Creating a Culture of Trust: The Key to Navigating Unforeseen Challenges
Summary:
Dr. Jim hosts Jeff Harrison, Superintendent of Brecksville Broadview Heights City Schools, to discuss overcoming chaos in leadership. Jeff shares his journey from athletic director to superintendent, emphasizing the importance of conflict management and active listening. He navigates challenges like the COVID-19 school reopening and teacher contract negotiations by fostering trust and psychological safety within teams. Listeners will gain insights into effective leadership strategies, including collaboration, adaptability, and leveraging team strengths to achieve shared goals.
Key Takeaways:
- Developing a relational leadership style is crucial. Fostering psychological safety and openness helps navigate conflicts with empathy and cooperation.
- Effective conflict resolution requires listening to understand rather than responding immediately, allowing for deeper problem comprehension and solutions.
- Building strong teams involves empowering leaders at all levels, encouraging decision-making autonomy, and preparing them for future leadership roles.
- The R Factor (E+R=O): Events are uncontrollable, but responses determine outcomes, highlighting the importance of controlled reactions in leadership.
Chapters:
Leadership Lessons from Athletic Director to Superintendent
The Importance of Listening to Understand in Leadership
Leading a School District Through the Challenges of COVID-19
Building Trust and Leadership in a School District
Building Trust and Leadership Amidst Educational Challenges
Navigating School Challenges Amidst Pandemic and Contract Negotiations
Mastering Leadership Through Conflict and Collaborative Solutions
Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk
Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung
Connect with Jeff Harrison: https://www.bbhcsd.org/
Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda
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Transcript
It'd be near impossible for you to win in that game, wouldn't it? Imagine being thrown into a new leadership role where you don't really know the team, the players, the opposition, and even what winning looks like. And then you're tasked with coming up with a binding and complex agreement that everyone can be happy with.
iew heights city schools. The:And he's got two sons, Ty and Ryan, and has been happily married to his wife, Pamela. Jeff, welcome to the show.
[:[00:01:20] Dr. Jim: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation because we get to tell a messy story and not messy in the traditional sense, but in the sense that you're thrown in to the middle of a whole bunch of stuff and you have to figure out how do we make sense of this and move forward in a cohesive way.
t help shape your leadership [:[00:02:00] Jeff Harrison: Yes, I would tell you that probably my best experience professionally was when I was an athletic director. A lot of times I'll make the comment that I'm a recovering athletic director and that arena or that environment is probably the best test of your leadership capability because you're always in conflict when you're dealing with athletics.
It's not the most important thing we do as a school district. But it's by far your front porch of your school district. So you're always as an athletic director putting in long hours, but you're always right in the middle. You're between the coach and the player, the coach and the parent, and then your school district in your community.
So I would tell you the 10 years I spent as a district athletic director. Is probably where I learned, or at least was able to apply leadership lessons that I had learned along the way. And I would say, what has led to some of the success that I've had was a lot of the mentors along the way that gave me the opportunity provided me with constructive criticism, put me in positions where I could be successful, but also where I'd have some productive struggle.
So [:[00:03:22] Dr. Jim: There's a lot in what you just described that that caught my attention, but I wanna pull on a couple of things. You mentioned that one of the things that you felt. Prepared you well for the superintendency was your role as an athletic director and you specifically cited the fact that in that role, you're always in conflict.
And I want to dig in a little bit on that conflict concept. A lot of folks think that conflict is a bad thing. And I'd like you to share with us a little bit about how that experience as an athletic director, maybe reshaped how you view conflict in general and how it set you up for success in this role.
[:And I have a saying that I use all the time. It's never about what it's about. So when you walk into a situation, you have this conflict, you have this emotion, there's usually more to the story. And I think that's truly what, as a leader, you have to understand is what you're presented with in the present, Isn't always what the true issue or concern is that there's something other, something else going on behind the scenes.
been taught that we have the [:And if you're too quick to jump to an assumption or a belief it can lead you down the wrong path. So really listening to understand rather than listening to respond really helped me through that time, but that didn't come easy. That, that took a lot of training. That took a lot of reps. It took a lot of security on my part and not being an insecure individual.
I had to be comfortable in my skin and be comfortable, letting them know when I didn't have the right answer. Unfortunately, some of that comes with experience. And if you don't have good people around you that will help build you and create you into the leader that you are today, then that would only be stunted.
So I'm very fortunate.
[:So were there any moments that you can point to that really flip the switch for you and built in that discipline of being able to wait out and ask questions versus offer solutions
[:But all joking aside, being patient. It's not just about being patient and just letting it go. You also have to be present in the moment. So it's a lot of these individual skills that I think as a leader you have at different times, but bringing able to bring them all together at the time and the moment that you need it, being patient, being present in the moment, actively listening.
superintendency in August of:That was my professional goal, but that was probably a little bit of my, me being naive, thinking I was ready. Because when August of 2020 rolled around, I realized, hell, this was the right time because I had the opportunity to build those skills. And if I would have been into that role, maybe even five years prior to that, I may have thought I was ready, but I don't think I would have been able to handle what we had to handle in 2020 with a worldwide pandemic.
[:But before we dig into the nuts and bolts of what happened. I think it's important for you to give us a landscape of what the district looked like and what you were stepping into before we work through the controlled chaos that you needed to deal with.
[:That one week spring break with maybe an additional week while it cured itself. Turned into the whole spring and really turned to education on its ear. And we had to pivot like never before in history. And, I believe that the educators that I was working with and the educators I was surrounded with in, in Ohio.
Did a phenomenal job of making that pivot and making the best possible situation for our students. We were doing things that we had never done before. We all learned how to use Zoom and Teams and Google had become experts overnight. And we were able to successfully do that working together as a team.
n person? Are we going to be [:Are we going to be two days a week, three days a week? And that was also when I was coming into a brand new school district and inheriting a back to school plan that wasn't necessarily flushed out or ready to go, per se. Not only stepping into that new district, having to figure out how we were going to bring our students back in person, Because we all know that in person education is the best education, but then also allowing our adults and our teachers to feel comfortable back in our building again.
ld be a superintendent during:[00:09:37] Dr. Jim: That's a good layout of what you were facing. And then when we spring forward from there into the actual role, so you have all of these variables, some of these decisions that A plan is in place that you didn't create. How did you tackle that as you're stepping into the role of superintendent, where you have all of these things that are in conflict or in chaos?
[:We were virtually every single day talking through what we were going to do in our individual school district. But each school district is a little bit different. Your communities are different. And in the end, we had to make decisions that were best for our community. Taking that, I had to quickly build a plan with the team, and we decided to push the start of school back by two weeks.
And we brought our teachers into our buildings two weeks early with no students because we needed the adults to feel safe and secure in the space with other people because many of them had been isolated all summer. So we needed to get them back into the buildings, set up our classrooms in our buildings to be successful in this socially distanced world that we were going to be living at that time.
d then we slowly brought our [:It wasn't done alone. It wasn't made by myself. There were many decisions I wanted to make that weren't going to be good. And luckily, I was surrounded by a lot of good people who would speak into the plan. And ultimately, we were extremely successful because the district I was in at that time, during that school year, we had our students in person more than any other school district.
And that's only because of the teamwork and the teacher's willingness to do things differently.
[:And then on top of it, you're building a return to school plan without really a lot of time to. Find out what's important to all the [00:12:00] different folks that are stakeholders in this process. So when I look at building a plan without enough information, there's a lot of potholes that I might fall into.
So what were the guardrails that you set up to make sure that, yeah, this plan works or this plan is the plan, but here are the contingencies that we've built into it in case something that isn't working,
[:I didn't get to do any of that. I just was plug and play and here I was, I think what led us to be successful was I came with an approach that I didn't have all the answers and no one person would have all the answers. So I came into the approach of this was going to be a team effort.
criticized. They wouldn't be [:We had to be able to make changes on the fly. And sometimes in education, we're not always as nimble as we should be. And I think COVID that's probably one of the. byproducts of COVID that has been more positive is I think we are quicker to react and adjust when we need to rather than taking weeks and or months to make decisions.
But in that, you need to make sure that you have a psychologically safe space where people can feel as though they can give you input. They can be part of the process because once they are part of the process, They will believe in what we're doing. It's not about getting people to buy into what we're doing.
I want them to believe what we're doing. And when you have that belief, there's not many more things that are more powerful.
[:How did you overcome that sort of mindset or resistance where people are naturally hesitant or fearful of being that level of vulnerable with somebody that they don't know.
[:So that allowed me to get off on the right foot. [00:15:00] I also was a high school principal in the district right next door. So even though I was the new guy, I'm sure that my reputation preceded myself. And there were people that were in my new district that had friends, family members, and even some of the employees that I now had were parents.
when I was a high school principal. So I had a little bit of, I guess we'd say street cred because the districts were so close. So all of those things combined allowed me to get off on a, on the right foot.
[:[00:15:51] Jeff Harrison: Yes, the interview process to me, that's the most important thing we do as a school district is hire people to work here, and they're usually million dollar investments when you [00:16:00] think about it over this, over the span of their career, so it's something we take very seriously, and the interview process almost turns into a sales pitch from us as to here's who we are and how we operate, and they're going to hear me say, and most people Employees in my district could repeat these phrases.
It is a psychologically safe place where people can be vulnerable with one another and have a shared purpose. Ultimately, that's what it all boils down to. If we can be on the same page in those areas, we can be successful. And and that's allowing them to have a voice. And sometimes people have had experiences in districts or other jobs or with other leaders or bosses or whatever you want to refer to it as, where it isn't a psychologically safe space where I have a voice.
I might get disciplined. I might be ridiculed. I may be laughed at because I'm speaking into the environment and what's happening. That's not what I want to have because that's not how you get the best out of people.
[:So what were the things that you did to work through your leadership team and even your builder building leaders? To mobilize everybody in the organization to make the pivots that needed to be made.
[:Motivated. And all of that, then you have 10 percent of it that probably no matter what I do, they're not going to feel comfortable. They're not going to voice their opinion and they're just going to march to the beat of their own drum. The key is keeping that lower end of that 80 percent in a positive light and just continuing to pour into them.
in this instance, when I was [:Education that we call it. So that union leadership, that executive group of about five to six officers were ones that I spent as much time with them as I did with my central office team during this time, and I allowed them to speak into it and I would come to them and I would be completely vulnerable and say, listen, I don't know what the right answer is here, but I think between all of us, we could figure it out.
he staff and student is what [:[00:19:02] Dr. Jim: It's interesting that you're describing the conversations that you had with the union leadership, and that's. Sometimes an adversarial relationship, and you still need to find consensus and move forward.
One of the things that I'm curious about is how are those conversations different from the ones that you had with your internal building leaders and cabinet team and When you look at the differences between those two groups, what did you do to get both groups of leaders on the same page so that they can move forward together?
[:But my own team didn't know me as an individual, hadn't worked with me, didn't have experience with me. So I guess what it ended up being is I almost played like a mediator type of role between these two groups of [00:20:00] individuals who had worked together for many years, both during good times and bad.
And I was able to hear both sides and then it almost made me a neutral party for a while. And that whole first year felt that way, and, when we approached the end of that first year. The joke with the union was next year, you're gonna have to own all this, because you got a whole year where you didn't have to own anything because I didn't create it.
It wasn't responsible for it. I hadn't been there. And going into year two, that was how they used to tease me. It's now you got to own everything. But being on that island and being able to see from the outside. Both kind of factions that were in the district allowed me to make sure that we were crystal clear with our communications.
Because again, a lot of conflict comes from a lack of communication and a lack of, again, as I go back to it, listening to respond rather than listening to understand. And sometimes when I was able to communicate some of the union's concerns to my team, They took it a lot better than if the union was telling them that and vice versa, other way around.
So [:[00:21:04] Dr. Jim: So as you were talking, I started thinking about your comment about how you felt like you were on an island and you're playing mediator. But when I think about the circumstances of what you have to coordinate, There's another element that you need to get input from and make sure that they're taking care of as well, and that's your frontline staff, and that could include educators as well as other other people across the operational side of of the district.
So how are you making sure that you had line of sight into what was important to them? And then building the case between your leadership and the unions that, Hey, this is the full picture of what we need to do. How did you navigate that?
[:Fortunately the teaching staff came or teaching union came with the mindset that. They were not only fighting for their team, but they were fighting for the support staff because they knew they couldn't do the job if the support staff wasn't provided with the tools they felt they needed.
And during that time, we didn't know what tools they needed, right? We didn't know what disinfectants we were going to use. We were buying plexiglass left and right, trying to section things off. And we didn't know how it was transmitted when COVID went first started. So a lot of their concerns were the environmental concerns.
That really no one had the answers to and we were learning together. But the T I will give credit to the teaching union. They wanted their needs taken care of, but they were very upfront that they also wanted the support staff to have a seat at the table. So when we talked about bringing students back, we talked about bus routes and how many kids were going to be on buses.
The teachers wanted to make sure that those things were taken care of because if they weren't comfortable during their job, we weren't going to get the kids to school.
[:[00:23:17] Jeff Harrison: As I mentioned earlier, I feel extremely fortunate to be where I am today, and I could liken it back to a handful of leaders that I came in contact with during my 20 first 20 years of my career, and they had put me in positions to be successful. They believed in me. It didn't micromanage me.
They allowed me to be successful, but they also allowed me some productive struggle. So I truly believe that my job as superintendent is to prepare my administrators for their next position. And I want to give them opportunities to shine. My building principals in my district currently know that decisions are made at their building.
cision to run their building [:So I had to continue to pour into them, to reassure them that I needed their help. I couldn't do it all alone. I couldn't do it then all on. I can't do it now all along. So I need strong leaders around me who are willing to do the job. And it just takes. giving them opportunities. I can't. And again, I have to delegate, early in my career as an athletic director, I felt like I had to do everything and I didn't delegate very well.
And I, and in turn, I wasn't very successful and I was burned out and on the verge of burning out. So as a leader, you got to recognize that your success and the success of the district is really dependent upon my administrative team. I call them the A team, the 80s sitcom. I call them A team, the administrative team.
doing. So just continuing to [:[00:25:02] Dr. Jim: After talking through all of this, it seems like there's a workable framework or at least process to move forward on the school operation side of it. And how educating is going to be done once you transition to both the transition back to in person, but there's something else that that popped up to that.
You didn't account for. So tell us a little bit more about how that added more complexity into the process.
[:But it got delayed because of COVID. So now, you just think you make it over Mount Everest, getting back in school in person with kids. And then all of a sudden it's time to negotiate, which isn't always the most enjoyable time. So I, and not knowing the [00:26:00] players at the table. Didn't quite know how it was going to, how it was going to unfold.
So that's what we ran into. Probably that was about October of that school year.
[:[00:26:14] Jeff Harrison: And first I said to myself, if I ever interview for another superintendent's job, I'm going to ask where they're at in a negotiated agreement, so I don't get surprised. We transitioned into it. We decide to start negotiations as soon as possible because again, we were.
Working on an expired agreement and it had just rolled over. So we wanted to get busy with it. But going into it, we knew there were going to be some new concerns based on the environment that we were working in with COVID at the moment. When we built the idea to negotiate, we wanted to go into it With not a traditional style of negotiating, but we went into it with a interest based bargaining, which interest based bargaining usually takes a little longer, but there's a lot of conversation that happens.
a lot of conversation during [:[00:27:06] Dr. Jim: When you look at both of those things that you had to navigate the negotiation as well as the logistics of returning back to in person classroom and educating. How do you feel those two things, navigating those two things, set you up for success in future negotiations and future initiatives within the district?
[:And I still feel that way today. But it. It really just goes back to those simple concepts that I believe are so true. [00:28:00] And it's being a person of integrity and being someone who is willing to listen, to understand rather than listen to respond and have to have a great deal of patience because both the return to school and the negotiation process, both of those instances took probably double the amount of time that they normally would.
And we just had to persevere through it. And there was enough uncertainty around us in the world in general, That provided us time in a room to get to know one another and really dig into the issues that for years had hampered our district. And I think when we came out of those negotiations with the teaching union, we were almost like a new district and we had a renewed energy about us.
We had a fresh start, a clean slate, whatever it was. And when negotiations. If if no one's happy then it's pretty good negotiations, in negotiations, not both sides can't get a hundred percent of what they want. So if you come out of negotiations on both sides. Feel as though they gave a little or got a little that's successful negotiations.
[:[00:29:20] Jeff Harrison: Yeah. I think it goes back to some of the training I had early on with a leadership system called the R factor. And some people know it as E plus R equals O, which you're going to have events in life, you're going to have events that pop up every single day. You can't control the events, but what you can control is your response to those events.
To get the best outcome. So that's the E plus R equals. Oh, so when I walk with my leadership team, we talk about how do we control our are our responses. So events are going to come up. A teacher is not going to show up for work one day or students going to misbehave. What is our response to that event to give us the best outcome?
ld be press pause. You don't [:And you need to adjust and adapt. And during that time we were adjusting and adapting every single day. And you also have to understand that your are, your response to an event, So you have to be cognizant of the fact that however I react to the event or the situation I'm in is going to create an event for someone else.
So if I can refine my response or my R, control my R, we can get the best outcomes possible. Because again, Events are going to happen. We don't control those. We only control our response. I think that's what I've really learned over the years here of going through this experience, and what I continue to teach to my leadership team is controlling your R.
[:[00:30:57] Jeff Harrison: I'm available email, phone call. [00:31:00] I love speaking leadership. I love working with other people in the field of education and leadership in general, even outside of education, because I have so much to learn from other people as well. I would love to connect with other leaders and people with influence in other areas. Not only in education, but also in the corporate world as well, because a lot of the skills correlate and I think there's lessons to be learned in the education field from what we refer to as the real world.
[:Conflict isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's pressure that you have to deal with in order to pursue a solution. So when you're faced, when you're thrown into chaos, don't be afraid of that conflict and don't be afraid of that pressure because that's, what's [00:32:00] often going to lead to the solution in front of you.
The other thing that was important about this conversation was that we touched on it in various points where this is not something that you can navigate alone. So you need to be able to delegate and also tap some of your external resources so that you have sounding boards to identify what could be the best possible way forward.
And that was another couple of elements that I thought was really important to tease out of this conversation. So other folks know No sort of a rough game plan to move forward. So I appreciate you hanging out with us. For those of you who've been listening to this conversation, we appreciate you hanging out as well.
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