Transforming Schools Through Intentional Leadership and Culture

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What if more emphasis was placed on the front end of the hiring process? What would be the impact of doing that? These are just a few of the questions that we'll be tackling in today's conversation. This is another special feature on leadership, best practices in the K through 12 education space.

We will be looking at what practices yield the best educator retention outcomes based on the experiences of superintendents who are leading some of the top districts across the country. In today's conversation, we'll look at how leadership. Setting the tone and committing to action drives better retention results.

superintendent of St. Croix. [: 00:01:00

And prior to that, he had various administrative roles in education, including middle school principal, high school principal, assistant principal, athletic director, and transportation director spanning over 14 years in his previous school district. Tim is a lifelong learner who is passionate about leadership, employee engagement, positive culture.

Trust relationship, strategic organizational systems, and the importance of employee attraction, engagement, and retention. Tim, welcome to the show.

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[00:01:36] Dr. Jim: Yeah. Nice having you. And I'm looking forward to getting your perspective, especially when we consider the The really interesting situation that public education is in, and particularly when it comes to educator retention.

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So before we dive into that conversation, I only covered two or three things about your bio when I opened the show. So I think it's going to be helpful for you to share some more detail about your background, your story. That's going to be helpful for our listeners to really get dialed into the perspective that you bring to the table.

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For the superintendency and I think it allowed me to tell, like I said, have empathy for everyone's role and understanding for the finer details, which plays into the big picture. But I've really enjoyed I'm a geek about leadership and a lifelong learning and continuing to get better and One thing I enjoyed about stepping up, the levels into the superintendency was the ability to, shape things for the entire district and for thousands of students and staff.

The bad part of course, was I was, each level removed from students, which was the reason we got into it. But I say that in that I have the opportunity to get into classrooms quite often. And matter of fact, I'm intentional with putting that in my calendar every week to get in and keep grounded and What's most important.

That's what's best for kids.

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Give us a little bit more context into what drove you down that path, because [00:04:00] oftentimes people will stay educators, there had to be something that actually prompted you to consider that path. So what's the story there?

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It was pretty simple at the time. Yeah. It wasn't, this is broken and I want to fix it by any means.

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[00:04:51] Tim Widiker: Yeah, those inspirations were, I look back continuous improvement thinking outside the box and, I think building relationships those were [00:05:00] some of the key takeaways from my mentors and folks that I looked up to. All my mentors were focused on people and and building relationships.

And I think that really. I know has carried over into my entire career.

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Some of the strategy and execution within the district.

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So when we, I'm sure you've talked about this a lot, Jim, but you don't ever use the word leadership. You think of whatever title and it's not that everyone's a leader. And whether it's the [00:06:00] bus driver, the custodian, the cook, administrative assistant, school psychologist, teacher, principal superintendent, et cetera, everyone's a leader, but yeah, showing humility.

Vulnerability, invisibility, like humility, I make mistakes. And I, the first thing I do is I apologize, I apologize. And then say, I'm going to learn from this and we move on. You gotta be authentic for people to follow you. Vulnerability. Yeah. You gotta be willing to take risks. I can't be.

Comfortable with the status quo and then visibility. Like the only way people can get to know you and build relationships is to be visible in in, out and about, and having meaningful conversations. This is not conversations about the weather, so to speak meaningful relationships show interest in Listen.

And I think all this plays into what we're going to talk about a lot is that hiring you want to hire people that believe in that as well.

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[00:07:20] Tim Widiker: Yeah. One thing our admin team talks about is keeping the talent pipeline open and always looking for the next talent with leadership positions and number one, recognizing it. And then the number two, giving them an opportunity, and we have that for our staff, especially within the teaching staff, with our builder, building leadership teams, guiding coalitions et cetera.

And then of course, all the student council and coaching and positions that are typically available, but being intentional with that. And then again, if you build a relationship with somebody, you're having a conversation with them our one to one coaching, that's It's critical, both formal and informal, those conversations.

we have encouraged to, we've [: 00:08:00

Just those organic, I think conversations. And again, Building relationships encouraging those folks to continue their leadership journey.

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And when you and I were talking previously, you had an interesting lens to what's been successful and effective within your district, where you not necessarily ignore the post hire stuff, but you put a specific emphasis on the talent attraction side and [00:09:00] interviewing side of the employee life cycle. And that's led to some pretty, pretty significant positive retention outcomes.

So tell us a little bit about how you front loaded your hiring process so that it drives better retention outcomes down the road.

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Anyway, even the same exact job in another organization is going to look a little different and those skill sets going to be different. So we focus on hiring great people. So we have an actual. Checklist, hiring checklist, right from preparing [00:10:00] to post the job, what that looks like, how we post it who we get on the interview committee, what questions we use that was a game changer for us when we switched to behavioral based questions.

It's a little it's more realistic and effective to hire people cause they can't fake their way through philosophy type questions and what if questions where it's behavioral based questions start with, tell us about a time where they need to use their experience and you can't really fake it as much so to speak.

So that process is really important with the actual interview questions. Like I talked about who's on the team, obviously it's going to be their colleagues, but there's an art to interviewing as it's not all literal and trying to read things and read people is key. We're very intentional about putting them at ease.

heir philosophies and their. [: 00:11:00

So we're really focused on calling those references that are on the sheet and most and more importantly, the ones that aren't necessarily on their application. Another thing with interviewing, I want to add is that only one candidate is going to get the job. So if everyone we interview, we want to treat them like our guests from the moment they walk into the moment they leave and follow up phone calls with them, so that they leave with a positive experience because that's marketing for us as well.

They want to, even the ones that don't get the job, we want to walk away and say, you know what? St. Croix Central is a great place to work.

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But before we dive into that, there was a point in time where that wasn't standardized. So what did your, Interview process and retention outcomes look like [00:12:00] before you put this into place. And then after you put this into place,. Give us a little bit of of context in those areas.

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So number one, yeah, the quality I think has increased and number two, the turnover. And I get turnover as you, You will know, there's a lot of factors that play into turnover. But that has decreased as well. And when we think because it's because the fit they were here, they knew the fit, they knew that they're getting into through the process and stayed, or like I said, from our standpoint the fit wasn't there.

And we had to facilitate their departure.

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So tell us a little bit more about how you aligned fit across the district and how that actually shows up in the interview process. Because I think that's going to be something that other leaders in the K through 12 space and even in the private sector would find useful. What are some of the key ways that you've used to determine fit, and you've aligned it across multiple locations in the district?

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So right away they put in there like we want to be respected by others. That's up front And student achievement. It doesn't say academic achievements student achievement. So we focus on again the whole child secondly, our [00:14:00] mission is to prepare our students with exceptional character Knowledge and skills to thrive in their changing world.

And again, character is first intentionally. So we really promote obviously excellence being respected. Character is part of our St. Croix Central culture. And, I saw a quote once that says your company shapes your hiring and your hiring shapes your company. Even through our hiring process, we hear about our reputation a lot from our candidates.

So I think again, our culture and our fit is super important in our marketing and attracting, but it's also important in engaging and retaining as well. So here's some specific things. Once we have those that talent hired.

To make 'em feel valued. We have orientation right from the get go and mentoring program to support the new staff. We have one-on-one coaching with our supervisors and intentional time with that and what we call honest conversations. We measure employee engagement, although it's, it is anonymous.

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And that's so true. So we said this for a long time, it's well known. Educators are underpaid. So finally, I remember sitting in a compensation committee meeting and saying, let's do something about it. Let's think outside the box. Let's just take away all these excuses and barriers and let's just brainstorm.

er part. We don't talk about [: 00:16:00

Some people say, Oh, the education, the teachers. No, every staff is an educator is one of our strong beliefs. And we back that up and we say, we do what we say. And we say what we do with everyone's an educator. So we paid. Every staff member, every educator and got a benchmarked and got everybody benchmarked to slightly above average in our benchmarking in geographical region so that we really put our, our money.

Where beliefs are, and that goes back to our school board all the way down to the beliefs and commitments of supporting staff and giving them what they need. Yeah, it's, it started out at 1. 8 million per year increase. And it's a step recurring 10 year referendum. It's going to get to 4.

85 million in eight more years. And it'll stay that way in perpetuity. That's a lot of money in a 26 million annual operating budget.

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It means that you're almost taking a custom approach that's each student that's in front of you to make sure that they're best positioned to be successful. Now, if I'm reading that correctly, that doesn't happen out of thin air. So if you're recruiting. Out of that mindset, that also means that once somebody is hired as a district, you're having a similar mindset in terms of developing each person that you hire using a similar philosophy.

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[00:18:05] Tim Widiker: Yeah, we're very systemic with intentional focus on our professional development. And it started with building in one day of professional development per month, . So we, we increased right away the number of PD days. And then within that We, our admin team spends tons of time preparing every month and a professional development agenda, which includes the typical stuff, but includes staff wellness that we're very intentional with.

And then social emotional learning, I would say is one of the biggest parts of building those relationships and understanding that, students need to have their basic social and emotional needs met before they can have any academic needs met. So we always start with that. What's best for kids.

t's there's many reasons for [: 00:19:00

Welcome. Come on in. Number three, you're doing a little, you're doing a little check on them. You can just see by their face or by their. Reaction or by the response, today's not a good day. So there are staff are making mental notes and checking in with those kids. Once they get in the building and get started and settled in.

So that's a big part of it, and then kids understand that staff cares. In addition to the professional development and intentionality there that's more of a 30, 000 foot view with the entire staff systemically. We really focus on the one on one coaching conversations with supervisor and each staff member. And within that we call them honest conversations as part of our employee engagement.

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And then, yeah, we don't shy away from having those tough conversations, right? That's our job as administrators is to have those hard conversations. And in the end, that's really a show of love and care when you have those tough conversations. 'cause if you ignore it, that's really honestly disrespectful and unloving and in our eyes.

And that's the culture we build.

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Tell us about how you identify Bye. Educators to be part of that group. And also what belonging in that group does in terms of your succession planning and leadership development initiatives that you have within the district.

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Once they're selected, then, obviously they meet regularly within each building with that leadership team, and then the principal uses that group, it's like their cabinet. Bouncing ideas off giving them first looks at different changes and vetting it. And then obviously, it's a total collaborative effort in getting their opinions and from their perspectives.

and the principals are able [: 00:22:00

And then, Perhaps have those individual conversations about encouraging them to go into other administrative leadership positions.

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[00:22:28] Tim Widiker: yeah, great question because in fact, we have a 10 member administrative leadership team here and of us 10, four have been promoted from within. They were staff teachers, on our staff and on our building leadership teams prior to that. So we've seen that come to fruition and keeping that talent pipeline open.

e says, no, we're building a [: 00:23:00

[00:23:21] Dr. Jim: Great stuff, Tim. We covered a lot of ground and I appreciate you hanging out with us. When you think through the conversation that we had big emphasis of our discussion was getting it right on the front end of the hiring process.

When you think back to everything that we talked about, what are some of the key things that listeners need to pay attention to if they want to optimize their hiring for retention?

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Secondly, I think [00:24:00] listening to those folks, once we have them on board and again, we do a couple of different things, the Gallup Q12 employee engagement survey, and then emotional intelligence quizzes slash strengths finders there's lots of those there, but getting to know our employees and then trying to make sure that That fit continues and then we always tell our new employees there's an assimilation period.

So those first 90 days when you join our company, please give us feedback on how we can get better because after 90 days or so they assimilate and that can go away. So yeah, those are some of the most important things I think for our listeners.

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[00:24:38] Tim Widiker: Yeah, I would say email would would be the best way to get in touch with me.

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When we started the show, we talked about how perhaps focusing in on the front end of the employee life cycle, and particularly interviewing and [00:25:00] hiring is Could yield some better retention outcomes, and I think your experience within your district has proven that out in a lot of different ways.

There's a couple of things post hire that I want to highlight in what you talked about, and one was your emphasis on. Ongoing coaching and development across your team, and that showed up in a lot of different ways in some of the conversation. It showed up into in those just in time interactions that were happening across your organization.

But one of the key things. That I think is pretty interesting in terms of building a leadership pipeline and building a retention engine was how you leverage those building leadership teams as a way to continue growing the educators that are in your district. So when you look at the two pronged approach of really aligning for fit on the interview and selection process and then continuing to invest in the development.

loyees when they're in your, [: 00:26:00

So I appreciate you sharing that with us. For those of you who've been listening to the conversation, we appreciate you hanging out. If you liked the discussion, make sure you leave us a review. If you haven't already done so make sure you join the community that can be found at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact. And tune in next time where we'll have another leader joining us and sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high performing team.