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Janet Pilcher: Hello everyone, welcome to Accelerate Your Performance. I’m Janet Pilcher. Looking forward to our time today.

You know, last year I published Hardwiring Excellence in Education. That’s the foundation of the work we do with leaders like you.

I started today by asking, “what does it mean to hardwire something?” Hardwired refers to a direct, fixed link between a device and the power source. Hardwiring means our systems that we have are ones that we count on, ones that are reliable. We count on our critical systems to work.

Take that and transfer it to leadership. People count on us as leaders. We’re the ones who are responsible for creating hardwired systems that our teams can depend on. Systems that work.

Our team relies on us. That’s an awesome, yet honorable responsibility. And as leaders, we want our actions to show, “you can count on me.” Our actions say, “I am reliable because I’m committed to working with my team to apply systems and processes that people trust and believe in.”

Hardwiring, then, is a non-negotiable for leaders. That’s why it’s so important to me and where I’m spending my life work.

Think about it. Hardwiring is integral to many things we depend on, our appliances, our cars. The goal is to minimize risk for those things that are standard practices, things that we count on. When something breaks, it’s disruptive. The more integral it is to our lives, the more serious the miswiring is. If that system continuously breaks, we lose confidence that it will work. It’s unreliable and disruptive to our lives.

I have an RV, as many of you know from some of my other episodes, and I expect my systems to be hardwired, or otherwise I’m stranded somewhere. I’m camping in fear. I don’t trust the systems in my RV. On my last camping trip, the slide outs failed to come in when we were leaving the campground. I pushed the button and nothing. I can’t drive down the road with my slide outs out, so I was stranded and panicked by having to be out of the RV park at a certain time and figuring out how to fix the problem.

So I had to call for help and pay a hefty cost for the convenient service. The verdict? A loose wire that was never hardwired in the right way. Now, when I go camping again, I hope that darn wire is hardwired. I’ve asked for multiple checks, but I’m now wondering what else is not hardwired. The more incidents that occur, the more apprehensive I get until I decide potentially to abandon the RV, to not want to do this anymore.

We want to build reliable and stable systems that minimize risk in our organizations. When our systems are reliable, we can apply more agility and change within our organization.

We have trust in our hardwired systems to take those risks, but it’s important for us to hardwire systems so we can take risk. So when we talk about failing and learning from our failures, that is fine to do, but only when we have hardwired systems that allow us to understand how we learn from those failures.

Here’s where leadership is key. In our educational systems, we need our people to help us build hardwired systems that lead to excellence. Our professional work environment becomes too disruptive when we fail to have hardwired systems. And that’s what hardwiring excellence in education is all about, using our Nine Principles Framework to support leaders to apply tools, tactics, and strategies that are in the book with our people to build systems leading to organizational excellence.

It’s important for us to understand that it’s the people that we need to help us hardwire our systems. And we also need hardwired systems to engage our people.

As we’re focusing on building excellence in our organization, think about what it takes for you as a leader to lead in a way that builds our trust in our systems and to hardwire those systems and processes in ways that build trust in our organization that help our people become deeply connected to the work.

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Thank you all for tuning in today. I hope this episode was helpful. It just gives us food for thought to think about how important it is for us to continue to hardwire excellence in education.

I look forward to connecting with you next time as we continue to focus on being our best at work. Have a great week, everyone.