The Great Engagement: How CEOs Create Exceptional Cultures

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Tom Willis. Tom is a former classroom teacher and superintendent and is co-founder of Phoenix Performance Partners, where he helps leaders create exceptional organizational cultures. He's previously worked as an engineer at Intel and as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and he's the author with Brad Zimmerman of the new book, The Great Engagement, How CEOs Create Exceptional Cultures, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:40] Announcer:

And now our feature presentation.

[00:43] SPEAKER_00:

Tom, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thanks, Justin. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm excited to talk about The Great Engagement. And the title is definitely a nod. Anyone who looks at the cover will realize that that title is a nod to The Great Resignation.

[00:57]

What did you see happening with The Great Resignation? And how did you respond to that in The Great Engagement?

[01:04] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, great question. You know, it's a little bit sad, frankly, what's going on out there. There's so many folks that are disengaged, actively resigned about their jobs. And it's frustrating for a lot of leaders. You know, you've got two thirds of the workforce in the US is feeling disengaged. You know, that's amazing when you really think about it.

[01:24]

And 74% of those are actively looking for new work or open to new opportunities, according to Gallup. and the result of all that is that productivity and profitability have fallen you know the stress on people associated with it and the cost of the us economy is 550 million dollar 50 million days off a year at a cost of 500 billion dollars and ultimately you just got folks who are not loving what they're doing i've been noticing

[01:55] SPEAKER_00:

some trends in teacher absenteeism and certainly we want people to take sick days when they're sick when they need them for their physical or their mental health but it really struck me over the last couple of years how blatantly people are just taking days off because they're not engaged right there's nothing wrong with them there's not any you know particular reason to take those days off but it's just that lack of engagement the lack of something in their work that is not the way it should be. So thinking about this as an organizational culture issue, we know we have structural things going on in our profession with recruitment and the number of people entering the profession and things like that. So we have some macro numbers problems. Help us frame this as an organization level problem though.

[02:42] SPEAKER_01:

Ultimately, that's where it happens. Engagement doesn't really happen at a macro level. It really is micro. It's the people that I work with directly and engage with, and specifically my leader or leaders. It's both and. A lot of times we look to the leader to answer all these questions.

[02:59]

But a lot of times we have to look at ourselves for the answers as well. We can't expect an organization to kind of give us everything that we need. We have a huge responsibility as well that we're all cultural ambassadors, if you will, meaning we all have a responsibility to either add to or detract from the culture that we're working in. There is no neutral. We don't get to blame the boss because things aren't great around here. We have to look in the mirror and say, what am I doing to make it better?

[03:28]

And we need to help the leader to make things better. So it's a both and. It's really what creates a powerful team. And our way of thinking, we tried to really simplify it because we've been doing this work for 30 plus years now across all sorts of industries, a lot of schools across the country. And what we really found out is that engagement in a way is quite simple. It's not easy, but it's quite simple.

[03:52]

It's aspiration times empowerment. So in really simple terms, that's the equation that we like to think about. And so let me take one of those at a time. So aspiration is different than inspiration or even different than a vision or a purpose or a mission. Those things are all very important. But if you think about it, And aspiration is something that I aspire to, something that excites me.

[04:16]

It's that intrinsic motivation. You don't have to get, quote unquote, buy-in from me because I already have it. I'm aspiring to it. And so what does that mean? Well, it means leaders need to figure out what do my people aspire to? What do they individually want to do with their lives?

[04:33]

What matters to them? which there's a lot of ways to do that we can talk about if that's interesting to you. But fundamentally, it's personalized. Aspiration is personalized. Very different than what we typically do in organizations, which is declare a mission statement, and then we look for people to comply with it. It's like, what's the mission statement?

[04:54]

And did you memorize it? That's a compliance orientation that... That doesn't really work very well, obviously. And then the second part of that equation is empowerment.

[05:03]

People, especially in the world of education, are highly educated. They're highly talented and they want to be empowered to do what they think makes sense. And too often we have these rules and restrictions that kind of bottle people up and bottle their creativity up and nobody really thrives in that sort of environment. And so empowering people is a huge part of what

[05:28] SPEAKER_00:

creates ultimately more engagement in the- Let's talk about that piece for just a moment because I think there are some issues around autonomy that very much affect teachers' job satisfaction in particular that may lead to feelings of disengagement or disempowerment. What do you see as the way that school leaders should be thinking about that question of autonomy? Because, you know, certainly we feel pressure to get everybody on the same page, to bring some consistency from classroom to classroom, to be able to guarantee certain things for our students, regardless of which teacher they have. And, you know, so to leaders, to some extent, variation from person to person is is a little bit of a problem. I don't want to say it is a problem, but it feels like a problem if it means we have inconsistency. Help us see that from the teacher's perspective a little bit.

[06:17]

Someone who is looking to be engaged in their work and sees that idea of being just like their peers to be kind of a negative, how should we be thinking about that as leaders?

[06:28] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I love that question as if I have the answer, Justin, because it's a highly complex question. We human beings are very complex and there's no one size fits all, which is part of the answer, by the way, that in a way, especially in education, we're constantly looking for the silver bullet, right? It's the new curriculum, the new instructional technology, whatever. And most of that stuff doesn't really deliver on the promise. fundamentally we're in the business of human beings and growth and learning and in really simple terms we do a great job in a lot of schools now teaching sel right social emotional learning But as adults, we're not being it. And kids are tremendously astute at picking up on this stuff, right?

[07:13]

They know that that teacher doesn't like that teacher or that teacher doesn't like that principal or that assistant principal doesn't like that assistant teacher. And that's the real challenge right there. It's who we're being as a team that's at the root of a lot of these problems. And it has us avoiding conflict. It has us avoiding conversations we need to have. It has us retreating to ourselves and many times blaming others and obviously creates a vicious cycle.

[07:46]

And so I don't know if that gets in the ballpark of answering your question, but I think too often we're looking at sort of superficial solutions when we really need to dive deep into what's going on below the surface. Because one of our contentions is that we are much more emotional beings than we think we are. that we make decisions quite quickly at an emotional level. And the example I always point to for this is, you know, Justin, how did you pick the house that you live in now?

[08:18] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, you just know when you see it, right?

[08:20] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and that's an honest answer, which I appreciate. But most people say, well, it's in a great community. We got a great deal on it. You know, the schools are fantastic. It's got this and this and this. When really what happened is the person walks in and within about 10 seconds, is my estimate, we make a decision, oh, this is it.

[08:40]

And then later we go to work on justifying the emotional decision we already made with facts and figures. And so a lot of this work really gets down to if you're going to go about improving things and making a more engaging culture, You got to get out of the superficial. You've got to slow down in order to hurry up. And what I mean by that is you got to slow down, take the time with your team to have the conversations you need to have and to really get down to that much more emotional level, the much more root cause unconscious type behaviors that are driving the culture of the school. And when you can do that, it's amazing what can come out of it. It's amazing the results that can be produced.

[09:25] SPEAKER_00:

I'm intrigued to hear you say that because I feel like behavior is such an important place to focus because it's one of the things that we can hopefully get people change. If we see behaviors that are not helpful, we can ask people to change those behaviors. We can pay attention to our own behaviors, and they're a little bit more visible and tangible than, say, people's aspirations or their feelings or things like that. Talk to us a little bit about behavior and accountability and how that can show up in people's engagement. Because certainly we've all found ourselves in the situation where we have to deal with someone's behavior that has been negative. And we have to say, when you roll your eyes in a meeting or when you talk to your colleague that way, that has a negative impact.

[10:05]

And we can ask for change in behavior in that sense. Take us into a little bit more of a comprehensive set of thinking about behavior though, and its contribution to culture.

[10:15] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's everything. And it's, again, it gets back to that, the unconscious behaviors, which is the hard part to notice, right? And, you know, there's a lot of talk about people's unconscious biases and that you have to become more aware of your unconscious biases, which I think is good aspirationally, but good luck because the last I checked, there's several hundred of these that have been codified. There's a codex called the unconscious bias codex. That's just fascinating. All these different scientists have figured these things out.

[10:45]

So becoming aware of hundreds of different unconscious biases is really difficult. So you really do need a team. You need a team to help each other. And the leader needs to lead first. The leader needs to be the one that starts to be open. You know, Brene Brown talks a lot about this, obviously, with her ideas around vulnerability.

[11:02]

And to us, it's not so much about vulnerability. It's about being open. It's about being real. It's about being honest and genuine. And when you do that, it can feel vulnerable. But I know very few people who wake up in the morning excited to be vulnerable.

[11:18]

That's just not an end game that most people are excited about. But what we can do is wake up being excited about being open, honest, real, genuine, and that produces the results. And so from a behavior perspective, if you're looking to shape a culture, then it's helpful to know what some of the tools in the toolkit are. And we think there's really three in simple terms. There's leadership, there's management, and there's coaching. And those are three very distinct tools.

[11:47]

We don't treat them that way. In most articles, you won't see them treated separately necessarily. In fact, in some LinkedIn articles, you'll see management's bad. It's all about leadership or it's all about coaching. And we think that's actually not very helpful that you actually need all three of them because it's like being a carpenter. You would never work with like just a hammer or maybe just a saw.

[12:12]

No, you wanna have multiple tools in your toolkit and they're all very different. And so let's start with leadership because that's always the one that needs to go first. Leadership is about generating a view of the future that others take on as their future. Not because you sold it to them, not because you got buy-in, but because they genuinely want that same future. That's the aspirational component. And without a shared future, without leadership, you've got nothing to manage and you've got nothing to coach.

[12:41]

And that right there, Justin, I think is the biggest problem. As we're trying to coach people and manage people that we have no alignment with. And we wonder why it fails. And I was guilty of this too, by the way, when I was a superintendent, we took some of our best, highest performing teachers. We slapped the label of ELA coach on them or math coach, and we sent them out to the multiple schools around Detroit. And it didn't particularly work very well.

[13:07]

And that's because, well, lots of reasons, but one of them is that coaching is only coaching if it's asked for. And too often we're giving people coaching, we're giving them constructive feedback, quote unquote. And I don't care what you call it, but if I don't want it, that's annoying and it's arrogant and it's very disrespectful. So the first job of leadership is to get the person, myself included, open to that coaching. And there's a lot of ways to do that. That's not always easy.

[13:38]

I'm not saying it is, but if you don't have the person's interest in your help, then do not give it to them.

[13:44] SPEAKER_00:

I wonder if we could talk about a couple of scenarios and, you know, like if you were advising me as a principal, what would you pull from the book to steer me in the right direction? So taking that example, let's say I have a, you know, newer teacher, earlier career teacher, not someone who I would consider a master teacher, and someone who I want to take feedback better than they currently take feedback, right? They have some pretty clear areas for growth. Maybe we have an instructional coach who has been rebuffed, whose efforts have been resisted by this early career teacher. And thinking about those three concepts, leadership, management, and coaching, how should I look at this situation? If I've got a coach who's ready to help and able to help, and I've got a What sends us in the right direction?

[14:26] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it starts with that honest conversation. And there's lots of different ways to approach it depending on the specifics of the circumstances. But almost always it's an issue of leadership, meaning it's almost always an issue of we're not aligned on the future that we're going towards together. And so slowing down to talk to that person about just really simple questions like, hey, why do you do this job? Like, this is not easy. Being an educator is very difficult, especially in this day and age.

[14:53]

Like, why do you do this? Why do you keep showing up? And just start there and then have a conversation. Really understand what makes that person tick, what motivates them. And then start talking about, what do you want to accomplish this year? What do you want to accomplish the next five years?

[15:07]

What do you aspire to? How can I help you as a leader? How can I help you as your boss? Those are the conversations that need to happen first to really build that trust and build that relationship so that person knows that you're on their side. Because that's the other key to coaching is that If I don't think that person's actually on my side, then I don't care what they say. I don't care how smart they are.

[15:32]

I don't care how many years they've been doing this. I'm not interested because I don't think they actually care about me. So that's hugely foundational to it. Now, that's one approach. Sometimes it's just a matter of asking. It's like, hey, Justin, I've got some ideas for you if you're open to them.

[15:49]

And then just shut up, right? And see what they say. A lot of times we don't ask, right? And then we wonder why it doesn't work. Well, ask, just ask, right? And if they're open to it, my wife and I will do this with each other, frankly, Justin.

[16:01]

It's something we've worked on the last five, 10 years. And there are times when she'll be like, nope, not interested. And before I say anything, she can tell. I've got a suggestion, right? I've got an idea. And she's like, nope, not interested, Tom.

[16:15]

Come back tomorrow or come back next week or come back never. And I have to respect that and vice versa. And we've gotten to the point where we can do that 99% of the time quite well and quite effectively. So coaching is the only coaching to ask for. If they say no, then stop right there. Do not give it to them.

[16:32]

Now management, which we didn't really talk about yet is the other key component. And we do talk a lot about this, you know, in the book. So that's a great place to kind of unpack and learn more if you're interested. So management is getting people to make promises or agreements to do things. So if you think about that, what are we managing? We're not managing the person.

[16:54]

We're managing a commitment. We're managing an agreement, right? So we would contend you cannot manage people. You can only manage agreements that you have between people. And so the work there is to take the time to create those agreements, to create understanding, to create a shared commitment to doing something. Because when I've got that shared commitment, Now I got something I can go back to later and hold you quote unquote accountable to, which is a whole nother conversation.

[17:22]

Accountability is not well done. It's a nightmare. And we have a whole different way of approaching it called supportive accountability, which completely kind of does a 360 on what we tend to think about from accountability. But I'll hold off on that unless you're interested.

[17:38] SPEAKER_00:

Well, let's get into this a little bit more. I'm thinking about the scenario from just a moment ago where we have a teacher who needs some support, has some areas of growth, doesn't want to work with a coach. Let's say as a leader, I notice that this teacher is using a lot of sick leave and does not seem to actually need it. It just seems to be stemming from a lack of engagement, just not really committed to the role and they have the leave, so they're using it. And that sometimes maybe puts us in a bind as a school. We don't have enough subs.

[18:05]

We weren't expecting them to be absent. and our subs are busy elsewhere, so other teachers are having to cover or I'm having to cover the class due to that absence. Help me think about those commitments and that person's vision for the future and the kind of accountability piece because I know if I don't address this, if we just have, you know, continued kind of high rate of absenteeism, maybe every week this person's taking a day off because they're just not feeling it, but there's not really anything wrong either. How can I think about managing that commitment to show up for kids on a consistent basis?

[18:38] SPEAKER_01:

And you're saying that particular scenario, the person is aligned on the future. They share the same commitment. They share the same aspiration and vision. And they've made a specific commitment to show up.

[18:51] SPEAKER_00:

Let's say it's a little weak. It's a job. They've committed to do the job, but they're not sure if this career is for them. It's kind of a wait and see situation. And they're not feeling it at the moment.

[19:03] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So what I would say is that you don't have an agreement. So you got nothing to manage. You got nothing to hold the person accountable to. And it seems so simple, right? But that is the key, Justin, is you've got to make sure that you've got it one way or the other.

[19:18]

Because if you don't, it's like you got one foot on the dock and one foot in the canoe, right? It's a very tenuous spot to be in, right? You got to either be in or be out. The beautiful part about management, leadership and coaching are very artistic. They're very creative. Management's not.

[19:35]

It's very black and white. It's very binary. You either commit or you don't. There is no in between. So that's where I'd start as I just sit down with the person and say, hey, look, this is what's necessary for this job. Are you committed to this like life or death?

[19:51]

Yes or no? You can say no, by the way, that's fine. But I just need to know because then it creates the next step in the process and what I need to do from there. So getting that crystal clear agreement is really important because we don't do it all the time, especially educators. And I'm guilty of this too, by the way. We tend to be conflict avoidant and a little indirect.

[20:12]

And then we wonder why people don't do what we never asked them to do in the first place. And then we get mad at them. It's like crazy. It's like, you know, again, I did this too. So we don't slow down and get the agreement in the first place. Without that agreement, then you've got nothing to support them around.

[20:31]

You've got nothing to support them in being accountable because ultimately you can't hold somebody accountable. You can only support somebody in being accountable for something that they agreed to do because they want to do it.

[20:42] SPEAKER_00:

I was surprised to hear you say there's nothing to manage if there's no commitment there. But as soon as you said it, I was like, oh, yeah, that totally makes sense. I have an expectation of this person that they don't have of themselves. So certainly I'm not going to succeed in holding them to a commitment they haven't actually made. And we might be afraid to ask that question. Like, are you actually interested in this job?

[21:00]

Do you want this job? Because like, what if the answer is no, you know? What if they say, no, I actually, I'd prefer to be out of here as quickly as possible, you know, and that may be, that may have been the best available person probably was the best available person or we wouldn't have hired them. And I think often in that, that kind of, you know, I need somebody and this is the person that I have kind of situation.

[21:20] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's unpack that though, okay, for a second. So there's a lot in what you just said. First of all, you said one of my least favorite words, which is expectations. Where do expectations live? In my own head, right? Yeah, in your own head.

[21:32]

Very amorphous. I have no idea what your high expectations are, quote unquote. But if you tell me what they are, then I know what they are and I can try to meet them and then we can create an agreement. So one of the biggest problems we have is this language of expectations. I can never meet your high expectations unless you tell me exactly what they are. So that's one of the first steps is to get crystal clear about that.

[21:55]

And I've been trying to get the world to get rid of that word. Not really, but you get the idea. I'm being a bit extreme. That and performance reviews, I think that we need to get rid of in the world, but that's a whole nother podcast. So yeah, expectations, not a great place to start. That particular person, I noticed you said it, we're afraid.

[22:13]

That's what I'm talking about. That's what I was talking about before with that unconscious behavior. That's digging deep. As a leader, you got to get clear about what are you afraid of? And a lot of times it's not terribly rational. So for instance, you said, well, this is the only person, this is the best person I could find.

[22:31]

Well, is it? They're not showing up to work. You're trying to tell me you can't find somebody who can at least show up to work? But we stop there. We stop with like, oh, I'm afraid to lose the person. Why are you afraid to lose somebody who's not doing the basics of the job?

[22:47]

You should be excited. If they tell you they don't want to be there and they don't like the job, you should rejoice and say, that's great. Thank you for being so honest with me. How can I help you find a job that will be a great fit for you? And get them out of that organization immediately. Help, I like to say, externally promote them.

[23:07]

And it's a joke in a way, but I'm not kidding because that could be the greatest gift that you give to that person is to help them find something that they want to do. And it opens up a spot where you can fill it with somebody else. Now, I know that hiring is a challenge right now, so I don't mean to be Pollyanna about this. There are real challenges in finding good people. But the best organizations are not having a hard time finding people because they have really good cultures and they have really good leadership. So if you're having a hard time finding good people, unless you're literally in the middle of nowhere, although even that with this day of Zoom and webinars and whatnot or online meetings, is becoming less of an issue.

[23:50]

But unless you're in the middle of nowhere, then you need to look in the mirror and figure out how do we create a culture and a team that attracts really good people and stop blaming the world, stop blaming the candidate pool. I've got a friend in Chicago who he's an African-American CEO. He's phenomenally successful, great guy. I got my MBA with him at Notre Dame. And he says, stop being surprised that you're catching trout in a trout pond. And his whole point there is that, stop complaining to me that you can't find really good, in his case, African-American engineers, because you're not looking for them in the right place.

[24:26]

Go look where they hang out. Go look where they are. And I think that same discipline needs to be applied. We've been doing the same old stuff in HR for years. We post a job. Well, that's not cutting it anymore.

[24:38]

Do more. Get more creative. Go find the people. Go find out where they hang out. Go find out where really good educators coalesce and then go after them. Stop waiting for them to show up.

[24:49] SPEAKER_00:

I've noticed just a huge bifurcation in hiring where there are people who are in healthy organizations with great cultures who don't tell anybody that they don't want the secret to get out, but they would never give up that job because it's a great place to work. And at the same time, there are other organizations that have dysfunctional cultures that are having a terrible time keeping people because all the good people see the difference and flock to the healthier organizations. I'm really intrigued, Tom, by what you said about not wanting to lose them. And of course, if somebody is not doing the basics of the job, it's not a great loss, right? It was kind of eye-opening as soon as you said it, that of course...

[25:27]

you know, we do need to find the right person for that job. Do you think we have unrealistic expectations for people's capacity for growth? You know, because like part of me rebels against that idea and wants to say, well, if this person is not engaged in this job, I just need to motivate them. I need to find a way to get them engaged. Like I want to see this as a fixable problem for that individual who doesn't want to be here. Help me think about that.

[25:53] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I agree. In fact, we sort of adopt as a mindset that every single person can grow and become the person that they have the potential to become and that the organization needs them to become. So that's just an operating premise that we adopt. In fact, we learn it when we go to professional coaching school. They talk about how every person is whole creative and resourceful they're not broken they don't need to be fixed they just need to be get beyond their self-limiting beliefs because a lot of this gets back to in some cases like childhood trauma and fears have got people by the throat and they just can't operate at their full potential and so a lot of our work is really helping people to get beyond those fears and those self-limiting beliefs so absolutely as operating premise as a leader Great place to start. Does that mean it works 100% of the time?

[26:43]

No, nothing in life is guaranteed. So there are risks and rewards. So it doesn't mean that you're always gonna be successful, but it's pretty high. It's in the 90% range. When you adopt that mindset, of helping a person grow that they follow your lead and they can grow it's just like we learn with kids right like you know if you think about the best teacher of the audience everyone in the audience right now think about the best teacher you ever had okay got a picture of that person in your head what did they do for you And I'll tell you that it's somewhere in the vein of they believed in you more than you did. They saw a future potential in you that you didn't see in yourself, especially me as a difficult, annoying middle school kid, right?

[27:32]

Those teachers saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. Well, we're all just grown children. So it's the same thing. As leaders, we should adopt that same mindset. How do I help this really difficult employee become the best version of themselves. Not easy, but that is the work of leadership.

[27:53]

And if you don't like it, then get out of leadership because that's your job. Your job fundamentally is to grow your people. Your job is to fundamentally grow your people. And if all you're doing is complaining about your people, then you're probably not in a great job. You're probably not in a great fit. It's just at the root of what you're supposed to be doing.

[28:13] SPEAKER_00:

And I'm thinking back to what you said earlier about that individual's vision for the future, that if someone does have an aspiration to be a successful career educator, that And currently they're not engaged. Well, then we have some opportunity and some work to do in realizing that vision and helping that person see that they can succeed. They can work toward it. They will have to do some things to succeed and become the kind of educator they want to be. But if ultimately that vision is not there, if someone is not interested, then that does put us in a different place. And I think so much of our profession...

[28:47]

has to do with the challenges that we face. I think we probably all assume going into education that we'll just be successful right out of the gate, that I'm going to get my own classroom and I'm going to do great at this. And then reality hits and we realize that some of our kids don't want to be there and some of our kids find different ways to make our lives challenging. And there's a bigger learning curve than we're used to or than we expect, right? That success in the classroom might be more difficult to achieve than our prior success as students or in other jobs.

[29:17] SPEAKER_01:

One of the other really effective ways to do this is, in fact, I'll put it on. We'll put together a landing page here, phoenixperform.com slash principal center. And I'll make sure that we put a copy of our engaged life inventory. It's a two sheet, two pager, really, really good stuff, but it gets at the heart of, are you living a most engaged life you can? And as a leader, it's a great place to start for yourself because you have to lead by example, but it's a great conversation to have, you know, print out an extra copy and give it to that person and have them ask them if they're willing to do it with you and then walk through it together.

[29:52]

Because we like to say that CEOs are really chief engagement officers and that we're all the CEO of our own life. And so we have to be intentional about creating that engagement. And again, it's a great way to sort of begin that conversation. The other thing that people can do is to be more direct, to sit down with the person. And if you've tried leadership, if you've tried managing, you tried coaching and you feel like they're just not getting you there, then sit down with the person and say, hey, look, I care a lot about you. I think you've got so much potential.

[30:24]

And I really want to help you. But I want to be really clear. You are failing at your job because of X, Y, and Z. I don't want to mix any words. I want to be very crystal clear about this. You are failing at your job.

[30:36]

And if we can't figure this out together, you will not have a job in whatever, two weeks, two months, two years. That can be very eye-opening for people. That can create a tremendous amount of motivation. And again, if they know that you're on their side, if they know that you really do care about them and you're trying to help them, that can create a significant breakthrough in their thinking. And sometimes you gotta take that tough love approach.

[31:02] SPEAKER_00:

Tom, that's very nice of you to create a page for our listeners to access that life inventory. You said that's at phoenixperform.com slash principal center?

[31:09] SPEAKER_01:

Yes, we'll put that together for sure. And also put a link to a couple other things that might be helpful. We've got obviously the book, which we'd love to share with the world. For any of the superintendents that may be listening, we have a group called The Interchange, which is a monthly gathering of superintendents and CEOs from across the country. It's industry diverse, which people love. It's done on Zoom.

[31:30]

So I could put a link to that as well. And then also put a link to the work that we do, which is really helping this work. It's helping transform a culture within a district or within the school building itself. So if anybody's interested in that, they can learn more about it. And we actually make a promise. to produce results.

[31:48]

We don't just take people through a dance and if it works or if it doesn't, we get paid. No, we don't like that. We don't think that's a good use of time. We want to be accountable for results. So we actually promise to produce those results. So if anybody's interested in the cultural transformation work, there'll be a link to learn more about that as well.

[32:06] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is The Great Engagement, How CEOs Create Exceptional Cultures. Tom Willis, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[32:14] SPEAKER_01:

Yes. Thank you, Justin. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you for having me.

[32:18] Announcer:

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