How to Craft a Strategic Plan that Actually Works

Dr. Jim: [: 00:00:00

So what would be a better way forward? One surefire way to get results is to anchor everything to closing the opportunity gap and the achievement gap through the process of building a strategic plan. So how do you accomplish that? That's the story that we're going to cover today. And joining us, we have Ryan Logger leading us through the discussion.

ning leadership, management, [: 00:01:00

His focus on innovation. Involves creating a clear mission for the future, ensur-ing goals and objectives are well understood and communicated through both actions and words. He's a strong manager and ensures that his team is equipped with necessary tools, resources, and time to achieve excellence. He's been com-mitted to assessing and improving initiatives regularly, ensuring continuous growth and success within the school system.

His leadership is built on respect for stakeholders, creating an atmosphere of motivation, optimism, and partnership. And he's been dedicated to lifelong learning. He leads by example constantly enhancing his understanding of educa-tional best practices, both theoretical and practical in order to maintain his role as an instructional leader and constantly listening to the feedback loops in the dis-trict to make sure that he has a pulse on how things are going

Ryan, welcome to the show. Why don't you share with us a little bit about some of those key moments that helped drive your leadership success.

, you reflect back on all of [: 00:02:00

I started my teaching career in a suburban metro district one of the smaller sub-urban metro districts and after my first year there, we ended up in statutory op-erating debt because of a financial mistake that was made, superintendent left for the summer for two weeks, came back and found the business manager had tak-en another job, and in taking that job, the superintendent then found out they were in statutory operating debt, and I saw the significant impact that had on losing colleagues but significant budget cuts, things like that.

Then I moved and transitioned, had the opportunity to be a head basketball coach, which I will say that I also think you learn a lot about leadership through athletics and activities. Really my first opportunity to be a leader of young men. And I don't think I fully appreciated the responsibility.

I've [: 00:03:00

That was in the largest district in the state of Minnesota and I had the opportuni-ty to work with an incredible leader. Who really was a servant leader led from her heart extremely intelligent and is an incredibly successful superintendent here in Minnesota now was Ivy League educated which I was always Extremely impressed by.

But you would never know it unless you knew that about her. And she taught me so many skills about the importance of listening and communication. And those air to probably fundamental things that I've learned. If you want to be suc-cessful as a leader, you have to listen. You have to communicate and people have to feel like you're trying to support them and solve their problems.

istant principal, and then I [: 00:04:00

We made budget cuts five of the eight years that I was there. And in that time you, when you don't have the resources you need you're constantly riding a roller coaster. When we talk about strategic planning, we did a lot of strategic planning there. We used a Cambridge model we used an organization called Teamworks International.

We developed multiple strategic plans, the bridge to excellence, a variety of dif-ferent coin names. But, the one thing about those plans are, I don't think, I think the people who knew what were in them were those of us that worked in leader-ship level positions by title, principals, district office staff, but I never really saw it translate down to the school level.

Dr. Jim: There's a couple of things that you mentioned in what you just shared with us that caught my interest.

te disasters that you walked [: 00:05:00

So when you had to unwind those scenarios where you had a mess to deal with, what did you learn most in those experiences that you feel set yourself up for success today?

Dr. Ryan Laager: I think the importance of being financially stable if you want to, I pride myself on really working on having a positive culture. And if you don't have the resources you need to support the work of the people who you're supposed to be leading it's very difficult for them to do their job.

Dr. Jim: So it became, I always say the resources are the blood of the organiza-tion and they need to be available so we can support staff in the way that they need to be supported.

When you look at the challenge of resourcing it's come up a couple of different times in what we've just talked about so far.

Dr. Jim: What I'm [: 00:06:00

Dr. Ryan Laager: It's interesting. I came in End of July, early August contracts were unsettled. All of our labor agreements were unsettled. And we were facing what ended up being almost a million dollars in budget reductions. And at the time when the board hired me, they didn't want me to be directly involved in teacher negotiations, because there had been significant cultural challenges in the past between the district and the teachers union.

And they struggled to settle contracts. And one day the union president came to me and said if you're not involved, we're not going to understand like what your role is and how are you going to impact us as a leader? I was able to get in-volved and we got that contract settled at that point.

e state than were, but we've [: 00:07:00

Again, walked into a very similar situation where there were significant financial challenges that were. Prohibiting the ability to have a positive culture here.

Dr. Jim: So you underplayed the situation that you walked into. So you're walking into a financial issue. You're walking into a bunch of unsettled contracts and things like that. You're directed by the board not to get involved in the teacher contract negotiations. So when you look at all of those different financial pieces that aren't Set up in, in a good way.

What did you, what was your approach to start unwinding all of that process that you inherited?

Dr. Ryan Laager: I had some experience and again, getting back to the im-portance of having experiences over a lifetime of having to do budget reduc-tions and seeing that impact from early on as a teacher to being a principal. I ac-tually taught a graduate course in HR and finance and my culminating project in that.

d all of the students in the [: 00:08:00

So I had developed a finance model. Where it used comparable districts instead of a lot of times when school districts make cuts, we look at our own budgets, we look at our own staffing and we say these are the things we don't need. And my question always is if you didn't need those things before, why were you paying for them?

We're now, and I went to staff and I went around and I showed them what the impact of the cuts were going to be here. And then I shared my financial model with them, which looks at our own district and then six districts that are compa-rable to us in resources and size. And I basically said, if we, if you, if we can settle this contract and we can get through this, we'll use this model and we will not have to make a budget reduction outside of declining enrollment.

ward because this model will [: 00:09:00

Dr. Jim: So that gives us a good perspective into the financial landscape that you walked into. Tell me a little bit about the school performance landscape that you were facing when you took over the district.

Dr. Ryan Laager: Yeah, at the time, the district was only above the we give the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment here in Minnesota, the MCA test, and the test is one piece. So I talk about that as the achievement gap, and then the oppor-tunity gap are what are the opportunities that we're providing kids. And at that time when I took over, we were above the state average in four of the 17 differ-ent grade levels and areas that were assessed in the MCA.

e spending on instruction in [: 00:10:00

And then also, we spent a significant time looking at what was the curriculum in those areas with a goal or hopes of improving both the achievement gap. And still maintaining an opportunity gap for kids, but knowing we were going to have to really reduce some of that because there's only so many minutes in a day to be able to do both of those things.

Dr. Jim: When you start looking at the situation on the ground, you've already described an opportunity gap and an achievement gap. And that as a potential problem that you want to take on.

Where do you start? In the process of solving both of those gaps.

ocess in a large high school,: 2250

It's called a 321. I asked them, tell me three things that are really going well in the district or three things that you really value about being in the Belle Plaine public schools. Give me two school. Challenges two things you'd like to see that we need to work on. And what's one way administratively, all of us as leaders can better support you as staff.

And so I went around and did that with all of our teachers, paraprofessionals and I collected all of that information and getting back to listening is extremely important. And then also communicating, I would communicate back what eve-ryone shared so everybody could see. What people were seeing at each of our elementary schools at our secondary buildings.

lly helped me start to shape [: 00:12:00

We keep it nice and simple, one page. But every year I go back And I what I call I unpack the mission where I take it portions of the mission statement apart and I address all the things we've done in each of those areas. So people yearly can see this is how we're living our mission. And we do the same thing with our four strategic directions.

So everything that we do over the course of the year, we highlight the successes. Or the work we're doing or continue to do in those areas.

sions didn't really help you [: 00:13:00

Dr. Ryan Laager: In past experiences, I had been a part of like we did these scorecards and they actually were working on those scorecards when I came here is what their strategic plan was. And it gets back to a statement I've made before about. If we did everything on these scorecards, how do we know we're going to be a better district?

And a lot of those would set specific data points we were going to reach or things like that. And in, in one district, we had 56 different strategic directions. It was like we brought community in, we brought all of these people together to write the strategic plan. And I describe it as throwing spaghetti noodles against the wall and seeing what was going to stick.

And everybody got a little bit of what they wanted into the strategic plan, but the problem was a lot of the things that were in there. One, we didn't know how to operationalize it. We probably didn't know if we operationalized it. What did it actually mean? And if we operationalized it. Were we actually going to be better?

they the needs that our kids [: 00:14:00

And really wanted to make sure that As we put this plan together to drive our work here that it was something that came from staff and they saw as what they valued what their needs were, how they needed to be supported. And then what's really important to me is that every year we report this out.

No one in the district is going to walk away and say I don't understand what my purpose is, or I don't understand what our direction is, because we unpack every year in the fall, what we did the previous year and how it had an impact both on our culture, on our kids on our community, all those things.

ine that there's a potential [: 00:15:00

So what did you do to make sure that you weren't? Focusing in on the wrong thing or the media thing, and you still had a big picture that informed kind of the overall direction you want to go.

Dr. Ryan Laager: For us, I think It's anchored in our mission statement. Like our mission is to pursue excellence in academics, programming, social, emo-tional development of our students, fostering a culture of kindness, inclusion, and pride in ourselves, our school, and our community. And in that statement, culture is bolded, italicized, and underlined.

Because the one thing that has been, was the most important thing when I got here that I identified is staff really wanted to have a relationship with the district with Both the board, the leadership, the principals that we were all rolling in the same direction, but that they also felt a connection to us.

t we root everything in that [: 00:16:00

Culture is the one thing that we will protect at any cost. And then from there, we build out what are the other things that we need and assess how those things are going to make sure that they're getting the intended and desired results that we're all hoping for.

Dr. Jim: I like the fact that you talked about how everything is anchored on cul-ture. And when I think about that and think about where you started from, so you described a scenario where you had 56 different directions that you could potentially grow and that. Came out of a lot of people having voice in deciding what you work on, and now you're streamlining to a much leaner way of oper-ating.

to a [: 00:17:00

Dr. Ryan Laager: So we started developing the draft with us as a leadership team going through, and we actually did the 3 2 1 activity, and we have 10 peo-ple on our leadership team. And we took that draft and then I went out to build-ings and I did the 3 2 1 and I shared information back with them and we com-pared the information that we collected from all of our staff.

And then we formulated a sample of that mission statement, which was going to be our anchor. And then I went back to buildings to staff meetings where every-body was present and shared the mission. And then at their tables, I had a copy of the mission act. Ask them to tweak and change different wording.

r and tone matter a lot when [: 00:18:00

I know them at a certain level as an assistant principal, and I probably know them at a lower level. As a principal, and I probably know less of them as a su-perintendent, because as you become further away, less of what those needs are and those components. And then our staff are in our buildings every day, so they understand what their own needs are to be able to function at a high level or an optimal level for themselves.

So that's why we started there. Where a lot of people will just start by putting a huge community group together and it's made up of staff and parents and com-munity members and business owners and all those things, in doing some of these processes in the past, I had a lot of community members and business owners share with me.

t we should have in there or [: 00:19:00

And the one thing I will say is, yes, our process doesn't involve community or parents as much as typical strategic planning processes do. But the one thing I'll say is we don't really have parents who ever come to our board meetings and complain about things going on in the district. We receive a lot of positive feed-back.

eed to change. We have those [: 00:20:00

Was there communication that was dropped? Are we not treating people with kindness? Are we not including people who need to be included in certain things? So we take all of that feedback and constantly play it back to the mis-sion, but we don't get nearly as much of that because. I think we truly assessed what we needed as an organization 'cause we were right to the people who best understood it.

And that was our staff working at the grassroots level of what was important to them about being in Bell Plaine and what was most important to them about what we needed to do as a district to be better.

ens out of it. So you define [: 00:21:00

Then you brought those Elements down to the building leadership tier and the educator tier to define, okay, here's what we're thinking. What do we need to do to get there? So define the action steps out of it. Then you had the community and board offer their input and that's how you actually came up with the stream-lined plan.

Am I working through that process map correctly?

ery hesitant when I got here [: 00:22:00

And again, that just becomes the anchor. Then from there, we have far more specific things we're doing that have to meet all of those things. But any deci-sion we make or anything we do always comes back to how is this going to im-pact our culture to ensure we have a positive culture.

on so when you look at those [: 00:23:00

Dr. Ryan Laager: So again we started as a leadership team in this way. We worked a little bit. We developed what we thought were three to four key strate-gic directions that we needed to work on as a district. And we did this as a lead-ership team. And then we took that to a board retreat. And again, the same re-treat with the board weighed in on what the mission statement was.

They weighed in on what those strategic directions were going to be. The main reason for the timing of that was we did this in the summer or we typically do this in the summer. It's also where we reevaluate. It's why we come back and unpack the mission and that in the fall with staff is because we spend a lot of our time in the summer, unpacking these things and looking at what did we do well?

ortant. Like kids need to be [: 00:24:00

Then the second thing that we really valued and we also feel our community valued was really student involvement in our school and community. And that can be in activities. It doesn't just mean sports. It doesn't just mean theater. It means our our agri science clubs, robotics our choirs and bands, those kind of things.

How are they involved in our school and community? And then the one that re-ally resonated in the last time that we revisited this process was the importance of social emotional development of our kids. We've seen a significant Or seen significant challenges in the area of mental health around anxiety, depression, those kind of things.

velop-ment, social emotional [: 00:25:00

Without infrastructure, we can't do that. So those became those four things, and we took those, and those were our common themes. Then those common themes we went back and shared at back to school workshop with all staff. And then I went and shared them at a building level and collected feedback from staff at a building level about what they thought were key priorities.

And similar to the other process we talked about I collected all that information, I shared it back so everybody could see what was we had a leadership team that we just talked about in every school, and we worked as a leadership team to form that into. Okay. These are what we're going to focus on in these four areas.

And then we spent the year really developing what were the supports going to be to make sure we were addressing those four strategic directions.

ent directions down to three [: 00:26:00

Dr. Ryan Laager: One of the things, so they were working on a scorecard model when I came here, which was and so the 56 strategic directions had been a part of a plan that I was a part of actually in a previous district as well. But I would say when I try to remember the scorecard here, it was probably five by this probably 25, five by five categories.

Those were just very specific about we're going to see a 3 percent growth in MCA math at 4th, 3rd grade, or we're going to see, and so what we talked a lot about was. That kind of specificity doesn't really motivate people. It's very hard when you're that specific about things. It gets back to, if we do these things, does it mean we're better?

e do that, What if the state [: 00:27:00

And that's where a lot of that conversation came through in the scorecards of yeah, we can keep score, but it doesn't mean we're any better. So for us, it was really about coming up with some broad areas that we thought were better. the most important needs of our kids. And then going back to our staff, I will say, our staff continues social emotional learning continues to be at the forefront of that.

Coming out of COVID as well, but I'll say this, We had that as a strategic direc-tion prior to COVID and one of the decisions that was made was we hired a full time licensed mental health therapist in our district as a result of that strategic di-rection, because we saw a need for therapy level support for kids while they were at school, because a lot of kids who needed that support, they couldn't get appointments or get to appointments at a clinic somewhere.

We needed to provide [: 00:28:00

What we were seeing happen was a counselor would get to a point where I know this kid needs help, but we didn't, we couldn't get to the next step. It would have been up to the kid to do that. So it, that's how we went from say 25 things that were very specific to, we wanted to look at more or overarching things that were significant needs.

And a kid's mental health has a significant need has a significant impact on their ability to achieve academically. Or their ability to find that opportunity or that passion they want to pursue because they're dealing with their own mental health challenges. So that's how I would say we went down to that was we wanted a little bit more broad than just the specifics because the specifics didn't really tell us much anyway.

through that you've taken us [: 00:29:00

That's all great. How did it impact? What was the impact that it had when we're talking about the main thing that we wanted to cover closing the opportunity and achievement gap? What's been the result of all of this work that you've done on the strategic plan side? And how is that shown up in the actual scorecard?

Dr. Ryan Laager: If we took it, if we take a look at the academic and achieve-ment gap side of it this last year we're in our third year of implementing a cur-riculum, which was based on the science of reading. And we saw district wide. Six and a half percent growth in our literacy score, going back to one of the challenges that I saw when I came here.

[: 00:30:00

Test scores just are one measure at one point in time. Actually is not a great pre-dictor of a kid's long term academic success, even, but it is a measuring stick. And we've also measured that both cohort growth and year over year growth. So kids in third grade. How did they do in fourth grade? And then also against how did the state do in those cohort groups and year over year groups, so our data on that side is starting to look really strong and has been growing towards that.

kids taking a [: 00:31:00

And it's interesting to see kids, some kids who aren't engaged in other areas who absolutely have just taken that class and run with it. We have a construction trades class this year that's new where they're just finishing building a 52 by 20 foot shed from the ground up out at our softball complex.

We've created a lot. Our kids can get certified FAA certification for flying drones. So we've added. A variety of courses where if we didn't talk about the opportunity gap, we wouldn't be offering those. If staff didn't know that was an area of focus, they wouldn't come to us with these ideas.

And then the same thing on the achievement side, our staff really drove the cur-ricular changes because they wanted to see that academic development continue to improve our kids. So that's really what I would say is the impact where we are today at least.

the big things that came out [: 00:32:00

If somebody else is looking at trying to accomplish the same thing, what are the key things that they need to keep in mind to pull that off successfully?

Dr. Ryan Laager: I think number one is simplify the process. Number two is make sure everybody understands what's a part of it and keep it at the forefront of what you communicate and all the decisions you make. And you talked about this in your intro where it's not, a lot of strategic plans aren't worth the paper they're written on because they look really pretty.

their role in each of those [: 00:33:00

In the last school year around our mission statement. So when you talk about community can go out and see what are this is your mission. That's great. What did you do? It's right there where if you would go to most school district pages and you'd find their mission statement. I bet you would have a hard time finding with that level of simplicity.

What are they actually doing to try to achieve that mission?

Dr. Jim: Really great stuff, Ryan. If people want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

, a kid, a community member, [: 00:34:00

I call them on my cell phone because I want to make sure they have that direct connection. And some people will say you're a smaller suburban school district. I did that when I was in the largest school district in Minnesota as a principal. I was in the 20th largest district in the state as a principal and an executive direc-tor.

Yeah. It's just an easier way for me to operate. And people, what I've learned over my career is people don't abuse that piece of it. And it just creates a better connection, a more personable one for me with people. So feel free to give me a call too.

Dr. Jim: Awesome stuff. So I appreciate you hanging out with us, Ryan. When I think about this conversation, there's a couple of things that stood out to me as important principles that we should keep simplifying strategic plans. I think There's two questions that are really critical in this process. One is what is your anchor?

t into what that is going to [: 00:35:00

Is if you have a line item on there, you have to be disciplined to ask the ques-tion. If we achieve this line item, are we any better? How are, how is this mak-ing us better? So those two questions I think are critical in this process of simpli-fying the strategic planning process and the strategic plan to make it actionable.

So I appreciate you sharing that with us. For those of you who have been listen-ing to this conversation, we appreciate you hanging out. If you liked the discus-sion, make sure you leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. If you haven't already done so, make sure you join our community. And then tune in late, tune in next time where we'll have another leader hanging out with us and sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high perform-ing team