Janet Pilcher: Janet Pilcher: Hello everyone, welcome to Accelerate Your Performance. I’m your host, Janet Pilcher, founder and president of Studer Education.

Last week I spent time with our partners and met new educational leader friends at the American Association of School Administrators Conference. Dr. Pat Greco and Dr. DeDe Ashby on our team were lead faculty for several AASA leader cohorts. Also, it was great to see so many of our partner superintendents graduate from some of the leader cohorts. Congratulations to them and a big thank you to AASA for the difference you make in our profession. Thank you for the hard work of putting on the conference and for the work that you do each and every day to support us in the educational field.

As we think about the episodes that we’ve been engaged in over the last several months, as we’ve entered the new year, and if you asked me to narrow down one theme from the conversations with the superintendents and executives, I’d have to say: feedback loops.

What do I mean? A feedback loop requires us to gather information, study that information, and act on it in some way. For the most part, we take few yet mighty actions on the feedback that we gain, and then we continue to gather information as we’re taking that action. We continue to study what is occurring. We recognize the bright spots and review the gaps and revise what we are doing to get better and better. When we see an action, we work to scale that across the organization when we see it working. And guess what? When we see it working and apply that action that is working, we still continue to apply feedback loops.

You’ve heard from our organizational partners that there are two key tactics that they believe are significant to gain input and apply feedback loops with their teams.

They administer our surveys and engage in a survey rollout process to move input to action. The leaders also engage in rounding conversations. We heard a lot about rounding, which are, they’re one-on-one conversations that focus on areas working well, barriers getting in the way of someone doing a good job, people who deserve to be recognized for good work, and talking about ways they need help to do their best work. Leaders then recognize the bright spots and people doing the good work. They also look for themes to determine barriers to focus on. Create one or two action items and apply a feedback loop to determine how well the actions are working. They continue to round with people to feed in continuous input into that feedback.

And that feedback loop just keeps churning and churning and churning with the actions that we take in the feedback and the new feedback that comes in. For surveys, leaders review trends in the survey results by item over time with their teams. They recognize areas working well, they focus on one or two areas to improve, they create improvement actions, and apply a feedback loop to determine how well that action is working. Same process with different datasets and moving that into that feedback loop so that we’re always getting better and better.

As organizations mature, I think what you heard was how to tie the surveys and leader rounding together, using rounding as a feedback strategy for areas they’re focusing on from the survey actions that they’re connected to. We can apply feedback loops to almost everything we do. That’s how we continue to get better and better. With that mindset and toolset, our ability to achieve high performing results becomes reachable, something that we’re always striving for, always knowing that we can get better, and we’re looking at the evidence and the conversations around that evidence to help us get better. It’s just part of our DNA. It’s part of what we do.

So in summary, feedback loops do this: they help us analyze, synthesize, adjust, and optimize performance over time. Feedback loops help us make more informed data-focused decisions that continue to be assessed and improved. And feedback loops help us identify areas for improvement and have the confidence and changes that need to be made because we’re continuing to study the impact of that decision, knowing when to continue and when to adjust and when to adapt.

I appreciate the time that the superintendents spent with me to focus on leadership excellence and what has transformed their organizations. Their stories are powerful. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to their impact stories, I encourage you to take a moment and listen. I always learn from my guests.

Feedback loops are transferable to everything we do. That’s how we get better. I hope you think about how you can build this line of thinking into your organizations so you can be at your best every day to help others be at their best. And when we do, our students will achieve unbelievable results.

To hear more stories, join us for two and a half hours a day on April 15th, 16th, and 17th for our virtual conference. We will host some of our best leaders offering mini master classes and being part of superintendent’s panels. We’ll talk about feedback loops and the impact that they have made with applying those feedback loops and applying tools and tactics that have helped them achieve unbelievable results. To learn more, just connect to studereducation.com/events. I hope to see you online.

And as always, thank you for tuning in to Accelerate Your Performance. I hope you all have a great week.