Summary:

Dr. Jim chats about the importance of collaborative leadership and creating a leader-full organization with Dr. Alena Zachary-Ross, CEO of AZR Leads and superintendent of Ypsilanti Community Schools. Discover how Dr. Ross emphasizes listening, working with unions, and empowering educators. She shares her journey in building the "Rising Leaders" program, growing teacher leaders, and enhancing student support amidst a competitive landscape. Key takeaways include fostering agency, collaboration, and internal leadership development—essential strategies for any district leader aiming to build a resilient, high-performing team.

Key Takeaways:

• Leadership Collaboration: Successful transformation in education requires a collaborative approach, involving teachers, unions, and boards to ensure trust and shared goals.
• Listening as a Leadership Tool: Effective leadership starts with active listening, posing questions, and engaging stakeholders before implementing change.
• Grow Your Own Programs: Establishing leadership development initiatives like the "Rising Leaders" cohort can significantly enhance instructional quality and emotional support within schools.
• Resourceful Leadership: Even without extensive funding, districts can foster leadership and professional growth through book studies, instructional rounds, and leveraging existing resources.
• Empowering Educators: Programs that empower teachers to lead from where they stand help in creating a nurturing environment for both educators and students.

Chapters:

00:00

Leadership and Transformation Through Collaboration and Listening

09:42

Building Strong Districts Through Teacher Leadership and Cohort Models

15:06

Creating a Fair Selection Process for Educational Program Applicants

16:34

Empowering Teachers Through Building-Level Leadership and Support Networks

20:53

Collaborating with Unions to Implement New Educational Programs

25:13

Empowering Educators Through Leadership Programs

29:25

Building a Successful Leadership Program Through Collaboration and Feedback

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Dr. Alena Ross: linkedin.com/in/alenazacheryross

Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda



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Engaging Leadership Outro

Engaging Leadership Intro

The key to any transformation is to make sure that the effort is a collaborative one. And to build an environment like this, we need to make sure that choice voice and agency are embedded at all levels of the organization. Leadership and transformation is a team sport and the work of transformation gets done at the front lines.

She's the CEO of AZR leads. She uses her gifts to develop leaders and teams to transform environments. Beginning with themselves. She's a certified John Maxwell coach, a member of the Forbes business council. She's a pastor of the ISOM memorial CME church and superintendent of the Ypsilanti community schools.

She's formerly the superintendent of Okemos and the Muskegon Heights school district. Dr. Ross attended Grand Valley State University and received her bachelor's degree from there. She earned her master's of arts in educational psychology from Wayne State University and got her doctorate in education leadership from Michigan State University.

And she also never sleeps. So we're glad to have her on the show. So Dr. Ross, welcome to the show.

[00:01:47] Dr. Jim: Yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to this conversation and when you have two doctors on the show, it's going to be a pretty nerdy conversation, but interesting for the folks that are into this sort of stuff.

[00:02:17] Dr. Alena Ross: I grew up in Detroit. Really my mother was a teacher in the Detroit Public School district. She really influenced me by being a teacher, wanting to be in the classroom her entire career. I always knew I wanted to be in education. Really focused on being in special education and really thinking about this whole passion about leading from where you stand.

And that's that approach that I want us to have that conversation. I really listened to my teachers. I stand as a leader. And that's where I think I've been successful as 12 years, finishing my 12th year as a superintendent. This is my third superintendency.

The tenure of a superintendent urban superintendent is three years and to have 12 years under my belt. I think that's what the secret sauce is to listen to your stakeholders.

[00:04:11] Dr. Alena Ross: Yeah, I felt put into special education. My next door neighbor had a hearing loss and that really was interesting to me. He had the lights when the doorbell rang, the lights would blink on and off. And as a child, that was just really resonated with me. And I knew that he was Special. I knew that it just took a lot to teach him and people treated him differently.

And I, it just really touched my heart the way that people treated him and it just felt, I felt compelled to want to reach people special like him.

What was the most impactful lesson that you learned in all of those experiences that you feel is important for other early stage superintendents to know.

[00:05:41] Dr. Jim: So that's easier said than done. So I want to dig in a little bit more into that space because it's interesting to me. So when you look at whether you're talking about union or non union, coordinating the needs of your educator team, coordinating the needs and goals of the board, those are a lot of [00:06:00] moving. spinning plates. So how do you set the stage to be in a good working relationship with all three of those stakeholders, potential stakeholders who might have different directions that they want to go in?

And opening opportunity to hear from the teachers and being willing knowing that there's going to have to be some give there's opportunity. And then even with the board, because we know we're all people. There's always, there's going to be some opposition. There's going to be some disagreement.

And we've got to be flexible.

They may be all sorts of things that are going wrong within the district, which is why you were brought into that district and you talk about, you have to. Be in a position to listen. That's really difficult if you're brought in as somebody that is supposed to turn around the district. So how did you build the discipline to listen and how did you create the guardrail so you're not acting too quickly and you're building trust first?

Those norms really keeping keep myself grounded being curious and not furious. And again, putting my hands out and instead of closing them up. And so I'm working with the board is and working with the teachers with the hands opening open and asking those questions.

Especially if you're a high performing leader coming into any organization, you have this track record of having an [00:09:00] impact. So you're coming in with potentially a baked in agenda and the quicker that you can realize that your agenda doesn't matter until you fully understand the situation on the ground.

The better off you're going to be. So I like the framework that you had when it when we're talking about creating that space to actually listen and understand what's going on. When you and I were talking before, you mentioned people will support the things that they feel they helped create. I think that's an important lesson for every leader to know and understand what I'd like you to do is share with us a little bit about how you came to that sort of positioning statement that helped you build these strong organizations and strong districts.

We know here in Michigan, especially we were looking at teacher shortages and What were we going to do? We couldn't wait to have someone else do something for us. We knew that, especially in my district, we are in a county where other people were paying more. We're right next door to Ann Arbor where they paid more.

They were bigger than us. And so we knew we would have to, we would have to do it ourselves. And so we had to make sure we would do something right with right away. And to build this culture, we needed to do something strong.

[00:11:06] Dr. Alena Ross: Yeah. We noticed our application pool was getting smaller and smaller. We said, okay, We had at that point, we did have some grant funds, but we also knew we did not have any assistant principal roles coming up. So any principal roles coming up soon. So we knew, okay, we could put in some leveraging of other codifying some.

additional roles coming up that were non traditional roles. We knew we could lead from where we stood. We knew teachers would be able to come up in additional roles that they knew that they could be teacher leaders. And so we would make those roles by having teachers to create those roles within their own school.

[00:12:05] Dr. Jim: It seems like what you're describing is a relatively stable leadership organization where there isn't a lot of movement at the assistant principal or principal level. And it seems like what you were trying to do was build more internal growth opportunities among the teacher ranks.

If I'm on the right track with that, how did you define what growth areas would be the highest priority? For the district, if you're trying to build a leader full organization.

So we knew some social emotional pieces were happening. We also thought about the [00:13:00] fact that teachers felt like they were alone, right? They were in there in the classroom settings and they said, That they felt like a cold. They like the cohort model. They felt like they didn't know people in different buildings.

They didn't see each other. They felt especially during the pandemic, people have been all apart. They hadn't felt ways that they were together. And so we. But felt okay, this is going to be a cohort model, and we were going to look at instruction and we were going to look at social emotional,

Was it for everybody in the district or was there some sort of [00:14:00] selection process that helped you build momentum into this program?

We've made an application process and we did blast it out for everyone so that it would not seem like we were eliminated, eliminating anyone. And from the pool. We then had a group of individuals from our building networks, because we do have networks already set up who then would, from a group of criteria that our executive cabinet created who volunteered, who could then select, they did not see the names, but they [00:15:00] then selected based off of the criteria a list of from that pool.

They were able then to select the applicants for us to be able to select from the applicants the pool of the first cohort.

Am I getting that correct?

[00:16:03] Dr. Jim: Okay. So one of the things that I'm interested to find out about. So when you have an application process and you have a selection process, there's always going to be a group of your employee landscape that are automatically your hand raisers. What was your strategy? To capture the people that probably in their own minds would be like, Oh, I'll never get picked.

I'm not really good enough for this. I'm just not even going to apply. So how did you bring those people into the conversation?

When we put out the [00:17:00] criteria, we asked our instructional coaches to talk to their teachers. Because again when we talked about people support what they helped create when we talked about this. Rising leaders cohort. We the rising leaders helped us to develop this the program.

So when we talked about what rising leaders was about when we talked about what was going to happen with the data wise book and what what was going to happen during the sessions the instructional leaders, they really know what Their teachers and they saw teacher leaders who had not seen themselves as leaders.

And we talked about you leave from where you stand. And so they saw people who didn't see themselves as leaders. And we talked, told them, please encourage them to apply. And so they helped us. They were allies in this.

[00:18:34] Dr. Alena Ross: Prior when I got here as superintendent, we did not have instructional coaches at every building a lot. It was a lot of top down. So we had instructional coaches at some buildings. It was a lot of coaches. People at central office. I deployed an instructional coach at every building and a climate and culture coach at every building.

They're able to have the relationships. They are able to be and be able to push into the classrooms. So because they have that at every building now, because we have building networks at every building. So we have a system now in those buildings. And because when we pushed out that pushed out the rising leaders program, they understood [00:20:00] the purpose and that made it conducive to be able to push the message out that we really want you.

And we're encouraging your presence and your participation in this opportunity.

So if that happened to you or in, in your district, what were the things that you did to navigate that potential obstacle? Because I would imagine other unionized environments would leaders of unionized environments would have that concern.

Hey, this is coming up. How might we navigate? Who do we need to talk to? Who do we have the conversation with? Also. We had to build in time. So when we're creating it, we had conversation about what's going to be paid and what's going to be not paid. So some of the time we had to think about grants that there's going to be time.

So this was an additional time where they're going to have to go back to work and then do some of the, do it while they're doing work time. They were going to be doing their work while they're doing the rising leaders time. And so all of that had to be scheduled out before time with our union leadership.

There's a potential for some grants that can be brought in And that sounds like stuff that would happen at a larger district Now if there's a smaller district that You Is wanting to do some of [00:23:00] this same stuff. What are some of the creative ways that they can still launch a program like this without necessarily having to have a big resource impact which it sounds like there's a risk for that when you want to set this up, you got to find the funding somewhere to get it off the ground.

And taking the first step to make it work and fit for your district. So don't say no without, without taking the risk, make it fit for your district. Take the first step. And so what is that first step looking at? Can you take time? Take time without during maybe some after school time? Can you take [00:24:00] time during summertime?

Can that time work with in collaboration with your union and say, what is it that you all want to do and accomplish together during book study time during time in which you do instructional rounds? This time can be done together if if the union and the administration want to work around an achievable goal.

And it, our teachers really saw a lot of growth. They really saw that it benefited them as a professional unit and it wasn't about the, Administration at all. It really helped teachers to see themselves as a more professional person. Our teachers said that after 25 years they saw themselves as advocates.

They saw themselves just as a whole new person and they gave got a lot more energy. They just are excited about coming to work every day.

You're also putting an emphasis on collaboration amongst peers, but also a focus on better support for students that are within the district. The one thing that I'm curious about is when you look at this leadership program that you've built. [00:26:00] How is that structured to get some folks that are at the educator level moving up the ranks into potential administrator roles?

What are the areas of the program that seek to meet that need?

After the first year of the cohort, and he is, he's been, he's completed his first year. He knew he had followed, he had come in. He had followed some of the principles. He had come in and shadow, the principal, he knew how we done lunch duty. He knew how they had [00:27:00] done some of the breaks.

He had understood the missions. He had gone to some of the professional development that we send our administrators through. And so the transition went really smoothly. He knew a lot of the staff members there. So during the interview process, he unanimously, the staff wanted him. And so the transition went really smoothly.

That's one example. Another example is most of our coordinators during this summer's Grizzly Learning Camp are rising leaders. I'm saying 100 percent of our summer coordinators who applied this summer are either cohort one Or cohort two rising leaders. And most of them had never thought about being summer coordinators before, but they applied, they took the risk and they are now summer coordinators.

They visit other buildings because they're a part of the district, they go and do instructional rounds in other places. So they feel comfortable going to visit other buildings. And because of that. exposure, they do feel comfortable leading in other roles. They advocate, they feel comfortable advocating on behalf of the extended school year program.

And so now this is year 3 of the cohort, and we're, not only do we see them applying for roles, but the year 3 cohort is now being led by some of the year 1 cohorts. Cohort participants. And so we're seeing it blossom being influenced by the previous year's participants, and it's just getting better and better every year.

What are the key things that they need to keep in mind when they're thinking about building a program like this? What are the core principles that they need to put into place so that they can launch something as successful as a, as your program?

And grow from there. Hear their voice. Make sure that you already work with if you have a union, work with them to make sure that you have a shared mission and vision and then start small and grow. We grew with a small cohort and we got feedback from them and then we continue to grow each year.

And with baby steps. And now we're in year three. And begin small, get feedback and then continue. But just start and then continue.

[00:30:55] Dr. Alena Ross: They can contact me at YCSchools. us. They can [00:31:00] email me or they can give me a call on my cell phone,

When I think about this conversation, there's a few things that stand out that really are worth Calling out and mentioning as some critical principles for having a program like this succeed. I think first and foremost, you said it early on in the conversation that you as a leader needs to have the will to make it happen.

So don't get bogged down in all of the logistical items you need to. Really feel that building this leadership culture within your organization is important enough and then will it into existence and in your effort to will it into existence, the key principle of having this being successful is to get all of your multiple stakeholders aligned on what the end goal is the end goal.

Teams so that you're successfully building a well rounded leadership program. Rounded grow your own program that not only helps you build stronger educational skill competencies, but also helps you build a leadership pipeline into your organization as well. So for those of you who have been listening to this conversation, we appreciate you hanging out.

If you like the conversation, make sure you leave us a review on your favorite podcast player, and then if you haven't already done so, make sure you join our community. And then tune in next time where we'll have another leader sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high performing team.