Ryan Carpenter: Harvesting the small wins is what allows us to build trust like you are talking about. It allows us to gain that momentum, and it allows us to tell our stories.

Intro

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Janet Pilcher: Hello everyone, welcome to the Accelerate Your Performance podcast. I’m your host, Janet Pilcher. Thank you for joining me today as we jump into part three of our series on leaders as great coaches of teams.

In part two we connected with Dr. Christi Barrett who shared how she uses daily huddles to address student needs. That link is in the show notes so you can go back and listen if you missed it. I sure hope you do.

Today we’ll dive into short cycles of improvement, another one of the strategies helping us to press forward, support our people, study our data, and focus on what matters most. And joining us today is Dr. Ryan Carpenter, Superintendent of Estacada Schools in Oregon. I know you’ve heard his name before because this is the ninth appearance on our podcast. Ryan’s a dynamic leader. In just five short years as a superintendent, he and his team have made several gains including a national ranking in U.S. News and World Reports, Best High Schools. He also won several awards, most recently, Studer Education’s National Difference Maker of the Year award in 2024.

I’m happy to welcome Ryan here today, and I invite you to listen as we talk through how to coach our teams to get results. And how short cycles of improvement help us get there.

Interview

Janet Pilcher: It’s with great pleasure that I welcome Ryan Carpenter back to our show. Ryan, so glad to see you and know you’re off to a good start in the semester. Great to have you with us today.

Ryan Carpenter: Well, thank you so much, Janet, and happy new year to you and happy new year to your faithful listeners of evidence-based leaders. I think 2025 is going to be a great year and I hope that your short cycles of improvement yield positive results and just continue to improve everyone’s culture, your outcomes, and empower your organization. 2025 is going to be a great year for those who do evidence-based leadership. I believe that.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, thank you and you know as we go into the new year, Ryan, 2025, we’re on calendar year so this is truly a new year for us. And just working on our own scorecard and getting those measures and getting the three prongs in place, so exciting times for us in terms of what’s ahead.

So as you know, we all work in partnership and practice what we talk about every day in the field. So glad to be a partner in that process with you.

I’m going to spend–on the first two questions today, I’ve really had some time to reflect just on leadership, and I’m going to talk just more specifically about leadership and then setting the stage to those short cycles of improvement. But I’m going to kind of read a couple of sentences, Ryan, that are just reflective thoughts for me, and I’d love to get your reaction to them. So let me start with this one.

It’s important to develop leaders to support their teams with the mindset that leaders have not led well until their teams have performed well. And this means that leaders need to have coaching relationships with their teams and have established positive organizational culture where people trust leaders. So as a leader, what does this mean to you?

Ryan Carpenter: Well, I agree that today’s world is very results oriented, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but because of that, it’s very easy to get stuck on the results of the big aims. It’s easy for your teams to get discouraged when seeing the slow movements of the long-term goals. And today is also an era of instant gratification, as we all know. And I’ve seen teams in this work, including my own teams, get overwhelmed as the data yo-yos up and down as the year progresses, leading really to the identification of more failures inside the systems. But this is why harvesting the small wins and intentionally recognizing the people who are aligned in this work is so paramount.

While we all have big aims when it comes to the graduation rates, test scores, attendance, special education access to the mainstream classrooms, those are all the big and broad aims, and it’s so easy to get lost. It is critical for the leaders to keep their bull’s eyes small and narrow, to keep all employees and the school community focused and engaged.

You know, Janet, I think about the movie, it’s an old movie, so this dates me a little bit, but if you remember the movie, “The Patriot,” with like Mel Gibson, and he’s teaching his son to shoot the musket in the woods for the first time, and he has this great phrase called “aim small, miss small.” And I think that that’s so critical when you take a look at that work and this work as well.

And Estacada, our current real-time winner priorities, is right now we’re focused on four specific things. We’re focused on good transitions in daily lesson planning, which correlates to the bigger aim of teacher development and skill development. We’re focused on getting students dropped off at school on time by our buses, which ultimately promotes attendance and what we’re looking for in that big aim. We’re focused on improving how teachers talk about strategy after post-test data has been collected. We’re really good at looking at data these days, but what do we do with the data afterwards is an area that we’re trying to improve. And getting our school principals to improve the frequency of communicating the “why” behind our decisions throughout the course of the transformation is also so critical.

And these are the very specific, yet small aims to help our big aims, which allows us to deploy our teams to coach and build those relationships with people who are engaged in the front lines of the work. It also allows us to collect good data in comparison to “this is what I feel like” or “this is what it, you know, my gut is telling me.” It also helps us make the best next step decisions as to what do we want to do next because we’re collecting good data on small actionable items, ultimately allowing for our entire organization to engage in the process. But harvesting the small wins is what allows us to build trust like you were talking about. It allows us to gain that momentum and it allows us to tell our stories. And so we are really working hard to aim small so that we miss small.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, so good, Ryan. And, you know, I just, as I hear listening to you, you know, I just, I started the new year with just kind of what my reflective thoughts were about what needs to occur in 2025 and really talking about how, I mean, we almost have to push harder, right, and be very tight in that push, and then make sure that we’re really, I think I love what you’re talking about and harvesting those wins and looking at the very specific focused areas that we want to connect to and connect our teams to. I mean, that’s just such an example of really, I think, what it means to, to really tighten what we do, but really drive hard.

I mean, we’re just going to have to drive hard. It’s not time to let up, you know, and I think sometimes we want to feel like we want to let up because it feels like it’s been so heavy, but I don’t think this is the year. It’s kind of was my belief. I don’t know. I may be proved wrong with that, but I don’t I don’t think so. I think we’re going to be driving hard for quite a while.

Ryan Carpenter: Yeah, no doubt about it. And staying small too really allows every employee in the organization to stay engaged in the conversation. If you’re saying, “we just need to improve attendance,” that is so broad that people just get lost in that conversation, but really focusing on when we dropped kids off in the morning off the bus. Like that’s a very tangible specific measurement that, you know, obviously attendance is a very wide-ranging thing, but just that very specific thing allows all players to engage in that.

Janet Pilcher: Absolutely. And people understand it, internalize it, you know, how to attack it and go. So good, Ryan. So, you know, I’m going to get back to just some old thoughts here, but just again, coaching teams and our, and just the importance of great leaders coach their teams well. You know, I kind of took the, the leaders have not led well until their teams have performed well from Wooden’s book, you know, about teaching and just kind of transferred that to leaders. And so he was such a great coach.

Ryan Carpenter: Yes, he was.

Janet Pilcher: And so, you know, when you look at the coaching piece, the four aspects that we talk about is seeking input from others to make the good decisions and really understanding what that means, listening to that feedback, probing individual thoughts for deeper understanding and applying feedback to improve. And that doesn’t mean everybody gets their own way. It just means we’re just truly listening and processing and moving to action. And that’s really what short cycles of improvement are, right?

I mean, we’re looking at data and going through that process. So, you know, thinking about what you do and do so well with short cycles, can you explain the purpose of these cycles and the way you all do them and how you approach them?

Ryan Carpenter: Absolutely. So these cycles are paramount to our work and success at Estacada School, because first, they keep our organization focused and anchored to our strategic plan and our mission, vision, and values. But second, we use these short cycles just to get a better at getting better, like Tony Bryk says, to allow us to just get better at getting better.

If you want your organization to have an improvement mindset, you have to regularly start and finish, emphasis on the finish, these short cycles of improvement. Just the exercise alone equips our leaders and your leaders with the ability to practice talking about data, to own the data, and to empower the others to engage in the work as well. It’s really the practice of the short cycles that sharpens your leadership teams, which gives them the confidence to lead the work with their leadership teams and those that they supervise.

If I could give you just a current example of a problem that we’re working on as we speak in a new short cycle that just actually started about two months ago, that required us to seek input, listen to feedback, probe individuals and apply the feedback to improve like you just talked about, Janet. That is a change in our middle school start times, which correlated to so many other problems inside our system. Estacada Middle school last year, which is our lowest current performing building in academics, attendance, and behavior, all three. And so our team of teachers and middle school leaders and committees of parents made a decision that they wanted to change the middle school start times to reflect that of the elementary school start and stop time and to no longer go at the high school start and stop time, which is longer. This was a group of people who we empowered to make this decision. We did a great job of rolling out and communicating that decision.

At the beginning of this school year, we executed that decision that was made by this collective group of people. Then a new problem emerged. As we released the middle school students and the elementary school students at the same time, our bus drivers were ill-equipped with the capacity to manage the behavior of middle school students on the bus while waiting to load elementary school students on the bus. And so we immediately got instant resistance and feedback from our bus drivers saying, “hey, we have a major problem here and it’s not a people problem, it’s a systems problem.”

And so that forced our organization to have to engage with our bus drivers to work collaboratively and collectively and empower them to ultimately come up with some type of a decision. About two weeks ago, just before the winter break, we brought a new team together and we created a system where we were going to change how we picked up kids. We now pick up the middle school kids first and then we pick up the elementary school kids rather than our bus drivers having to fight with the elementary kids while trying to wrangle the middle school kids onto the bus outside of the building.

This has been an excellent execution again throughout the system, but a new problem emerged and that was our elementary school folks who are releasing at the same time now managing kids who are waiting and loitering to get onto the bus. And so as we come back from winter break, and today is technically our first day back in Estacada Schools, we are now conducting a new short cycle of improvement to make sure that the changes that we made, what we did is we moved our middle school start time and stop time up five minutes. So now we’re releasing middle school students five minutes earlier so that there’s less loitering time all the way around and so now we’re going to be collecting data on that change, but that’s a quick specific example of a short cycle of improvement and how one solution led to a problem which led to a solution which led to a problem and so on. And that’s very common in this type of systems improvement work.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, and you know, Ryan, as you’re talking, you know I think about, I know you’ve been doing this for a long time in the, and building your cultural piece, too, so you know I think about people going out, out the door and just working in those short cycles of improvement. There’s a trust factor there as well, right, and I think this, because you’re right, when we implement something. it’s going to have a domino effect on something else that we couldn’t anticipate, but our people are going to trust that they’re going to be involved in that the solution building and continue to be involved in the input in the process and improving what’s there, but your people trust you to do that.

Ryan Carpenter: Yep, absolutely. And if you, if you audit this entire process, this wasn’t any decisions that were made in a vacuum. Like if you think about the different people inside our organization that have had the opportunity to participate and collaborate in the decision-making process, really, even though it’s still not perfect yet, we have empowered so many within inside our organization to play a role in this solution-oriented process. And that’s also how you develop that trust that you were talking about, Janet, is allowing people to engage in the problem.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, so good. So let’s dig a little bit deeper just in terms of like what this looks like, how it how it works. So when you’re engaging in these improvement cycles, just talk a little bit about like, how do you seek input from employees? What do you do with that input?

How do you communicate back and follow up after receiving like, what is that? Even though you’re solving different problems, you’re still creating that same systems process as you’re moving forward. What does that look like for you all?

Ryan Carpenter: Well, thankfully, we use the toolbox given to us through our great partnership with Studer Education. You know, before Studer, we were surveying people to death. The questions were bad. We never shared the results. And there were very unsound surveys really from the theoretical perspective. We also acted on gut feeling a lot, really with no data at all. And that’s what resulted in a lot of knee jerk decisions inside our organization. And I was guilty of that too. I want to put that on the record.

Today, we use rounding, we use plus deltas, we use our employee forums, and we are more targeted in committee work and stoplight reports to better inform the progress of our short cycles of improvements. I’m so proud to share with you, Janet, that really after five years of dedicated work and installing the evidence-based leadership framework into our entire organization, we now have teachers who round with students, coaches who round with teachers, principals who round with coaches, district directors who round with principals, and the superintendent and the cabinet rounds with its directors. And so we now have a healthy, linear line of data and information collection focused on those short cycles, which really ultimately allows for major organizational alignment, which correlates to an improved culture.

A quick example, if I could, of how we’ve been able to utilize this, because I know a lot of school districts across America are experiencing major pain points when it comes to students making inappropriate contact or harming teachers inside the classroom. And this is something that we’ve been working on through the entire process.

And, you know, as kids were hitting teachers in the general education classroom, our teachers were instantly pulling the principals out of their office to engage with this behavior circumstance, which really deviated or distracted our principals from leading this evidence-based leadership work because they’re being pulled to these crises in the classroom, skipping, by the way, para educators, learning specialists, and so many other systems that are in place to support these behaviors and so many experts through that process.

And so as we tried to tackle this problem last year, Janet, 72 teachers got hit and or harmed inside the Estacada School District last year, because of this unwanted contact. And so as we brought, again, talking about bringing teams together to co-own the problem and to co-solve the solutions of how we can improve this process, we completely looked at every single step inside our systems as to how we respond to these behaviors. We empowered our learning specialists to play a deeper role of how we’re supporting kids. We trained our teachers and our para educators on how to work with students in those volatile escalating situations.

And I’m happy to share with you today, Janet, that exactly one year from when we started working this problem, I told you 72 teachers got hit. This year, only nine so far. So we’ve actually seen an 87.5%, 87% improvement utilizing our measurements and these short cycles of improvement to actually correlate to some of our big aims by using short cycles and small aims to support that.

And the big win, by the way, is what we’re seeing is culturally, this is where we’re experiencing our win in our in an employee engagement survey. And our employee engagement survey went up from year to year. But the three major areas where you will see growth as you work on these short cycles in this case, was the question: “I have a clear understanding of my expectations as an employee.” That went up .12. The “I have the support needed from leadership in my immediate work environment” went up .06.

And here’s my favorite one because we’re all dealing with this. “I feel supported in balancing my work responsibilities” went up .29. And so this is how we’re harvesting small wins, celebrating and recognizing those who are engaged in the work and using these short cycles and measurements to tell our stories and empower our leaders to develop as leaders.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, that’s an incredible improvement and so important for your teachers, Ryan, you know, and your, and your students and families, I mean, you know, I mean, no one wins with the, you know, the 72 hits, right? I mean, no one wins that in any way. And so just that, just the, the, the outcome, the outcomes speak for themselves in terms of the numbers. It also touches people in a very significant way about how they enter their work every day and how families and students are really getting a better outcome from that as well.

So the other thing I really love about what you said is there are multiple tools and tactics and measures and tools and surveys that we do, but they’re not isolated from each other, right? I mean, you’re looking at when you do X, you’re looking at what the outcome is when you’re doing something else and you’re really triangulating that information to see the true value of what you’ve contributed. And that, that’s from the, the measure piece as well as just how people show up every day and, and how they feel that they’re supported. So, so important.

You know, again, gets back to the work is going to continue to be hard and our people, the people who show up every day wanting to do the best that they possibly can, just truly need our leaders to provide the best that they can.

So I’m gonna, I’m gonna kind of go high level again with, you know, just thinking about, how does being a good coach of your people make you a better leader? You know, thinking of all what you talk about, but how does that just make you a better leader?

Ryan Carpenter: Yeah, great question. When you think about good coaches, you mentioned John Wooden, and we’ve all had, you know, very meaningful and impactful coaches in our life. You know, the things that I think that they exhibit or the examples they exhibit is they empower people, they engage people, and ultimately, those teams under good coaches achieve because of the culture that was built.

And so in this work, particularly, which is, which is very hard work, especially being the leader of this work, is you always need to remember that you have to empower your people to just execute in the work and mistakes are going to happen. And, and we can celebrate even inside those mistakes because there’s learning inside of that work.

But while you empower people, you also always need to be the leader who is making sure that the empowerment is aligned in the work that you’re trying to establish in the first place. I think so often, you know, we have some great Studer coaches in this organization that work with so many school districts across the country, and they come in, they work with the teams, and then they leave. And I think the leaders so often say, “okay, now go execute what the coach just told us to do.” And obviously, you’re going to come back and report back a ton of variation because what that looks like is how one person interpreted that is different than how another leader interpreted that. And if you’re experiencing a lot of yo-yoing inside your organization right now, that’s because there’s not a clear understanding of what a five out of five looks like or what “right” looks like.

And so as the leader, while you empower your people to execute that work, please make sure that everyone has a crystal clear understanding of what “right” looks like. What I do every year, just to make sure that I myself am aligned in the background and the foundation, is I read your book, Maximize Performance, Janet, every summer, and I read Quint Studer’s book, Hardwiring Excellence, every summer. So then when I start the school year, I am grounded in the true fundamentals of what that looks like because I know John Wooden and other great coaches, the first thing you do is fundamentals in every season, regardless of how expert you are. And so staying grounded is so uncritical.

Then you just need to engage people to do the work, ask for the data. Once a month in Estacada, we have developed an improvement lab where we bring all of our leaders who have leader action plans and who are leading short cycles of improvement, just to come together simply to talk about the work so that they can engage it, we can hold them accountable for doing what they said that they would do. And through that practice, they just get better at talking about the work, looking at the work, and talking about what to do next with the work.

And then lastly, as I talked about achieving results, the only way to achieve those results is to harvest those small wins. I believe that’s Principle Nine in the Nine Principles. Harvest those small wins, celebrate those who are doing great work, the people is who needs to be recognized for doing great work. And that ultimately allows you to tell your story. And it’s your ability to tell your story through small wins is what ultimately leads to your accomplishment of the big aims which are so overwhelming when you think about them. But those small, small stories and steps is what gets you to the top of the mountain.

Janet Pilcher: Yeah, so good, Ryan. We’re going to be able to see that in action coming up at Destination High Performance in Estacada. So in our last minute, you know, talk a little bit about what people can see if they visit with you.

Ryan Carpenter: Well, it’s hard to believe that this will be our third year hosting Destination High Performance in Estacada. And it is one of our most favorite events that we do all year long in partnership and conjunction with the great people of Studer Education. Really, I believe it’s the only conference in the United States that exists where educators and leaders alike get to see the work in action with their own eyes, with the opportunity to learn and collaborate with others who are doing the work. And they get to be in the classroom, but still get to listen to nationally recognized speakers and leaders who are actively engaged in the work just like we all are, which is so paramount.

This year is going to be a little bit different only because now that it’s our third year and we have a lot of people who are at varying levels of implementation of this work, we’re excited that we’re going to work hard to differentiate this experience for beginners, intermediates, and advanced people who are engaged in this work and a strategically designed agenda to really try our best to support the needs of all. For people who want to sign up, Janet, they can go to estacdaschools.org/DHP2025. And I’m hoping that we can share these links as well in various spots.

But there are only 200 slots available. We’re already a third full. And this event, as you know, Janet, sells out fast. In the two years that we’ve done it prior, it’s been completely sold out with a waiting list. And so I do encourage you to just come celebrate inside the Estacada School District, have your team see this work with their own eyes, and have the opportunity to collaborate and just talk with other people who are engaged in this work just the same as you. We’re all doing it.

Janet Pilcher: So good. And I’ve been there myself, Ryan. So I can say that it is such a great event. And for any of you that are wanting to see the work in action and engage with your colleagues, it’s just a great place to be.

As always, I enjoy the conversations that I have with you. So appreciate your leadership and the work that you do and the partnership you have with us. Good luck into the new semester and a good year that you’re having and continuing with that, Ryan. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Ryan Carpenter: Thank you, Janet, and fire up. Happy New Year to all.

Conclusion

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Janet Pilcher: It’s like Ryan said, empowering and engaging your people is what great coaches do. And this creates a culture where everyone is driven to achieve. As a superintendent facilitating monthly improvement labs, he’s exemplifying this in action. You can see it. Thank you, Ryan, for empowering the people you lead to do their very best.

I’ve been there on site in Estacada, and I have seen it with my eyes and experienced in the conversations that I’ve had with your team. If you’d like to join Ryan and other passionate educators and leaders to explore improvement science and the improvement process, you’ll want to be at Destination High Performance March 19th and 20th this year. When you attend DHP, you’ll leave with practical strategies and tools you can implement to achieve student outcomes. It’s going to be at the Estacada School District. Again, I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. You all please take a moment and check it out. And to do so, please visit Estacadaschools.org/DHP2025 to learn more and get registered. I’ll also leave a link in the show notes for you.

As always, I thank you for tuning in to this episode of Accelerate Your Performance. I hope to see you and connect with you and continue our conversations as we build reflections on the things that I talked about with Christi and Ryan more to come. Have a great week, everyone.