings to our students.

Dr. Jim: The aspect that I like the most about what you just said is that you're taking the approach of having everybody within your district look at their career path as a lattice more than a ladder. The default for a lot of organizations, public sector or private sector, is to look Push the message out that it's up or out.

[: 00:18:00

I want to look at the other end of the spectrum where you're a smaller school district, and maybe you don't have. The headcount to create that lattice within your organization. So how could you engineer that focus on impact within a smaller school district and still have it be meaningful where educators are feeling like they're being developed in different ways?

to find ways to support that [: 00:19:00

So if you are a building principal and you know that there is a teacher in your building who has a high capacity for serving as a building level leader and perhaps they've even said they're interested or perhaps they haven't, but you just see it. I think there are ways to support them and to develop that without the label of intern, .

Like I had amazing mentors throughout my career and when I was a teacher the mentorship. That I received from several principals who were just wonderful human beings who said, Hey, I think you'd be good at this. Let me give you this opportunity. I never had the title of intern, but they they took me to meetings.

They sat and explained things to me. They asked my opinion. They recognize the fact that this was an area of interest for me and fed it. That doesn't take money. That just takes noticing.

Dr. Jim: I like what you said there. One thing that has got me thinking. You're talking about, you have to take, you have to be intentional about taking the time to ask those questions.

Leslie Bergstrom: You do?

Dr. Jim: you said something [: 00:20:00

Leslie Bergstrom: You do? And that is, once again, it goes down to the idea of knowing people. And that means having a relationship where it is comfortable for you to be able to talk to people about what it is you notice. And what it is you'd love to see if they are interested or being able to know them well enough to just ask the question where would you like to be or what opportunities are intriguing to you?

interests of the people with [: 00:21:00

And if you're able as a leader, no matter what, whether you're leading a department or a building or a district, if you have connections with people where you can actually ask those questions and know that I haven't heard from so and so. I don't know what so and so wants to do or where they want to be or what's really interesting to them.

You have to be able to seek those more quiet people out. I know in our district, my board every year will ask me to talk about the entire administrative team and. Where they want to grow and what is interesting to them as far as their next steps because they want to keep people to and they want to make sure that I know that about people and that I'm investing time and energy into ensuring.

Growth for everybody.

ngs that comes to mind is, I [: 00:22:00

And if there were share with the class.

Leslie Bergstrom: I work to schedule with a lot of one on one time. And I know that it's quite easy to do with principals. They expect to meet with the superintendent on a pretty regular basis. But I think what's also really important is to find the time to do that with associate principals. Because they're usually working with, under the direction of the principal.

And so I think in many places they probably don't have a very good time. Direct communication line with the superintendent. And so I try to make sure that exists for them. Because they're very talented people and could very well be our next set of principals,. If they want it to be. I also meet with all the administrative interns once a month.

And it's a [: 00:23:00

It's about finding ways to make a one on one connection. In as many opportunities as you can. Sometimes it's bus duty. Sometimes it's lunch duty. Sometimes it's sitting outside, standing with someone while they're doing recess duty. But it's making sure that people feel they have a connection to you and they can be open about what they need to stay.

To feel like they're being challenged.

Dr. Jim: If I'm summarizing what you just mentioned is that if you want to identify, opportunities to connect with people and also understand what is important to them in terms of their development track, you as a leader need to be visible. You can't be doing this from behind your desk.

that's an important sort of [: 00:24:00

Leslie Bergstrom: We've always had a, an extraordinarily visionary board that did actually, they actually did things like write position papers related to instruction in the future of education. And That component has always worked really well with our board on vision for teaching and learning and to hold child emphasis.

I think that the part of our culture that is about the adults in the system that make all of that happen and how they work with one another and how they interact with one another, that's a part of the culture that has really been Very values driven and it's been all, baked from the inside, .

thinking about things we do [: 00:25:00

We can't just rest on the pieces that we already have in place. We have to think about what we should be planning for, how we're going to need to evolve to continue to meet the honestly the employment needs of of the people who are currently educators and will become educators. And so that has taken a little bit of a different kind of strategizing.

Dr. Jim: You just mentioned that it required a different strategy to go ahead and execute. Tell us a little bit more about what that involved and how you actually pulled it all together.

ost concerning to us and our [: 00:26:00

We weren't even scoring well in comparison to other districts. Thanks. So we knew that was something that we had to investigate if we wanted to continue to have some level of professional sustainability within the district. So the first thing we did after gathering some of that information from our surveys was to conduct some stay interviews.

We are randomly selected. I suppose we have about 700 employees when you include our wonderful coaching staff and club advisors and such. And we selected about 38 to 40 people and asked them after introducing it as an idea, if they would be willing to sit down one on one with me to talk about why they stay in the profession.

lishing or establishing that [: 00:27:00

At that time, 2023 or 2022 we took our survey data that stay interview data, and then we had several years of data from interviewing people in their second year of employment, we sit down and do a one on one with them and year to tell us what it was like to be new. What are the things that we could improve on?

What are the things you thought we did really well in helping you be prepared and acclimate to the expectations of the job and the culture and the needs of the students? So we took those data sets and we brought them to a task force that included our staff members and community members.

ed to be able to continue to [: 00:28:00

And they often felt as if the demands were so high with the limited amount of time. That it made people feel like they, they just weren't enough. And that's a really uneasy thing to consistently be feeling over the course of your career. So we took the data, we looked at what research tells us is really critical, why people stay in, in their jobs as educators.

What are we already doing to address those areas? And then given the data and given what we know What are we missing? One of the key pieces was how to create time. How to use maybe the calendar, the school year calendar differently. How to use the daily calendar or daily time differently. Because that's what people want.

ime to. Listen and hear from [: 00:29:00

I think that's really important. And it's probably one of the things that leaders should do a lot more of and more consistently is ask for feedback and ask for, what are you seeing? What would make your day to day better? The gap is that oftentimes organizations will do a lot of those exercises.

Oh, we want your feedback and then not do anything with it. So you got this feedback. What did you do next? To demonstrate your commitment to fixing some of these themes that came in.

Leslie Bergstrom: Our school board put together a charter for a professional sustainability task force, which included community members and professional staff. And it was run by our talented HR director and a really dedicated school board member. And we had six sessions over the course of two months where we looked at all of the data we had collected.

en we talked about then what [: 00:30:00

And I think the key thing that came from the committee was people want time. They really want flexibility and time. Flexibility is very hard when you don't have enough substitutes on a daily basis. So giving people more time off when students are in session would be a really challenging thing to do, and I think it would have a negative impact on our kids.

So we started talking about what can we do with our calendar. That perhaps could give people more breaks during the school year to allow them a little bit of that time that they needed. And then also, is there maybe a possibility of late arrivals or early releases a certain number of times a month to ensure staff have the time to do the professional learning community collaboration that we are stressing as so important.

ood stuff. I really like the [: 00:31:00

Decision to stay within an organization. I think that's really valuable. And then baking that into a lot of the stuff that we talked about earlier shows that it's actually having some impact. When you think back to The conversation that we've had, what are the big things that you want listeners and particularly those listeners who might be leaders of school districts? What are the big things that they should be taking back to their district and putting into place?

That's going to help them better engage and retain their teaching staff.

ensure that the experiences [: 00:32:00

So it's being a good listener who is continually reflecting on the impact of the organization. for your attention. And really knows how to gather people around the idea that we are all first and foremost here for our kids, and it's the people in the schools that make a difference. And we need to be paying attention to what they need so that they can be the best people possible for the students.

Dr. Jim: Great stuff. If folks want to continue the conversation with you, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

Leslie Bergstrom: Probably email. My email is lc b2@oregonsd.org.

maybe even some of the other [: 00:33:00

I think the first thing that strike strikes me about this conversation is just philosophically how you've looked at the district. And career pathing for everybody within the district. And I referenced this earlier when it came up that you've really operationalized the mindset that people should be looking at their careers as a lattice versus a ladder.

Where can you make impact as an educator, as a, as an administrator within your district in ways that don't necessarily mean that you're going vertically within the organization. And I think that's an important concept for any organization and particularly it might be useful. for those districts who are trying to offer growth opportunities within the district to their educators.

t. And the reason why that's [: 00:34:00

That's your duty every single day is convincing your people to stay. And if you ask for feedback from them, you're going to be derelict in your duties if you don't take that into action. And if you're not in the habit of consistently asking, you have no line of sight into how you can positively impact the lives of your people because you have no idea what your target is.

You need to create that habit of listening, and then you need to follow that up with action, and that's going to give you a recipe for sustained success. And it's probably going to surface some things that you weren't even thinking about. So those are really some key things that I appreciate you sharing and that I took away from the conversation.

We appreciate you hanging out. For those of you who have been listening to this episode, If you liked the conversation, make sure you leave us a review and if you haven't already done so make sure you join the HR impact community. You can find that at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact.

Tune in next [: 00:35:00