INTRO: In this episode of An Imperfect Leader, Dr. Doug Reeves is my guest. The first thing we talk about is an article he authored, We Censor Ourselves in Education. In the article, he hooks the reader by describing a former intern he had while you has in China, and how she had gone on to anchor the news on China Central Television. She told Doug and his colleagues at a forum in Cambridge, MA:

“We have no censorship in China.” When she was challenged at this evidently absurd statement, she replied, “We do not need censorship in China. We censor ourselves.”

In my book and in the leadership model I use to advise others, there is a dimension called Nested Patterns, and that is the muscle of an organization’s work. Inside that dimension are terms Doug has discussed as an author and speaker:

·      Terms like creativity and courage (in his book Beyond Conversations About Race, he and his co-authors step into a complex national dialogue – that took courage).

·      Terms like high level collaboration (in From Leading to Succeeding, he reminds readers that trust is built when decisions are made collaboratively).

·      Carol Dweck’s term growth mindset is visible in his work (in the book Deep Change Leadership, Doug references the fixed mindset paralyzing educators even when research disputes deeply-held beliefs – reading instruction, for example).

We talk about all of these topics and more! Thanks for tuning in to An Imperfect Leader: The Superintendents and Leadership Podcast.

BIO: Dr. Doug Reeves is the author of more than 40 books and more than 100 articles on leadership and education. He has twice been named to the Harvard University Distinguished Authors Series and was named the Brock International Laureate for his contributions to education. Additionally, Doug was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for his service with the United States Army’s Military Intelligence.

-------

An Imperfect Leader is sponsored by Yondr. 

Schools around the world are seeing the damaging effects of phones on student engagement, social development, and mental health.

Yondr has developed a unique product and program to allow schools to become phone-free, from arrival to dismissal.

Learn why 1 Million Students use Yondr every day.

MINIMIZE DISTRACTIONS. MAXIMIZE LEARNING POTENTIAL.

Go to overyondr.com to learn more.

-------

An Imperfect Leader: The Superintendents and Leadership Podcast is supported by ILAA, LLC, a firm dedicated to supporting aspiring, new, and established leaders. For more information, please find them at www.human-centeredleaders.com.

Music for An Imperfect Leader was written and arranged by Ian Varley.

Sam Falbo created our artwork, a wood-print inspired daruma doll butterfly.

-------

NEW EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE

"What do we want to create together?" 

So proud to have co-written the foreword with Zach Taylor to this essential book on Human-Centered School Transformation. If you're a school leader looking to make sense of what you know to be true about schools, check it out. If you're a corporate leader, you will find a pathway to better results in every page.

-------

AN IMPERFECT LEADER IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

My book,  An Imperfect Leader: Leadership in (After) Action is available at Amazon.com. If there is no hyperlink to follow, please go to Amazon.com or peterstiepleman.com to order a copy. 

Book Update!

Imperfect Leaders! My book, An Imperfect Leader: Leadership in (After) Action is available on Amazon.com. If there is no hyperlink to follow, please go to Amazon.com or peterstiepleman.com. You can order it there.

INTRO: Hello, Imperfect Leaders!

Evaluations.

In every single profession, employees are evaluated. They are evaluated by their direct supervisors or evaluated by a board of directors. Often they are evaluated by the people they lead in the form of a survey (often referred to as a 360 survey). Plus, there are informal evaluations conducted by the community over social media – those can be brutal.

Formal evaluations can be difficult to navigate if there is not a clear process and protocol established at the very beginning. How often have you entered an evaluation meeting only to discover that what you thought you were being evaluated on was very different than what your evaluator thought? A shared image of what success looks like is paramount.

My guest today, Dr. Jennifer Cheatham, has incredible advice for school and district leaders about goal setting, reporting on progress, and even tips for how leaders can formally request authority over the evaluation process as part of their contract (I hadn’t thought of that one – so wise!). During her After Action Review, she talks about something very important to me – the tackling of a major system of oppression – a district’s code of conduct (also known as discipline).

It’s a great episode full of incredible insights! Thanks for tuning in!

BIO: With over twenty-five years of experience in the field of education in San Diego, Chicago, and Madison, Wisconsin, Dr. Jennifer Cheatham has served as a teacher, a teacher leader, a professional developer, a central office leader, an area superintendent, and a superintendent. In each of these roles, she focused on a number of things, including cultivating strong teams, designing enduring systems, and strengthening routines for organizational learning – all to make the lives of children better. She is now a Senior Lecturer on Education and Co-Chair of the Public Education Leadership Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

FURTHER INFO: A few months ago, I had a chance to speak with Max Silverman at the University of Washington’s Center for Educational Leadership. Our conversation was wide ranging, but we kept returning to the role of evaluations. Leaders in every profession are interested in growth. Personal growth and the growth of those they supervise. This is a big topic for educational leaders as well. It wasn’t a day or so later that I came across an article by Jennifer, Can Superintendents’ Evaluation Lead to Their Own Growth? In the article she points out the unintended consequences of a traditional school board process of evaluation and how that the lowering of one point might lead to a superintendent’s quick demise. She references the incredibly disturbing national trend when it comes to leader longevity (we are losing superintendents at alarming rates). As we continue to read the article, we learn more about the shared process she created with your board in Madison, Wisconsin, which included self-reflection. Give it a read!

-----

This episode is brought to you, in part, by the Waters Center for Systems Thinking. The Waters Center helps people understand what systems thinking is and how to incorporate the Habits, tools and concepts of systems thinking into their work and life to achieve desired results. To learn more, go to waterscenterst.org.  

----

An Imperfect Leader: The Superintendents and Leadership Podcast is supported by ILAA, LLC, a firm dedicated to supporting aspiring, new, and established leaders. For more information, please find them at www.human-centeredleaders.com.

Music for An Imperfect Leader was written and arranged by Ian Varley.

Sam Falbo created our artwork, a wood-print inspired daruma doll butterfly.

www.peterstiepleman.com

Book Update!

Imperfect Leaders! You can now order my book, An Imperfect Leader: Leadership in (After) Action. Click on the link here. Or if there is no hyperlink, go to peterstiepleman.com, you can order it there.

AND if you liked it, would you please leave a positive review? I’m hoping to get 35 positive reviews on Amazon. Thanks!

My Guest: This week, Dr. Thomas Hoerr is my guest. If you’re in education, you likely remember the first out-of-town conference you ever attended. Not because, as a superintendent told me recently, they went to a conference and found themselves being dared to ride a mechanical bull. I think he said something like, “It would have to have been a weekend at Bernie’s kind of thing (where I was actually dead) to get me on one of those things!” Weekend at Bernie’s – ah, a classic. And it does conjure an image of sorts.

Well my first out of town trip was to Albuquerque, NM. I was teacher in Oakland, and I saved my money to fly to Albuquerque to attend a 2-day training with Tom Hoerr from St. Louis. Tom had become a sought-after expert on Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), and I was really interested to learn more and see how it might provide me with some approaches to teaching bi/multilingual learners. 

What if we found ways to attend to the strengths of a child to teach them English as opposed to a drill and kill method? That was my wondering and I was considering writing my dissertation using Gardner’s research. In the end, I found a school in Indonesia who was using MI to teach English as a second language, and well, I was living in California making $29,000 a year, so.....  So I settled on the question of why children learn (or don’t learn) English. Drawing on Guadalupe Valdes’s research. The quick answer is it has to do with systems and their design – systems will create exactly what they are meant to create.

But back to Tom Hoerr! I reached out to him recently to tell him he was my first professional learning conference, and that I spent a career using what I learned from him, and how I’d love to have him as a guest on the podcast. And in a lovely display of his interpersonal intelligence, he agreed! Thanks for listening!

Bio: Tom Hoerr led schools for 37 years and is now a Scholar In Residence at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he teaches prospective principals. Tom was a public-school principal in University City in the St. Louis area before becoming the head of the New City School in St. Louis, a school founded on a commitment to progressive learning and respect for human diversity. Under his leadership, New City began implementing the theory of multiple intelligences (MI) in 1988 and created the world’s first MI Library in 2006.

Tom Hoerr’s new book, The Principal as Chief Empathy Officer, stems from his premise that leadership is based on relationships, and he uses empathy as the tool to help everyone grow. He shows how we can each grow our empathy. Hoerr devotes chapters to empathy and personnel, instructional leadership, DEI, and so on. The book is filled with specific examples, tables, and strategies to help everyone lead in an empathic manner. He also relates leading by empathy to the other Formative Five success skills – self-control, integrity, embracing diversity, and grit – and offers many interesting anecdotes.

--------------

An Imperfect Leader: Leadership in (After) Action is supported by ILAA, LLC, a firm dedicated to supporting aspiring, new, and established leaders. For more information, please find them at www.human-centeredleaders.com.

Music for An Imperfect Leader was written and arranged by Ian Varley.

Sam Falbo created our artwork, a wood-print inspired daruma doll butterfly.

www.peterstiepleman.com

----------------

An Imperfect Leader is brought to you by EdConnective whose mission is to ensure student success through transformative teacher training.

 An imperfect leader, TLI, peter stiepleman, Dr. peter stiepleman, imperfect leaders, school culture, education, culture, school, positive school culture, principal, superintendent, aspiring superintendent, new superintendent, experienced superintendent, leadership, district leadership, school leadership, school leadership thoughts, inspiration, strategic planning, leadership development, human-centered leadership, collective aspiration, nested patterns, leaders’ learning work, educators, superintendent pipeline, Model for Human Centered School, New City School, Multiple Intelligences, MI, Harvard, Howard Gardner

Let me introduce you to Dr. Nemanja Baletic aka Dr. Nemo. The founder of Oneness Medicine is a former Ottawa U Gee Gee's basketball player whose holistic approach to medicine has led him to study around the world and at some of the top medical institutions. With Harvard on his resume, Dr. Andrew Weil as his mentor and his name on published medical papers Dr. Nemo is a true game changer. We talk about medicine from a very different perspective which goes far beyond actual medication to the healing powers of meditation, food, love, environment and visualization. Dr. Nemo discusses the tools he used as an athlete to help shape the way he studied and performed in difficult medical situations. In addition to continued athletic aspirations, he also models, and considers himself an amateur filmmaker. Name it, he's done it. I was in awe of the energy and passion he has for integrative medicine and his ability to share it with others in a way that makes them want to change for the better. For future med students this is a must listen and for anyone who believes in the power of healing this is a great one for you.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the latest episode Leader ReadyCast. I’m your host, Eric McNulty, and my guest today is Dr. Eric Goralnick. Dr. Goralnick is Medical Director of Emergency Preparedness, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School; and Instructor of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He has also spoken to cohorts of the NPLI executive education program on his experiences in the Boston Marathon bombing response. He has developed deep expertise on the intersection of emergency medicine with disaster preparedness and response.
Today, we’re going to speak with Eric about building a culture of preparedness, educating the public—and the limits of relying upon the public in a response, and understanding the dynamics of active shooter and other mass casualty events.

Welcome to the latest edition of Leader ReadyCast. I am your host, Eric McNulty. My guest today is Dr. Murray Nossel and our topic is storytelling. One of the more frequent concerns that I hear from NPLI participants is that the media fails to “tell our story.” Whether in the aftermath of a human or manmade disaster, it seems that government responders are cast as inefficient, inept, and at times uncaring. That doesn’t reflect the people that I know and so when I saw Dr. Nossel’s book, Powered by Storytelling, I knew he would have valuable insights to share.
Dr. Nossel has been helping organizations craft and present stories for more than 30 years. His firm is Narativ (one R, no E) and its clients include everyone from The Walt Disney Company to UNICEF. He is an Oscar-nominated documentary film maker and a co-star of the storytelling performance, Two Men Talking that has been on stage in Edinburgh, London, and New York. He’s a fascinating individual with a lot to teach us about stories and why they are so important.