The Schooling America podcast covers issues and ideas relevant to leaders in American education. We bring in the brightest minds in administration, philosophy, culture, and beyond to reflect on topics that directly impact schools, organizations, and the children and families they serve. From cultural issues to operations to curriculum and pedagogy, Schooling America seeks to enrich the ideas, strategy, and execution of education institutions nationwide.
For the most recent episode, “Schools & the Wisdom of Patrick Lencioni,” Erik Twist and David Denton sat down with the Head of School at Xavier Charter Schools, Gary Moon, to discuss leadership team health and the Patrick Lencioni model. Below, you will find edited excerpts from the conversation:
Erik Twist: I’ve been looking forward to this conversation in particular, because one thing that’s really exciting for us at Arcadia is that we’re seeing more schools come to know and utilize Patrick Lencioni’s models, his framework, his approaches. Personally, when I was at Great Hearts many years ago, being introduced to Lencioni’s work was absolutely transformative for us. It helped diagnose a lot of our internal conflicts and weak points, and it gave us a shared lexicon for identifying where we were breaking down. Improving our interpersonal relationships, and overall team health, began to actually lay the foundations upon which better operations could start to flourish. So I’m really excited to see more and more groups popping up that are taking the Lencioni framework and translating it into the K-12 market.
Gary, I want to explore why the Lencioni framework was, or is, an important part of Xavier’s future, and what you learned as you went through the process of exploring Lencioni’s framework, his models, and the exercises that are just really crucial to teams having the types of conversations and gaining the clarity that they need. So, Gary, would you introduce Xavier and yourself and give us a little bit of the context under which you took up this team health work?
Gary Moon: Well, my name is Gary Moon. I’m the head of schools at Xavier Charter School in Twin Falls, Idaho. We are the area’s only classical charter school and are in competition now for students where we haven’t been before. Xavier’s been around since 2007, and I’ve been the head of schools here for 13 years, so a significant amount of time. It’s my first experience in a charter school, and my first experience with a classical school as well. When I first came on, I was the only administrator. We now have a total of six individuals on the administration team, which is new. So, I think the reason that we became interested in doing something was because our administrative structure was evolving, and in all honesty, you know, I didn’t have time to think about that when I was the only administrator: it was a lot of putting out fires and surviving day to day.
We started looking at the Lencioni model not this summer, but last summer (2023) and had our first interaction, our first training, with Arcadia. It’s been an extremely valuable investment for us. We’ve just finished our second round of training, in which there were a couple of new members of our admin team to bring onboard. And this second year it was a super easy sell, due to what we got out of it the first year, the progress that we saw, the steps we’ve been able to take, and how we’ve shared not just with our staff, but also with our board, why we think it’s valuable, and what they’ve seen over the last year as well. So that’s kind of where and how we got involved. The main reason is that we were changing. Our administrative structure was changing, and we didn’t want to be putting out fires and just surviving anymore. We wanted to be able to take some significant steps forward.
Erik: Growth obviously puts new demands on the adults in any institution, but certainly and especially in a school. And we like to say at Arcadia that the culture of any school is always downstream of its adult culture, and the adult culture is always downstream of the leadership culture. And so if you don’t get that leadership culture right, in each of the ways that Lencioni addresses, that is going to trickle downstream into the overall culture of the school.
So let’s go to the beginning: You worked with David in that first retreat with the team, and I want to hear from you both about what you focused on, where you started, and what were the headwinds. Gary, what transpired that got you to a place where, today you’d say “the team’s all in on it”?
Gary: I hadn’t received any leadership training, to be honest with you: very, very, very little. This was my first real exposure to the model and to Lencioni, but it was great. I felt confident going into that first training, because David and I probably had at least three Zoom meetings prior to lay out what it was going to look like. And those meetings made me nervous for sure about what we were going to do: it’s really work. I mean, you don’t go in and sit there and listen to somebody present to you for two days: that’s not what we did in either of the two retreats that we’ve had. It’s tough work, and it’s intense, and it’s honest, and for lack of a better word, it’s deep. You get to some pretty deep-rooted issues with individuals, and you get to know one another pretty well.
We had set it up that, in that first retreat, I would be the one to be the most vulnerable and open and take criticism and be open to criticism. And because the team was pretty new, and I think we’re all pretty green, we didn’t go too deep into that for other members of the team. But this past summer, a few weeks ago, we did, and the admin team were super nervous about it, as David can probably tell you. But it was great. It went extremely well. And it has gotten us, even with a couple of additions to our admin team this year, off to a good start. We’ll have our own mini-retreat soon, picking up where we left off with David.
Erik: David, I want to hear about that pre-work, why it exists, and what its goal is. When a team is new to the Lencioni model, a lot of groundwork has to happen. First, as Gary was saying, with the leader, but then also with the team. Can you map that out for us? I love what Gary said: you’re not bringing someone in to just talk at you, and you’re not doing stupid trust falls or other cheap sentimental crap that doesn’t stick at all. There’s substance, but how do you get there? What are you doing in that first retreat, and what is the goal, what should a team have at the end of that?
David Denton: Let’s start with the end in mind, and then work backwards towards the pre–work. There are six critical questions that the team has to answer and those questions design clarity for the organization—really at every level, from the abstract down to the granular and particular. So starting with “Why do we exist?” and working all the way down to “Okay, who needs to do what tomorrow?” and all the things in between. But you tackle all six of those questions on the second day. That’s where you end. And the idea is not that you are just talking about those things, but you are working towards a tightly crafted answer to those things. So the goal is that you produce a playbook where you’ve condensed all those answers down to one page—really, you could fit them on a three–by–five index card that everybody can keep in their back pocket wherever they are on campus.
But first, in order for the team to successfully go through and tackle and answer those questions, they reach the point as a team where they have the capacity to engage in that kind of conversation and disagreement with each other productively. And that’s really tough. That’s usually where things get toughest for a team. So the first day is all about what makes our team healthy. Patrick Lencioni writes about that in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I think of this book as asking what the five most difficult things are for human beings to do when they’re on a team. The thing that—if you made us do it—we would all want to run away and hide in fear, because it scares us. And the fundamental piece upon which everything else is built is trust. One way to talk about the retreats would be to say that it’s all geared towards advancing the team in their trust of each other. And Gary made it perfectly clear that the keyword is vulnerability–based trust, where you entrust yourself to your teammates, entrust them with knowledge of your weaknesses, your pain points, where you need help, and open yourself up to their feedback. That’s the thing that none of us wants to do. If you want to get your team to a place where they’re going to entrust themselves to each other, the leader has to model that and set that as the norm. Gary was a stallion at this. That’s what we were talking through in that pre-work.
Erik: That’s so fascinating. I want to hear your reflections on why that’s such an important first step, especially through this lens of clarity. Because that’s what the exercise is attempting to bring out, right? It’s an exercise in clarity about things that exist. They’re there on every team. Everybody knows what people’s strengths and weaknesses are. Why is it better to shine a light on them in the leadership team, rather than just accept them, keep them under the rug, you know, not make a big deal about them? Somebody might say, “Well, like, everybody’s got weaknesses, guys, like, that’s just par for the course.” People might call it a little hokey: “We’re going to sit around in a circle and we’re going to call out people’s weaknesses? Why the hell are we doing that?” Walk me through that.
Gary: Two days doesn’t seem long, but you accomplish so much there. I’m gonna bring in a couple of other things we did for the training, because it’s all tied together. We did a self assessment prior to the meeting on the first day of the retreat. Everybody fills that out, identifying where we see ourselves and each other in terms of trust and conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. So, we get a team score for that, and then we get individual scores that we can see. And then we also do a “Working Genius” profile, identifying our working geniuses and our working frustrations.
And then we get to the exercise where we tell one another “this is what I need you to start doing, this is what I need you to stop doing, this is what I need you to keep doing.” And it is amazing how all of those things come together. Everything highlighted in the start, stop, keep doing, are so closely related to each of our Working Genius profiles, to the point that we’re laughing at it as we’re reading the descriptions of the profiles afterward. It’s a super trust-based exercise. You are vulnerable in ways you haven’t been with administrators and professionals at any other point in your career. And it gives an extremely deep understanding of where we lie in working together, and how we can best work together.
Now when something is off with someone on my team, it helps me to understand where and how I can best approach them. We’re pretty diverse in our group, and I think we have people that are way better at some things, and like to do some things, way more than other people. We’re still feeling our way through that process, but we have a really good understanding of how to complete projects with our team in the most efficient way, and we’re getting better at it all the time.
Erik: If we can’t be honest with one another, we can’t actually go build anything consequential. And you can’t be a great leader if you can’t stand in front of everybody and say, “Listen, I know I have weaknesses, and by modeling this exercise, I’m actually giving you permission to call it out.” You make it a culture where everybody has permission to put sunlight on these things because—and this is the thing we all wish that more school leaders took seriously—if the adults aren’t functioning, aren’t aligned, aren’t dealing with their stuff, aren’t consistently mending the cracks that are constantly forming in relationships, then those cracks start to get bigger and bigger until one day the dam breaks, and the people that are most hurt by that are the kids, right? That’s true in a home, and it’s true in a school. And so there’s a moral obligation, because we have kids in our midst, for the adults to be doing this type of vulnerable and strong work, because the consequences of not doing it are not just an unhealthy admin team at some business that makes widgets. Oh, you get a little less productive, right? No: There’s something deeper going on when you have children that you’re caring for.
David: And you don’t—as a result of doing it—end up soft, and unable to make hard decisions. It’s not that you get soft and you’re now walking around with wounds just bleeding on everybody else.
Erik: It’s the exact opposite, isn’t it?
David: It is! Gary, how has that played out for you guys?
Gary: Well, I can tell you. One of the greatest things that came out of that first retreat is we completely changed how we have our admin meetings. And one of the greatest things we got out of this was the daily five minute stand-up meeting right at the beginning of school. We’d never done that before, but it’s the best, and if I could tell any administrator to do one thing, do that with your admin team every single day.
Our meetings are phenomenal now, because we can be honest with each other, and we can have serious hard discussions, disagree with each other, have conflict, and work our way through those things. And we don’t make every decision with all six of us agreeing 100% on the best move. But what we do come out of there with is: this is the decision we’ve made, we’ve all had an opportunity to make our points, and now we’re all going to support this decision because we decided it was what we were going to do. And if you look at our Working Genius profiles, we come at problems in a lot of different ways, and when everyone’s had an equal opportunity to participate in that discussion, it’s much easier for us to support whatever decision may be made.
Watch the rest of the conversation here or hear the full episode wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
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